is an American Science fiction media franchise originating from the 1960s television series Star Trek, created by Gene Roddenberry. That series, now often knows as “The Original Series”, debuted on September 8, 1966, and aired for three seasons on NBC. It followed the voyages of the starship USS Enterprise, a space exploration vessel built by the United Federation of Planets in the 23rd century, on a mission “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to bodily go where no man has gone before”. In creating, Star Trek, Roddenberry was inspired by C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series of novels, Johnathan Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels, the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, and television westerns such as Wagon Train.
Roddenberry intended the show to have a progressive political agenda reflective of the emerging counter-culture of the youth movement, though he was not fully forthcoming to the networks about this. He wanted Star Trek to show what humanity might develop into, if it would learn from the lessons of the past, most specifically by ending violence. An extreme example is the lien species knowns as the Vulcans, who had a violent past but learned to control their emotions. Roddenberry also gave Star Trek an anti-war message and depicted the United Federation of Planets as an ideal, optimistic version of the United Nations. His efforts were opposed by the network because of concerns over marketability e.g. they opposed Roddenberry’s insistence that Enterprise has a racially diverse crew.
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