Sci-Fi USA, some *very* rare praise
quote:
Originally posted by Aleck:
Thing is, it wasn’t even that he stumbled on a good idea. He took an idea that was as old as [i]First Men in the Moon[/i] — people travel space, basically good guys, run into bad aliens and win out over them…what Roddenberry stated at the beginning would be “[i]Wagon Train[/i] in space,” to show how “original” this guy’s thinking was — and hired some good sci-fi writers to develop it. That it turned into something better than it had any right to be is pretty much wholly dependent on the writers he hired. When he got rid of most of them in the third season, the show, for the most part, turned into a big flying piece of crap. Like I said, he had a couple of decent ideas and could get some talented staffers together to create some good stuff *in spite* of what his natural tendencies may have been. But outside of that…yecch.
I don’t think [i]Star Trek[/i] borrowed much from Wells. The sci-fi novel which it most closely resembles is [i]The Voyage of the Space Beagle[/i] by A. E. van Vogt (though not as much as [i]Alien[/i] resembles the “Discord in Scarlet” segment). Really, the original series’ premise utilized well-established science fiction elements and themes. It was writers like Harlan Ellison and Dorothy Fontana that made [i]Star Trek[/i] what it was (and still is, to some extent). I am not among the Trekkies who idolize and boswellize Gene Roddenberry.
[i]Spock’s Brain[/i] angered me. It wasn’t so much the plot flaws, continuity errors, pseudoscience, or shameless reuse of sets, sound effects, and story factors from previous episodes, but because it was my idea! A couple of years ago I created an outline for a story (I make a lot of outlines, the actual writing is the tough part) called “Arcanus Muliebribus” (maybe the xenomorph can tell us what that means) that was remarkably similar. Not to the plot about the missing brain, but the part about a planet where the males and females live in different societies, and the males are absolutely terrified of the females. I thought up that same premise! Gene Roddenberry stole my idea 31 years in the past! That’s even better than George Lucas. [img]images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]
Gene Roddenberry has had more posthumous success that Tupac Shakur. I cringe at the thought of what could follow [i]Earth: Final Conflict[/i] and [i]Andromeda[/i]…
[b]Gene Roddenberry’s [i]Assignment: Earth[/i][/b] with Jolene Blalock as the cat [img]images/smiles/icon_rolleyes.gif[/img]