The Original Series

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, its five year mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life, and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before...

For over 30 years, the creative mind of Gene Roddenberry has touched the lives of millions with his stories of human endeavor and achievement. His works and ideals have been integrated into numerous cultures worldwide, offering each a sense of hope for humanity as it enters the new millennium. By far, the biggest, and most popular of these visions, is Star Trek.

In the beginning of 1964, Herbert F. Solow was hired to run the television production for Lucille Ball's struggling Desilu Studios. In April of the year a rumpled, a soft-spoken ex-cop named Gene Roddenberry walked into Solow's office with an idea for a new science fiction television series called Star Trek. Immediately seeing the shows potential, Solow struck a script development deal with Roddenberry on the spot. Soon, Solow and Roddenberry brought Robert H. Justman on board as assistant director to work on what was to be the first of two Star Trek pilots and, later to act as associate producer on the series. Together the three men embarked an incredible odyssey that would make television history.
With Herb Solow running interference-both within the closed walls of the studio and between Desilu and NBC- and Bob Justman handling all phases of weekly production, Star Trek endured it's birth pangs. Finally, when Solow hired Roddenberry to produce the initial sixteen episodes, the fledgling series began to assume a life of it's own.

Sept. 8, 1966 was a watershed for sci-fi fans. It was on this day that NBC aired the first episode of a strange and wonderful new series called Star Trek. And it had a prime time slot, competing against such popular series as Bewitched on ABC, plus My three Sons and the Friday-night movie on CBS.

StarTrek's survival in that inaugural season was not immediately guaranteed.Less than three months after its debut, NBC hinted that it might pull the plug because of low ratings. Fans - spurred to action by a group of science-fiction writers - flooded NBC offices with thousands and thousands of letters, and saved the show.

Star Trek writers chartered a slightly different course in science-fiction TV, giving birth to stories that would focus on the human drama of the crews' lives as much as the new worlds and alien creatures they encountered. In retrospect, the first season's plots were unlike anything seen before on TV, ranging from frivolous ("Shore Leave") and frightening ("The Corbomite Maneuver") to touching ("Miri") and philosophical ("A Taste of Armageddon"). Creator Gene Roddenberry had thus established the Star Trek trademark:" In space, anything can, and often does, happen".