Star Trek Premieres, 8 September 1966
—Chrissie

Listen here: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/hwts289--74988883 

At 8:30 pm eastern time on Thursday, 8 September 1966, NBC aired the first episode of a new science fiction drama, to moderate success. This show had a difficult time getting to air and little could have anyone involved have guessed how much the effort would pay off.

            In 1963, writer/producer Gene Roddenberry had developed and was running a show for NBC called The Lieutenant, which dealt with life during the Cold War on the Marine Base at Camp Pendleton. At first, it was supported by the Department of Defense, who also provided free production assistance. That support, and the show itself, ended after an episode centering on racism in the Armed Forces because the Pentagon didn’t want them portrayed negatively. This prompted Roddenberry to work on a new project, one that would allow him to present social commentary in the guise of space adventure. He reasoned that if he couldn’t tell stories about racism in the contemporary United States, he might be able to tell the same story about aliens and humans in the far future. This would also allow him to present a positive vision of the future in which humanity had evolved beyond the drive for conquest, wealth, and power that was so defining to the mid-twentieth century. And so, Star Trek was born.

            Roddenberry pitched the idea to NBC in May 1964 with Desilu Studios executive Herbert Solow. NBC was not quite convinced, but Solow suggested they option it as a longer script which could be used as a one-off TV movie if they decided not to pick up the series. The network requested three story outlines, one of which, “The Cage,” became the pilot. The other two were later reworked and used in the first season of Star Trek. Roddenberry developed the script over the summer, revised it with notes from Desilu, NBC, and a few science consultants he personally involved to assure as much accuracy as possible. The story centered around Christopher Pike, captain of the Starship Enterprise, and his crew who get caught up in a series of mind-games run by a group of aliens for their personal amusement.

Most of the autumn was spent working out production needs. Filming began on 27 November 1964 (the day after Thanksgiving) and ended just before Christmas. Post-production took another month; by the end of January, the pilot was complete. It received rave reviews from almost everyone who watched it, notably missing from that positive opinion were the NBC executives. They called the story “too cerebral” and had complaints about the cast. They saw the potential however, and with a little bit of cajoling, they ordered a second pilot.

The new pilot was not written by Roddenberry, though it was based on an outline he provided that maintained the overall themes of the first pilot and his larger ideas for the series. This new episode, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” combined Roddenberry’s ideals about humanity’s future with a bit of action, which took it enough out of cerebral territory for NBC to give the go ahead for a season. The Enterprise had a new captain, James Kirk, played by William Shatner, and a new crew, save one character, the Vulcan Science Officer, Mr. Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy. Though this character was the only one to make it out of the first pilot, his character saw considerable change between the two episodes, as he was given some of the personality traits of another character, Number One. The new cast was also more diverse, including a Japanese helm officer, Lt. Sulu, played by George Takei, and a Black communications officer, Lt. Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols. They, and later additions such as Walter Koenig, exemplified one of Roddenberry’s core ideals for the show, that the ship should represent all of humanity on what he referred to as “Starship Earth,” which showed that we had grown past internal conflict.

This was not, however, the episode that viewers saw on that September evening, but another called “The Man Trap,” which was deemed a better episode to catch the public’s attention. This later episode also featured some changes that continued in the series, most notably the brightly-colored gold, red, and blue uniforms which would show off NBC’s full-color broadcast.

And, it was a success, sort of. The people who watched it generally loved it, but it didn’t have the ratings grab that NBC had hoped. Only a fan-run letter campaign kept it going through three seasons and 72 episodes, just enough for syndication to local stations. And it was these reruns that bought in ever more fans, who kept Trek going via fan magazines, conventions, selling merchandise, novels (both licensed and fan-produced), and all the rest that kept Trek in the public eye long after the last episode had aired. The rest is the history of the last sixty years of the franchise, movies, more TV shows, more movies, then another round of TV shows. But whatever happened to “The Cage?”

While portions of the episode were colorized and used in the season one two-part episode “The Menagerie,” and the episode was screened at conventions, the episode wasn’t easily available until it was released on VHS in 1986, for the show’s twentieth anniversary. This version combined those colorized portions with the original black and white. A full-color version was produced for air in 1988, when it was shown on television for the first time as part of a history of the franchise hosted by Patrick Stewart, who played Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The episode has subsequently been included in syndicated airings of the show and in home releases from VHS to Laser Disk to Blu-ray.

While Captain Pike’s story was essentially concluded by the story of “The Menagerie,” his time as captain of the Enterprise was not handled on screen (though it was addressed in a number of non-canon novels). That is, until the second season of Star Trek: Discovery in 2019, which brought Captain Pike, Mr. Spock, and Number One to the Discovery for a special mission. They proved so popular that it prompted the creation of another Trek series, Strange New Worlds, which tells the story of Pike’s Enterprise. It is nearly finished with its penultimate season as of this writing. Star Trek has had sixty years and is still going strong; with any luck, it will still be offering its positive vision well into the future.