Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek: The Original Cast AdventuresDouglasBrode and Shea T.Brode, Editors. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

Abstract

Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek: Original Cast Adventures Douglas Brode and Shea T. Brode, Editors. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek looks at the progenitors and influences on Roddenberry, Star Trek's creator and producer, and examines a number of 1950^ and 1960's television series, the American western genre, and other influences on various episodes of the original Star Trek series. editors, Douglas Brode and Shea T. Brode, have a broad background in cinema and cultural studies, while the contributors bring expertise in media, politics, theater, American history and culture, physics, rhetoric, philosophy, and animation. Having just reviewed for Journal of American Culture, Star Trek and American Television (2014), which discusses Star Trek's influence on American television in the forty-some years since its premiere, I thought it would be interesting to review a similar book that focuses on influences to the creation of Star Trek.The Introduction provides a detailed background on the train to the stars! motto which Roddenberry originally conceived to sell his sci-fi series to NBC executives in the early 1960s. editors illustrate how the American western genre was portrayed and was popular on American television in the late 1950s to early 1960s and how a particular sci-fi movie from 1956, Forbidden Planet, influenced Roddenberry immediately prior to his retirement from being a police officer to becoming a TV writer and producer. Four pages in the Introduction explain at least seven similarities and borrowings from Forbidden Planet that Roddenberry used and elaborated upon in his Star Trek series. These include hyperdrive, the character of Doc (similar to Leonard McCoy/Bones), the United Planets organization (similar to the United Federation of Planets), and the theme that human beings are emotional and passionate whether it is in the 1950s or in the distant future. editors then take another four pages to discuss the similarities between a number of Twilight Tone episodes (1959-1964) and the original Star Trek series. One standout is Rod Sterling's time warp tale about a wagon train, which is eerily familiar to Roddenberry's Old West time warp where the Enterprise crew members go back in time to re-enact and become the main characters in the O.K. Corral gunfight in nineteenth-century Tombstone, Arizona. There is also a Twilight Tone episode about a mute that probably influenced Roddenberry's The Empath story. …