Star Trek (1964) [pdf]

I wonder, how has the calculation changed based on current knowledge?

If i recall right (from a documentary or interview with roddenberry) is that he made up the equation (though he knew of the drake equation) to justify that aliens exist to the people he was pitching to. I guess they just didn't believe that many aliens would exist.

Not only that, they wrote part of this math into a monologue for Dr. McCoy, where McCoy was advising Kirk.

    In this galaxy, there's a mathematical probability of three million Earth-type planets. And in all of the universe, three million million galaxies like this. And in all of that... and perhaps more, only one of each of us.

    Don't destroy the one named Kirk.

From the episode Balance of Terror:

https://youtu.be/2237SaR75iw?t=83

>surprised at how jarring the math and background on page 2 feels.

>there is an endless firehose of pitches in-front of people with the money

>living in the hyper-optimised pitch environment

This does seem to be a pitch that worked wonders in such an environment.

On page 1 it says what they want to do, and page 2 its almost like exaggerating the upside of their market to seem mathematically infinite during a startup pitch.

Everyone involved already knew the finite (but huge) size of their (highly lucrative) market at the time, no need to elaborate about it.

Let science turn fiction into reality instead.

"We take the Opera out of Space Opera"?

I quit watching after several episodes because it devolved into High School level drama of who is fucking you and totally unwarrented flip-flops every episode of people being loyal, betraying, hating someone then in love with them etc. And (mostly) starbuck screaming, crying then totally forgetting she was overacting in the next scene. It was simplistic, base, boring and not sci-fi. It was "drama" aka soap-opera.

>“series bible” for battlestar galactica

You mean the Book of Mormon?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolob#Kolob_as_the_inspiration...

https://www.beliefnet.com/entertainment/movies/2005/05/born-...

https://www.deseret.com/2014/11/22/20553208/mormon-creator-o...

https://www.millennialstar.org/battlestar-galactica-and-morm...

http://www.mormonthink.com/glossary/battlestargalactica.htm

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-Mormon-themes-in-Battles...

Yeah, that last idea has legs. Or at least eggs.

This is why they always tell startup founders to study how Hollywood pitches are done.

Putting together a good collection of these would be valuable to founders.

Not just for tech startups by anyone selling ideas... Writers selling novels, governments pitching policy ideas, lawyers defending clients, corporate workers pitching new ideas internally, etc etc

A pen, perhaps? Inksmanship, drafting, lettering all were much more common skills.

Could also be stickers, hot metal typesetting (unlikely), or even phototypesetting.

In '64, this might have been reproduced on a Xerographic photocopier, although it's also possible it was reproduced photographically (to produce offset plates) if they were making a large number. Either way I suspect it's most likely the "Star Trek" lettering was done by hand, but another possibility would be pressure transfer lettering.

It could have been created the old fashioned way, with a stencil and ink. After being photocopied, it would look indistinguishable.

Back then there were several ways to do this sort of thing.

Rub-off dry transfer lettering like those from Letraset or mechanical pantographs like the Leroy were commonly used for technical lettering.

But it was probably hand drawn -- "draftsman" and graphic artists were found in all sorts of office settings that you don't see today.

To me, this looks like the Brush Script font [1]. Probably Letraset [2] or a similar system. (Display lettering was the actual purpose of Letraset.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brush_Script

[2] Compare: https://www.pinterest.at/pin/brush-script-24pt60pt-letraset-...

Though I doubt the document was typeset (because it appears typed by a typewriter), before desktop publishing, and before typesetting computer systems, there was phototypesetting.[1] Because this is only a minor element on one page, I doubt it was phototypeset and instead merely pasted up with type tape... literally rolls of clear tape for every font with one letter on it repeated over and over in all point sizes. Lots and lots of these rolls of tape in production art areas. You cut off the letter from that roll of tape, stick it to the paste up, get the next letter from the next roll, stick it next to the first letter, find the roll for the lower case "a," cut it, trim it with an exacto knife, and place it, find the roll with the lowercase "r" in that font and point size, and so on and so forth. The tape was mostly used for last minute corrections, typos in the photostat type, wasn't really for typesetting a lot of copy, but using 8 letters or more of type tape wasn't out of the ordinary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototypesetting

This is almost certainly custom stationary; we called it Letterhead. Even before computers. You get it from a print shop, you roll it into your typewriter, and start typing. And try not to waste it, it's expensive!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterhead

The way it worked in the old days is you would have a graphic designer make your logo, then you take it to an offset printing shop and they would make your stationery for you. Same with business cards, as made famous in that scene from American Psycho.

A Piece of the Action was probably the fruit of that idea.

Will Don Capone make a comeback in 2024?

It ended up manifested, sort of, in "Lights of Zetar" (or, you could make the argument, slumbered in the concept space all the way to Strange New Worlds' "All Who Wander").

Seems like that's what eventually turned into the episode "The Child" of TNG. Which was earlier to be used in the never-made "Star Trek Phase 2" series a good decade earlier.

And even then, the episode only got made because there was a writers strike and they had to use scripts that were mostly finished already.

And even then the episode still sucked! It's currently ranked as the 170th episode out of a total of 176

The D&D "Deities and Demigods" supplement was published in 1980; first ep of He-Man was '83.

I can't help but wonder if that phrasing was an instance of simple alliterative coincidence or if the He-Man showrunners were tabletop nerds.

It travels around in a cube instead :)

Parts of it sound like "What Are Little Girls Made Of"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Are_Little_Girls_Made_Of%...

It's interesting to see how the show ended up being both similar and completely different from this original pitch. Having grown up on TNG-era Star Trek, my first reaction to this document was, "WTF" and "no way in hell a person who wrote this should be let anywhere near the writers' room"[0]. I take this as a demonstration that one shouldn't be too attached to their first / original ideas.

> stereotyping (each "alien race" has its own predominant substantive characteristics)

Yeah, the so-called "planet of hats" trope is integral to the show, and spilled to many others (Stargate franchise being a good example). They did try to subvert it a couple of times, most notably and to great effect with the Cardassians and the Bajorans in DS9, and to a lesser extent with the Klingons in ENT. I wish they'd do it some more[1].

> glorification of the military

It doesn't sound that bad in context of the show itself, because the people are different. Starfleet may be a military, but (at least in TNG-era shows) it's one that's philosophically focused on everything else other than fighting and killing. For proper glorification of the military, nothing beats the Stargate series, SG-1 in particular.

Still, I'd argue that it makes sense in context. Even with the science fantasy of the franchise, by the shows' own numbers, every starship in Star Trek is a mobile, FTL-capable WMD platform. A single TNG-era photon torpedo is given a yield 30% larger than that of a Tsar Bomba[2]; TNG's Enterprise-D carried a standard complement of 250. Phasers are capable of (and shown to be used for) impromptu geoengineering. Impulse engines can speed things up to double-digit percentage of the speed of light. There's no way in hell a future with tech like this isn't thoroughly militarized - not because of potential of conflicts, but because of the need to control the tech that can casually wipe out life on planets.

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[0] - My second reaction was, my God, Roddenberry knew how to pitch a studio.

[1] - I generally wish the new shows would work more with what they have. There's decades of continuous worldbuilding to take from, there is no need to introduce new strange aliens and situations every other episode.

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba - 50 MT for the nuke, ~64 MT for a Starfleet photon torpedo, based on its stated 1.5 kg antimatter payload and E=mc².

Young Kirk was pretty buff.

Sexist maybe, not misogynistic.

I think the end of that paragraph is more interesting.

> She is not dumb; she is very female, disturbingly so.

It is interesting how things change over time. The undercurrent in the character description for both of the women has big "she's real competent for a woman" vibes. I'm sure they were trying to be progressive and just stumbled over the attitudes of the era. Hey, we'll all be there some day, right?

Give some credit for the female Executive Officer.

Chauvinistic? Misogynistic traditionally meant hatred, and the way it has been redefined is genuinely bad for communication.

Is it misogynistic to revel in the female form?

The unaired pilot episode features characters very close to those described here. There's a "secretary has crush on her superior, he doesn't notice or doesn't care" cliche going on which would have been a feature over the whole series. Obviously making her physically attractive helps that plot point.

Of course that got axed after the unaired pilot episode, but in return the gender ratio took a hot with both the yeoman and Number One gone.

Heh, if you are a fan then you’ll realize women being sexy is integral to a good portion of the original Star Trek’s plots…of of course, Kirk being Kirk.

Remember who the audience of the document is: powerful studio executives steeped heavily in the sexism that was the social norm for the era. They may not understand the philosophy of the series (and probably wouldn't have cared for it if they had) but they do understand that having pretty faces can improve viewer counts (not so different from today really) and they want to be certain that there's going to be ROI before doling out funds.

What you should be marveling at is that, for the 1960s, Star Trek TOS had highly progressive aspects, such as having women about a warship at all, let alone as officers and even the first officer. For comparison, in the United States Navy, women were not allowed to serve on combatant ships until 1994[1] and having the first woman to be assigned to command a combatant ship didn't happen until 1998[2]. Even I'm a bit surprised to discover that it was that recent.

[1] https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/browse-by-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_United_States_Nav...

Eh, the bigger issue was Roddenberry was a Weinstein-type producer who hired women who he was sleeping with. "Free Love" guy who signed the checks. He's describing a particular actress who has been open with the star trek community about her issues. He is almost bragging that he could put her into a major role. (Even back in 1960s, this point in the proposal was creepy and barely appeared in the tv show.)

How is pitching a sexy women a women-hating thing to do?

As others have said, while this looks exploitative to modern eyes it was in the context where having a women serve in the quasi-military context of Trek was almost absurdly progressive. At the time, NASA refused to contemplate putting women in space, despite the efforts of a shadow training programme (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_13) - far more misogynistic.

Trek also featured an interracial kiss (not quite the first, but nearly) at a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in several states. It was very much the SJW show of its time.

Apparently he became José Tyler in the series pilot[0]. And, of course, nearly 60 years later, we now have Erica Ortegas[1] named after that original character.

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[0] - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Tyler

[1] - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Erica_Ortegas

Maybe you are assuming it would be actually "scientific". IMO, TNG Technobabble was one of the worst elements of the later shows and inspired a legion of lukewarm nerd bullshit.