STAR TREK 1948

[CalBear]

What if Gene Roddenberry wrote Star Trek when he was 26 and it got produced as a series of films in 1948?

Initial thoughts

Captain Kirk - John Wayne
Spock - Gregory Peck
Bones - Jimmy Stewart
Scotty - Cary Grant
Sulu - Yoshio Tsuchiya
Uhura - Dorothy Dandridge
Chekov - Anthony Perkins
Nurse Chapel - Marilyn Monroe

This means, at the least, that Peck doesn't get a chance to do Gentleman's Agreement and Twelve O'Clock High (nominated for the Oscar in the 1st, won for the 2nd). Depending on pre-production timing it might prevent Stewart from his defining role in It's a Wonderful Life.

Monroe was under contract to Columbia at the time. Wayne was contracted to Republic & Peck was working for Fox. The studio system was still all powerful in those days. It's hard to see how Peck and Wayne would be allowed to work in the same film by their respective studios. Monroe was a no entity at the time. There were literally pools of starlets under contract at every studio, whichever studio made the picture would have simply dipped into their retained talent pool.

BTW - I assume that this would be a movie? or a serial of shorts? TV shows were pretty much non-existent at the time.

 

[phx1138]

I assume that this would be a movie? or a serial of shorts? TV shows were pretty much non-existent at the time.

That would sink the project, if nothing else did. What studio is going to sign over permission to use some of its biggest stars for a serial?

Which presupposes you've got a studio with the money to make it, & if it's a serial, where are Monogram or Republic getting it from? This single project could eat up their year's budget on salary alone...

Then there's the question of what execs think this is actually going to make money...

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

In 1948, only a small fringe group of people really thought about space much, let alone space travel. It wasnt that long before that Times had chided Goddard for being an idiot, obviously rockets wouldnt work in space.

If the massively improbable instance that he could convince someone to stump up the cash, it would be very amaterish and low budget with no name brand stars at all. Make the original DrWho series look fancy. Imo.

 

[Michel Van]

A question on Design of Enterprise

Rodenberry not wanted the traditional Rocket ship design for it.
(so Wiki) he show Matt Jefferies a cover of Sci-Fi magazine as scheme, for what became the most iconic Spaceship of all time.
but that was 1965.

So what would Rodenberry take in 1948~1950 ?
i think he would take this Design

by the way
the movie Forbidden Planet was for Rodenberry, the inspiration to make Star Trek.

 

[zoomar]

"Enterprise" would probably look like a flying saucer as in Forbidden Planet. It would probably land on planets itself rather than use shuttles and transporters.

As noted, the human crew would almost certainly consist only of white males, although there is the remote possibility that a woman might be a semi-important secondary character kept around as eye candy - nurse or perhaps some sort of "soft" scientist like a linguist, etc.

In 1948, I think the ship would be more military in tone - a warship with a secondary mission of exploration like HMS Beagle. I also suspect the writers would feel obligated to create some comedic "non-intellectual" main characters such as a ships cook, rough-around the edges "petty officers" and so forth. If the ship had an "international" crew despite the "USS" in front of "Enterprise" (assuming this was still the ship's name), you'd probably only see/hear British, Scandinavian, or other western European accents, although there is the outside chance of a generic good-guy Asian as the wildly experimental casting decision. There is a very good chance that there would be Human enemies - Commie-like bad guys, or renewed Nazis, or even nasty future-Jap-like earth people) also seeking to contact/conquer alien civilizations and that would be a major reason the "Enterprise" existed.

It's not out of the question that an Alien might be on the crew, but it is out of the question that he would be a human-alien hybrid. On the other hand, it might be more likely the "alien" role would be taken by a humanoid robot.

 

[Michel Van]

I second that, Zoomar

but there is a perfect solution to that:

"They're like animals, vicious, seductive. They say no human male can resist them."

so we got a Alien in crew, with different skin color and it's a female !

woman, the real unexplored part of the universe...

 

[Just Leo]

To widen the demographic, there would have been a boy named Rusty, and a cute dog named Scraps, and one of the crew would speak in a Brooklyn accent.

I wouldn't mention it, but I grew up with Space Patrol, Space Cadets, Captain Midnight, and Commando Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen. I would have had a decoder ring but I couldn't finish my first glass of Ovaltine, and it required two box-tops.

 

[Derek Pullem]

Possibly derailing the thread but what if Rodenberry made Star Trek for the BBC in 1963 instead of BBC commissioning Doctor Who?

He had been working for ITC so he wasn't totally cut off from this side of the atlantic?

 

[HARRY]

For all the Wagon Train in space explaination for Star Trek it is actually more Hornblower in space. I guess if one studio managers to get their hands on the rights to the Hornblower books there were 8 or 9 out by 1950 and makes a successful couple of movies when a young Rodenberry drops of a script of something similar but set in space another studio may go for it. Sure the Klingons would sound more french.