Movies - TV
Gene Roddenberry Took A While To Warm Up To One Famous Star Trek Character
By DEVIN MEENAN
Although Michael Dorn’s Worf is one of the most popular “Star Trek” characters, series creator Gene Roddenberry wasn’t initially a fan of his character concept.
Worf was originally imagined as a Klingon, or half-Klingon, First Officer, but Roddenberry didn’t want to use the villains from “The Original Series” in “The Next Generation.”
Associate producer D.C. Fontana shared, “Roddenberry just felt that Klingons were totally black hats.” Four months after the initial suggestion, Roddenberry approved the idea.
Fontana suggested that there could be a woman commander on the Enterprise-D, which Roddenberry countered by going back to the original idea of a Klingon commander.
Dorn was cast as Worf, but the writers didn’t initially know what to do with the character and hadn’t worked out the specifics of the Federation/Klingon relationship.
Worf’s backstory and an exploration into Klingon society wouldn’t occur until later, but when they did, the alien race grew from Roddenberry’s “black hat” idea into a true culture.