A Brief Guide to Star Trek

fantasy and SF from the 1980s through to the twenty-first century). With the longer form came a more in-depth exploration of ideas and a better focus on character, along with an improvement in the literary quality of the writing.
    The same period saw a dramatic boom in science fiction on radio, film and television, much of which had a direct influence on those who’d later tell their stories through
Star Trek
. Radio is the perfect medium for science fiction drama. It is a truism that the locations are much better on radio, not requiring the extravagant budgets often needed for visualising science fiction settings in film and TV. On radio, ideas and settings could be explored in dramatic fashion, relying on the listener to fill in the blanks with their imagination. Shows from the 1950s – such as NBC’s
Dimension X
and
X Minus One
– dramatised short stories from the pulps and the new paperbacks, as well as producing original scripts. Other shows included
2000 Plus
and
Beyond Tomorrow
, although much of the material produced was simplistic and juvenile.
    Several of these early science fiction radio shows were transferred to the new medium of television in the early 1950s, including
Tom Corbett – Space Cadet
and
Space Patrol
. Television was welcoming to science fiction from the earliest days, despite the difficulties of visually realising spaceships, alien worlds and new high-tech gadgets. Most of the early series were broadcast in short episodes (fifteen to twenty minutes, often transmitted live) and mostly aimed at the children’s audience (shown in the early-evening ‘kid-vid’ time slots).
Captain Video and His Video Rangers
was one of the first, starting in 1949 and running until 1955. The show revolved around the adventures of Captain Video (Richard Coogan) and a space police squad who patrolled the solar system. It featured the first robot character as part of a regular television cast. Many well-known science fiction authors wrote some of the later
Captain Video
scripts, including Isaac Asimov, Cyril Kornbluth, Robert Sheckley, Damon Knight, James Blish, Jack Vance and Arthur C. Clarke. Similarly,
Tom Corbett – Space Cadet
starred Frankie Thomas, Jr. and included science fiction author Alfred Bester among the principal scriptwriters. The similar
Space Patrol
reached 210 half-hour shows and almost 900 fifteen-minute shows across that series’ five-year run.
    While these shows were largely primitive, regarded as disposable and aimed at children, they did pave the way for the more adult approach of
Star Trek
in the late 1960s. Youngsters who’d enjoyed the juvenile adventures of Captain Video, Tom Corbett and Space Patrol’s Buzz Corry (Ed Kemmer) in the mid-1950s were teenagers in the mid-1960s and ready for something more substantial in their television science fiction.
    There were some slightly more adult – or at least more pseudo-scientific – TV shows in the 1950s and 1960s that may have influenced
Star Trek
’s approach to the science of its fiction. Between 1955 and 1957, Ziv-TV produced seventy-seven episodes of an anthology show called
Science Fiction Theater
.Introduced by respected former war correspondent Truman Bradley (often against a science laboratory background), the series told a different story every week with a different cast involved in a scientific dilemma, often based around new discoveries or the ways in which new technology might change society or humankind. The show purported to draw its stories from the headlines, and used realistic scientific approaches and data in formulating many of its tales. More cerebral than the likes of
Tom Corbett
or
Space Patrol
,
Science Fiction Theater
provided more thoughtful drama readily enjoyed by teenagers who’d outgrown the early kid-vid space operas.
    By 1957, Russia had launched the Sputnik satellite into orbit and sparked the real-life space race between the Cold War superpowers. This gave rise to a new strain of more realistic science fiction shows based around the imagined realities of the exploration of near space. Ziv-TV’s
Men into Space
ran for a year in 1959–60 and took a more grounded approach to space exploration, dealing with the scientific minutiae of space suits, re-entry trajectories and the challenge of sustaining human life on the moon. Among the writers on the show were Jerome Bixby (who’d go on to write four episodes of
Star Trek
) and B-movie specialist Ib Melchior.
    Men into Space
ran in parallel with
The