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Star Trek (1964) [pdf]
- lisper 4y agoThe "president Capone" episode idea has turned out to be frighteningly prescient.
- rkagerer 4y agoI never knew... the USS Enterprise was almost named the S.S. Yorktown. https://www.cbr.com/star-trek-why-enterprise-yorktown/ https://www.cbr.com/star-trek-why-enterprise-yorktown/
- kwertyoowiyop 4y agoIt’s amazing how far ahead this was, compared to everything else on TV at the time. And that last scenario kinda reminds me of…
- CamperBob2 4y agoYeah, that last idea has legs. Or at least eggs.
- MPSimmons 4y agoTons of echoes of things that happened later in the various series. This was a fun read. Thanks!
- cheschire 4y agoRonald D Moores “series bible” for battlestar galactica is also quite a fun read for fans. A copy is available from the same site, so clearly this person enjoys their sci fi. http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/Battlestar_Galactica/Battlestar_Galactica_Series_Bible.pdf http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/Battlestar_Galactica/Battlesta...
- njharman 4y ago"We take the Opera out of Space Opera"? I quit watching after several episodes because it devolved into High School level drama of who is fucking you and totally unwarrented flip-flops every episode of people being loyal, betraying, hating someone then in love with them etc. And (mostly) starbuck screaming, crying then totally forgetting she was overacting in the next scene. It was simplistic, base, boring and not sci-fi. It was "drama" aka soap-opera.
- cwillu 4y agoThe cylons did not, in fact, have a plan.
- neilv 4y agoSounds like they were Lost. ("Lost" was an extremely promising SF show that claimed to have a plan, but was revealed not to. Which is unforgivable when the attraction of the show was figuring out the mystery. My own theory is that the wildly successful first season led to the writers purchasing too much celebratory cocaine, and subsequently just phoning it in, while the business people were happy to milk it like a soap opera.)
- djbusby 4y agoLost had a plan. Then management wanted to drag out the phenomenon. So the story had to expand, it's how all those arcs that never resolved started. Then suddenly, the fad was over and it needed a quick close. Kinda like how GoT fell off in the last season.
- ArtWomb 4y agoAwesome collection! Pitch bible from He-Man Masters of the Universe is solid gold ;) "Beyond the farthest galaxies viewed by the greatest telescopes on Earth. Beyond the limits of our universe lies another place - a place of magic, myth, sorcery and science. Through the cosmic clouds spins a solar system with a type three star twinkling in the ether of interstellar space. About the star rotate worlds inconceivable to mere mortal minds. They are populated by deities and demigods, sorcerers and sybils, men and women imbued with the powers of good and evil!"
- shadowgovt 4y agoThe D&D "Deities and Demigods" supplement was published in 1980; first ep of He-Man was '83. I can't help but wonder if that phrasing was an instance of simple alliterative coincidence or if the He-Man showrunners were tabletop nerds.
- omnibrain 4y agoYou could ask @straczynski on twitter. He might know an he is usually quite happy to answer questions about past productions.
- ArtWomb 4y agoHN grok'd the reference in 7h. I legit consult (D&D)^2 once a full moon. And not just for my hostname Sumerian naming convention! https://okaq.github.io/dieties.webp https://okaq.github.io/dieties.webp
- akamaka 4y agoNot a Star Trek related question, but I noticed that the title is printed in a special cursive font, while the rest of the document is typewritten. What kind of machine would have been used in 1964 to print a custom font for a one-off document?
- zeckalpha 4y agoA pen, perhaps? Inksmanship, drafting, lettering all were much more common skills. Could also be stickers, hot metal typesetting (unlikely), or even phototypesetting.
- gumby 4y agoI don't think there was phototype in 1964. Probably Letraset. I think phototypesetters arrived around 1974
- zeckalpha 4y ago> The use of phototypesetting grew rapidly in the 1960s when software was developed to convert marked up copy, usually typed on paper tape, to the codes that controlled the phototypesetters. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototypesetting https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototypesetting
- gumby 4y agoThanks!
- jcrawfordor 4y agoIn '64, this might have been reproduced on a Xerographic photocopier, although it's also possible it was reproduced photographically (to produce offset plates) if they were making a large number. Either way I suspect it's most likely the "Star Trek" lettering was done by hand, but another possibility would be pressure transfer lettering.
- 4y ago
- firecall 4y agoEven if you are not a fan, the PDF is a very enlightening read! "...blonde with a shape even a uniform could not hide" It's shockingly misogynistic!
- ourmandave 4y agoYoung Kirk was pretty buff.
- temporallobe 4y agoSexist maybe, not misogynistic.
- bee_rider 4y agoI think the end of that paragraph is more interesting. > She is not dumb; she is very female, disturbingly so. It is interesting how things change over time. The undercurrent in the character description for both of the women has big "she's real competent for a woman" vibes. I'm sure they were trying to be progressive and just stumbled over the attitudes of the era. Hey, we'll all be there some day, right?
- WillPostForFood 4y agoGive some credit for the female Executive Officer.
- bigDinosaur 4y agoChauvinistic? Misogynistic traditionally meant hatred, and the way it has been redefined is genuinely bad for communication.
- xwkd 4y agoIs it misogynistic to revel in the female form?
- todorus 4y agoIf it exists for males to revel in? Yes, the male gaze is misogynist. I don't think that still requires explaining, it has been written about a lot.
- soferio 4y agoThe very last plot idea, “infestation“, seems to predate and be kinda similar to the Alien franchise.
- shadowgovt 4y agoIt ended up manifested, sort of, in "Lights of Zetar" (or, you could make the argument, slumbered in the concept space all the way to Strange New Worlds' "All Who Wander").
- jakzurr 4y ago"Lights of Zetar" - first episode I ever saw; don't think I was even a teenager. (Didn't always get to stay up that late.) Scared the heck out of me... Not sure if it was really that great. Maybe because it was so dark outside that night? But yeah, wonderful memories.
- skerit 4y agoSeems like that's what eventually turned into the episode "The Child" of TNG. Which was earlier to be used in the never-made "Star Trek Phase 2" series a good decade earlier. And even then, the episode only got made because there was a writers strike and they had to use scripts that were mostly finished already. And even then the episode still sucked! It's currently ranked as the 170th episode out of a total of 176
- temporallobe 4y agoThis is pure gold. The basic premise of many of those episode ideas at the top turned into actual episodes.
- dmix 4y agoThis is why they always tell startup founders to study how Hollywood pitches are done. Putting together a good collection of these would be valuable to founders. Not just for tech startups by anyone selling ideas... Writers selling novels, governments pitching policy ideas, lawyers defending clients, corporate workers pitching new ideas internally, etc etc
- gsatic 4y agoThats all startup founders (and for that matter most Americans who want to succeed) end up studying. Beyond being great salespeople with great stories there is nothing else interesting going on in the mind.
- dmix 4y agoMaybe you’ve been meeting different entrepreneurs than me because the vast majority of people with good ideas seem to suck at communicating them. I hope they study this stuff and I’ve seen it promoted heavily in the HN/VC world, but in practice it’s rare to find well pitched startup ideas.
- pencilguin 4y agoThis is why they say not to worry about anybody stealing your idea: if it's any good, you will need to invent a really great story to get anybody interested.
- techdragon 4y agoI'm surprised at how jarring the math and background on page 2 feels. It really feels reflective of a different era, coming from a modern perspective Id never dare include something like that, with a big "scary looking formula" that needed explanation text, in the first half dozen pages. I wouldn't trust the reader to care enough to keep reading one word past the formula if I didn't already have them reasonably invested in the concept. These days there is an endless firehose of pitches in-front of people with the money for all fields artistic, scientific, and financial ... Statistically your odds of making it past their initial selection process gets worse and worse and you’ve even seen some push back against this with more "shotgun" approaches to funding strategies, but this isn't as common outside the startup world. With risk appetites falling we get ever more obsessed with having the initial pitch be hyper-polished to the point I've seen people reference eye tracking studies while designing a slide deck layout, the last hope of "thoughtful consideration" having been extinguished as they try to ensure that the first few glances at their pitch deck slides might entice the viewer to look beyond the thumbnail. So yeah living in the hyper-optimised pitch environment we have today, page two was a real whiplash moment for me... really just adds to how interesting it is to read this.
- nelox 4y agoI wonder, how has the calculation changed based on current knowledge?
- techdragon 4y agoWell given how much we have learned about exoplanets, I'd say that at least one number of the assumptions are rather moot. The "how many stars even have planets" can be assumed to be basically "all of them" statistically speaking. ( https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10684 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10684 ) and while we can't yet say much about the specifics of their composition (a spectroscopy of the light passing through earth sized exoplanet atmospheres is at the cutting edge of research, with people mostly still working on new instruments, and trying to find lucky candidates where we can get any reading at all with current instruments) but we can definitely impact the lower bounds a bit here since based on current data, about 1 in 5 stars is suspected to have an earth sized planet. ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.6806 https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.6806 ) So the "... if only one in a billion of these stars is a sun with a planet... ... and only one in a billion of these is of earth size--" is now " 1 in every 5 stars has an earth sized planet and if only X% are earth like"
- WalterBright 4y ago"eliminating the need to encumber our stories with tiresome scientific explanations" Sigh.
- flomo 4y agoMaybe you are assuming it would be actually "scientific". IMO, TNG Technobabble was one of the worst elements of the later shows and inspired a legion of lukewarm nerd bullshit.
- WalterBright 4y agoI agree with you about the technobabble in TNG and how awful it was. But I've read enough scifi that did have reasonable scientific explanations for things like a warp drive, they just didn't want to make the effort. I'm also annoyed by characterizing it as "tiresome", I don't find reasonable explanations tiresome at all.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoStrong disagree. Technobabble inspired a generation of STEM people, and at least early TNG, when the show had proper scientific consultation, it was a delight. Problem came with the witers' attitudes and production cheapening out - ignoring internal reference works, treating exposition as something you can stub out with a "[TECH]" placeholder, to be substituted by some word salad after the episode is already written. In fact, I think technobabble was critical to the effect of the show getting people into science and engineering, and its omission would kill that effect - it's because it delivered a message: any problem faced can be overcome with help of science and technology. Sure, the terms were bullshit, but all this talk about nadion particle counts and how many cochranes does the subspace field measure, etc. reads as "this is all things we can investigate, understand, measure, build machines around". This overall feeling - that there's nothing out of scope for science and engineering - is a major theme of all Trek shows, and pretty unique to Star Trek. In other works of sci-fi on TV, the writers tend to be too busy writing character stories and focusing on people to the exclusion of everything else. (I may be biased about this, because TNG and its technobabble are what got me interested in the sciences, and is indirectly why I ended up working in software.)
- ilaksh 4y agoIn some ways I really love Star Trek. But you can see (like many things these days) that the initial paradigm has been carried through over the decades and it shows it's age and limitations. For example, stereotyping (each "alien race" has its own predominant substantive characteristics) and glorification of the military are core parts of the structure.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoIt's interesting to see how the show ended up being both similar and completely different from this original pitch. Having grown up on TNG-era Star Trek, my first reaction to this document was, "WTF" and "no way in hell a person who wrote this should be let anywhere near the writers' room"[0]. I take this as a demonstration that one shouldn't be too attached to their first / original ideas. > stereotyping (each "alien race" has its own predominant substantive characteristics) Yeah, the so-called "planet of hats" trope is integral to the show, and spilled to many others (Stargate franchise being a good example). They did try to subvert it a couple of times, most notably and to great effect with the Cardassians and the Bajorans in DS9, and to a lesser extent with the Klingons in ENT. I wish they'd do it some more[1]. > glorification of the military It doesn't sound that bad in context of the show itself, because the people are different. Starfleet may be a military, but (at least in TNG-era shows) it's one that's philosophically focused on everything else other than fighting and killing. For proper glorification of the military, nothing beats the Stargate series, SG-1 in particular. Still, I'd argue that it makes sense in context. Even with the science fantasy of the franchise, by the shows' own numbers, every starship in Star Trek is a mobile, FTL-capable WMD platform. A single TNG-era photon torpedo is given a yield 30% larger than that of a Tsar Bomba[2]; TNG's Enterprise-D carried a standard complement of 250. Phasers are capable of (and shown to be used for) impromptu geoengineering. Impulse engines can speed things up to double-digit percentage of the speed of light. There's no way in hell a future with tech like this isn't thoroughly militarized - not because of potential of conflicts, but because of the need to control the tech that can casually wipe out life on planets. ---- [0] - My second reaction was, my God, Roddenberry knew how to pitch a studio. [1] - I generally wish the new shows would work more with what they have. There's decades of continuous worldbuilding to take from, there is no need to introduce new strange aliens and situations every other episode. [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba - 50 MT for the nuke, ~64 MT for a Starfleet photon torpedo, based on its stated 1.5 kg antimatter payload and E=mc².
- makach 4y agoRobert M. April :-o
- gustavorg 4y agoI wonder how Jose Ortega(s) becomes Hikaru Sulu or Pavel Chekov.
- TeMPOraL 4y agoApparently he became José Tyler in the series pilot[0]. And, of course, nearly 60 years later, we now have Erica Ortegas[1] named after that original character. ---- [0] - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Tyler https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Tyler [1] - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Erica_Ortegas https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Erica_Ortegas
- usrusr 4y agoDoes that robot planet episode exist? It clearly exists in Futurama, just wondering wether that was inspired by Star Trek, or rather by that Star Trek pitch document?
- trebligdivad 4y agoFascinating! Bones is just as described. I'd realised a while ago that the 'ship' is the structure; the fact it's a 'spaceship' is a detail but it's very naval in organisation.
- stevenalowe 4y agoFascinating
- chkaloon 4y agoGreat find. Tyrannosaurus in 1,000,000 BC though? More like 65,000,000
- peter303 4y agoLucille Ball's best or second best decision in television history was to greenlight Star Trek. It was not a straightforward process, requiring an unusual 2nd pilot.
- _tom_ 4y agoIt was fun to look for hints of actual episodes in the episode suggestions. "Mirror" and "Charlie" for examples, and many others.