Gene Roddenberry Agreed To Star Trek: The Next Generation In A Fit Of Rage
The path to the debut of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" in 1987 was long and fraught. Many Trekkies will likely be able to draw the map of events that extended outward after the cancelation of the original "Star Trek" back in 1969. The show was canceled, but put into endless syndication, rerunning frequently. During reruns, the show finally found an audience of passionate devotees. In the early 1970s, "Star Trek" conventions began, show creator Gene Roddenberry began speaking at them, and a new type of relationship between creator and fandom was born.
As interest in "Star Trek" grew deep roots in the pop consciousness, Roddenberry toyed with the idea of rebooting his show. "Star Trek: Phase II" was put into production in 1977 with most of the original cast returning (Leonard Nimoy was out). Thanks to a byzantine production process and weird press releases, "Phase II" was eventually transformed into "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" in 1979.
The film, while successful, wasn't quite the hit the studio wanted and reviews weren't overwhelmingly positive. Gene Roddenberry then, wasn't permitted to work on further "Star Trek" feature films. Rather than fight for the movies, and pay the older, well-established stars the huge amounts of money they demanded (and, to be fair, deserved), Paramount elected to start yet another "Star Trek" TV project with a new cast, this time with the franchise's utopian ideals more firmly codified. That was to become "Star Trek: The Next Generation."
Even then, getting NextGen off the ground was a struggle. In the 2016 book "The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams: The Complete, Uncensored, and Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek," edited by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, Roddenberry admitted to making NextGen out of rage.
The new, Roddenberry-free Star Trek
Roddenberry admitted that he only wanted to make "Next Generation" after Paramount threatened to give a new "Star Trek" series ... to someone who didn't care about "Star Trek." In the documentary film "Chaos on the Bridge," it was said that Roddenberry deeply resented not being able to give input to "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" or its two follow-ups, making him especially keen to keep control of any new "Star Trek" projects that might emerge. When Paramount asked Roddenberry to make a new Trek, he flatly turned them down. He wanted control and wasn't so keen to dive into such a large project again. Regardless, Paramount started production on a new "Star Trek" without him. Roddenberry recalled:
"When Paramount originally approached me to do a new series, I turned them down. I did not want to devote the tremendous amount of time necessary to produce another show. There is only one way I know to write and produce, and that is to throw my energy at the project all the time. So when they began to think about a second series, I said I would not do it. When I turned them down, Paramount had someone else work on a new 'Star Trek.' It had a Vulcan captain and a lot of space cadets who seemed to mainly say, 'Gee whiz, Captain.'"
The "someone else," incidentally, was the father-son producing team of Greg and Sam Strangis who oversaw "The Six Million Dollar Man" and who were also working on a reboot of "War of the Worlds" at the time. Greg, despite a history in TV and a fondness for sci-fi, admitted that he wasn't a Trekkie in the slightest.
The naval academy on a starship
Strangis wanted to clarify that he didn't hate "Star Trek," but he certainly didn't care, having said, "It's not like I was a 'Star Trek' atheist, but I was agnostic." He recalled that his version of "Star Trek," was going to skew toward a younger cast and feature elder characters serving as their professors and instructors. It seems it was just one of many "Starfleet Academy" ideas in the franchise's history. Strangis might also have introduced the idea that Klingons were no longer going to be villains in this new series. He said:
"My premise was relatively simple: It was a time when, in the future in the existing 'Star Trek,' the Klingons weren't enemies anymore and were allies. I wanted to create Starfleet Academy on a ship. You'd have a lot of younger players and older, senior leaders, and it was going to be the naval academy on a starship. I did some preliminary work and shared it with [Paramount Television executive] Lucie Salhany and whoever else was running syndication then, and it was going along swimmingly ... until I got a phone call that said, 'You're out, Gene's gonna do it.'"
Gene's counterpoint? Not much, really. Strangis said that he "eventually saw Gene's work, which mostly consisted of drawings, hardly any written words, that didn't really mean much. And that was it. I was done." Regardless, with Roddenberry on board, all the old ideas were immediately tossed in the bin. Surely the creator of the original show had passion and ideas he wanted to share.
As it so happens, he had more spite than anything.
Angry enough to try
Roddenberry said: "I really feared doing it until I got angry enough to try." It didn't really matter what Strangis was working on, as the idea of making a "Star Trek" show without his input surely pissed off Roddenberry. He came back with his own pitch, however rudimentary. Roddenberry was nearly 65, "Star Trek" was 20, and it seemed like the time was right for a reboot. Only Roddenberry was going to have it his way. According to "Star Trek" archivist Richard Arnold, Roddenberry called a meeting with Paramount to threaten legal action should they proceed on a new Trek show without him. He ended up leaving the room agreeing to make "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Arnold said:
"Someone said ... that you couldn't get lightning to strike twice in the same place, to which Gene responded, "Damnit, I could!" He walked out of that meeting having agreed to produce a new 'Star Trek' series ... hardly what he had planned going in. He was approaching his 65th birthday and he had intended to retire and spend more time with his son, Rod, who was still very young at the time."
David Gerrold, a creative consultant on "Next Generation" feels that Roddenberry's rage was, in fact, manipulated from the start. He intuited that Paramount — sneaky devils — actually wanted Roddenberry on a new "Star Trek" series, but had to resort to desperate measures when he refused. As such, the series proposed by Strangis was not anything they ever intended to make. Paramount only wanted to show that they were perfectly willing to make a Trek show without Gene ... as a bluff. Roddenberry fell for their bluff, got mad, and agreed to make a new Trek show in his own idiom.
The rest is history.