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Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of Lucille Ball, who saved Star Trek even though she thought it was a show about Hollywood stars trekking to the South Pacific with the USO to visit American troops.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: September 8, 1966--
Lemme see if I can do this from memory. There was the original series, the cartoon series, six original cast movies, The Next Generation, I think four TNG movies, with some overlap of cast in the first one, Deep Space 9, Voyager, Enterprise (barf), and Discovery. Did I miss any? There is that new Lower Decks cartoon, but I only made it through one of them. Oh shit I forgot about Picard. I like Picard. There is also something called Short Treks I’ve never seen. Plus a bunch of books. There is enough Trek to choke an interstellar sandworm. Shit. Wrong franchise.
I asked my friend Rob Sawyer, a Hugo Award-winning science fiction author and the biggest Star Trek fan I know, about the show’s cultural influence. “Star Trek was the first adult science-fiction TV show about hope,” Sawyer said. “Unlike The Twilight Zone, Lost in Space, or its other predecessors, Star Trek said the universe would be a welcoming place—and, crucially for a TV show that premiered during the height of the U.S. civil-right struggle, a welcoming place for everyone, regardless of race, national origin, or gender; it literally changed the face of television.”
The original Star Trek was broadcast on NBC for the first time on September 8, 1966. And people were ... underwhelmed. The ratings were never that great and the show was cancelled after three seasons. It was its later broadcast in syndication in the 70s that transformed it into a cult hit that spawned the massive franchise. But if not for Lucille, it never would have been made in the first place.
The story goes—perpetuated by Gene Roddenberry—that Lucy was friends with Gene and did him a solid, but the pair never met. Lucille was owner of Desilu Studios but was detached from the day-to-day operations. It was Desilu’s VP of Production Herb Solow who purchased the pitch for Star Trek in 1964 and created a pilot called “The Cage.” But NBC said barf no thanks. They thought it was “too cerebral.”
So where does Lucy come in? Solow believed in the show and convinced Lucy to finance a second pilot, despite the board saying fuck it just don’t. They made “Where No Man Has Gone Before” with Spock being the only character carried over from the first pilot, and NBC said yeah okay. The ongoing problem was money. Desilu was a small studio and was also producing Mission: Impossible and the board was saying we can’t afford this space shit fucking cancel it. Her second husband and her brother were on the board and saying cancel the show, but Lucille was chairwoman, and she said it’s my company we’re making the fucking space show. Actually it was more of a nod of her head toward Solow. She trusted Herb’s instincts, and that was that.
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