One of our FACT TREK projects is to document original Star Trek history wherever possible. So although it’s been on YouTube for years, when someone recently re-shared a 1974 radio interview with Gene Roddenberry we decided to give it the FACT TREK treatment. We immediately located the original interviewer, Scott Arthur, and asked him if we might pretty please have his blessing to share it. He graciously said yes.

Value-added historians that we are, we’ve decided to not only share the recording, and not merely transcribe the entire interview, but to annotate it and add historical context.

History of the Recording

By way of introduction, the following is from the 2013 post that announced the release of the recording:

Houstonian Releases A Lost Interview with Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry

RARE 1973 PHONE CHAT GIVES INCITE [sic] INTO THE BIRTH OF STAR TREK
Former Houston radio and television personality Scott Arthur was spring cleaning recently when he came across a telephone interview he did with the “Father” of Star Trek in 1973 [sic].

“It’s 40 years ago almost to the day. ”Scott said. “I was a young DJ at WARM radio in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Mr. Roddenberry was scheduled to speak at a local college and I got his phone number and set up an interview to promote the event in advance.” said the Texas Radio Hall of Famer.

“Before I began rolling tape ….he told me that the TV set was going to be the center of our lives. He said, your TV will have a typewriter in front of it – and open up the world to you. Just a glimpse of his genius and vision.” said Scott. “With all the hype of the new Trek Movie [Star Trek into Darkness] — this is fun to listen to. He shares how they invented the Spock character and was told to hide him, what the woman’s lib movement forced him to do … and what inspired the Transporter.”[1]

Now, oral history is history, but it’s history as filtered by how people who were there remember experiencing it…and people’s memories are not always accurate (see our piece The Off-Center Seat (link)). So, as ever, Fact Trekkers, caveat emptor to whatever The Great Bird of the Galaxy says here.

Play the video and read-along!

The Interview

NOTE: This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Recorded January 24, 1974.*

For WARM radio, Scranton . . .

Scott Arthur: I guess the first thing to talk about would be what you're most noted for, which would be Star Trek. Now, can you tell me, when was Star Trek first born?

Gene Roddenberry: Well, it was conceived in the early 1960s. And we did our first pilot in 1964 for NBC. That was one that did not—the first pilot did not sell. NBC thought it was too…“cerebral,” was the term they used. Then we went on to do a second one the following year and it did sell and the series went on the air.

SA: It’s easy for an author nowadays to borrow ideas from current events and even history, to simply write stories revolving around a car or a plane, but you had to look into the future and invent your own tools of tomorrow. Where did you get your ideas? On what were they based?

GR: I mention they were based—I’d read science fiction since I was a child. I suppose most of the ideas were a combination of things I had read and heard about, although I have a smattering of ignorance in scientific fields. And I had been an airline pilot. And I suppose all of that helped.

FACT TREK NOTE: Here as elsewhere Roddenberry claims he'd been reading science fiction since childhood. This claim has been contested by at least one Roddenberry biographer, Joel Engel. We're working on a piece covering that topic for future publication.

SA: How about some specifics on the show, Star Trek, like the transporter. Where did you get the idea for that?

GR: Well, the transporter really came out of a production need. I realized with this huge spaceship we had come up with, approximately the size of an aircraft carrier, that number one, I would blow the whole budget of the show just on landing the thing on a planet. And secondly, it would take a long time to get into our stories. And so the transporter idea was conceived so that we would get down—get our people down to the planet fast and easy and our story going by page two.

SA: How about the concept of heat shields?

GR: They’re pretty well-known in science fiction. Various types of deflector shields and that sort of thing. They were really borrowed from concepts of half-a-hundred authors that have been writing science fiction since the twenties.

SA: You had to create another civilization, like the Klingons. Where did you get the idea for that?

GR: That actually came from one of the writers, who did an episode and had them in it. They seemed to work as good heavies, so we kept them on. When people say I created Star Trek, yes, I created the basic idea and I guided the writers from then on, but many of the things on the show came from writers who did various episodes.

FACT TREK NOTE: The creator of the Klingons was, of course, writer-producer Gene L. Coon, who goes unnamed in the interview, though Roddenberry freely admits they were the creation of another writer. While Roddenberry has something of a rep as a credit hog, in this interview and many others of the era he was quick to acknowledge that not every idea was his alone.

GR: A television show is a cooperative effort. For instance, the Famous Spock Neck Pinch came from Leonard Nimoy and Bill Shatner fooling around on the set one day. They were playing a joke on a new director. Leonard says, “Look, I’ll do this to you and you fall unconscious.” And they did it for a laugh and someone said, “Hey, wait, that’s great.”

FACT TREK NOTE: Of course Roddenberry was not on the set for this. According to Leonard Nimoy, the FSNP (Famous Spock Neck Pinch) was invented because he didn't think it was in character for Spock to violently subdue the duplicate Kirk in "The Enemy Within" and he invented the FSNP as an option for director Leo Penn. This episode would be Penn's first and only Star Trek directing assignment.[2]

SA: What about some of the characters on the show? Did you create them with certain actors in mind?

GR: Leonard Nimoy was the one actor I definitely had in mind. We had worked together several years previously when I was producing a show called The Lieutenant. Leonard had done a guest star thing. And I was struck at the time with his high, slavic cheekbones and very interesting face. And I thought to myself, if I ever do this science fiction that I want to do, he’d make a great alien. With those cheekbones, some sort of pointed ear might go well. And then I forgot entirely about it until I began to lay out the Star Trek characters. And then to cast Mr. Spock, I simply made one phone call to Leonard and that was it.

FACT TREK NOTE: In numerous interviews Roddenberry maintained that Nimoy was the only actor seriously considered for Spock; this was confirmed by Dorothy Fontana.[3] We address the rumors about alternate casting for the part in our piece in Search of… Spock (link).

SA: Were you satisfied with the way most of the characters were developed in Star Trek?

GR: I tried to... What I was trying to do was to get a sort of a family group representing different types of humanity so that our audience would feel at home on the ship. It was really an effort to give a twentieth century audience some handle in this future world of recognizable people.

SA: You seem to have let Spock develop on his own with more and more of a major role as an Enterprise crewmember. Did audience reaction encourage you to let Spock come into his own or was this planned?

GR: Well the Spock story is an interesting one. He was third or fourth most important in pilot number one. This was even before women’s lib, but I’d always felt that in a future world women would have positions of responsibility, so the number two in command at that time was a female called “Number One,” under the Captain. Among the things NBC didn’t like in the pilot was a woman in a position of command. And so they wanted that out, and they were very strong about that. But in making the pilot, I saw how the Spock character was working, and I wanted to elevate him up and make him the number two character. But NBC said, “No, we don’t want him, either, because the audience will never identify with a pointed eared creature from another planet.” I felt that was the one fight I had to win. So I said I wouldn’t do the show unless they let me leave at least him in. And they said, “Well, fine, you can leave him in, but keep him in the background, will you?”

FACT TREK NOTE: Roddenberry repeatedly stated that NBC didn't want a woman in command, whereas Desilu's Herb Solow claimed NBC didn't like the casting of the first pilot in general, and Majel Barrett in particular.[4] There's been some suggestion that test audience reaction to the character was a factor. We're writing a piece on Star Trek and Audience Research now, though we suspect the full truth of the matter may be entirely lost to time.

SA: Wow.

GR: And then when they put out their sales brochures on the show, they carefully rounded Spock’s ears and made him look human, so it wouldn’t scare off any potential advertisers. After the show had been on the air six or eight weeks, why of course the audience reaction to Spock was very strong, and a new NBC Vice President came to the west coast and he called me in, and he said, “What’s the matter with you? You’ve got this great character and you’re keeping him in the background!” And we pointed out the sales brochures and told him what NBC had asked us to do and his only answer was, “I think I’m going to throw up.” From then on, of course, Spock was number two.

The infamous retouched photo of Spock from the NBC sales brochure Advance Information on 1966–67 Programming, Star Trek, p. 4.

FACT TREK NOTE: Roddenberry never named this supposed exec. The one known New York NBC V.P. associated with Star Trek was Mort Werner, who was hardly new in 1966, so it wasn't him...assuming the story is true at all.

SA: Why was Spock a half-breed? Why was he that?

GR: I wanted to have an interesting personality facet. I wanted him, parts of him, to be at war with one another. The human part fighting the alien part. And half-breeds, traditionally in drama, have always been highly interesting characters.

SA: How about Captain James T. Kirk? He was a sort of all-American boy, but on a larger scale. He was handsome, he was intelligent. Was it hard to keep him the basic nice guy in situation after situation?

GR: That is a problem, of course, but at the time we were putting Star Trek on, television was full of antiheroes. I had a feeling that the public likes heroes, people with goals in mind, people with honesty, dedication, and so on. And so I decided to go for straight, heroic roles on the show, and it paid off. My model for Kirk, for those who were interested, was Horatio Hornblower, the C.S. Forester sea stories, which I’ve always enjoyed.

FACT TREK NOTE: A September 28, 1965 Daily Variety column by Dave Kaufman noted, “There is a small trend in some of tv to make the heroes what are called anti-heroes, guys who err and goof and just aren’t heroic.”[5] In Kaufman’s column one year later, on September 7, 1966, William Shatner was quoted as saying about Star Trek, “If we make it, we will be setting a trend. In movies and tv, there is a cycle of anti-heroes. We are playing exactly opposite — if nothing else, it’s heroic.”[6]

Our view is that these claims exaggerate the presence of antiheroes on mid-60s television. Square jawed heroes were still widely in evidence throughout the decade.

For a historian's perspective on these trends, allow us to quote from Stephen Bowie about The Invaders (1966-68), "David Vincent may have been television’s first really nasty, hard-to-like antihero. The term antihero had previously been applied to characters like Richard Kimble and Route 66’s Tod and Buz because they in some way defied the establishment, but their rebellious attitudes didn’t get in the way of their basic cuddliness."[7]

SA: Did many actors try out for the role of Kirk or was Shatner the only one?

GR: No, we had a great deal of trouble casting it. Many actors turned us down and later, of course, wished they hadn’t. But science fiction at that time had a very bad name. And many serious actors had just made up their mind they wanted nothing to do with it, because the stuff they’d seen on television at that time was so bad they didn’t want their name associated with it.

SA: Here’s a loaded question. Now, Kirk was almost always involved in quick, superficial relationships and not much else romantically. Sometimes that was even more fictitious than the rest of the plot. Was Kirk married to the Enterprise, is that what happened?

GR: That was our... That was what we wanted to develop, yes. Married to his job and to his ship, that was his real love affair.

SA: What about the Enterprise itself? Where did you get that name?

GR: Well, although I had been an army bomber pilot in World War Two, I have always been fascinated by the navy, and particularly fascinated by the story of the Enterprise in World War Two, which at Midway really turned the tide of the whole war in our favor, and I’d always considered a very heroic ship and decided to use the name.

SA: In the making of Star Trek, did you find that you made any technical boo-boos that NASA or somebody else discovered and complained about?

GR: Oh, yeah, we made our share, but we tried not to. We had technical advice from NASA at times, from the RAND Corporation. We had a technical advisor/physicist at RAND who checked all of our scripts. And then we also had another script checking service. So, we did our best to avoid ‘em, but of course every now and then we would slip. [The fans] were quick to point it out.

Newspaper clipping, June 14, 1965. Title: 'Antiworld' Concept Backed By Antideuteron Discovery. The clipping features a handwritten note a by Harvey P, Lynn, Jr., reading "Gene— Here is a weird one! Harvey". — June 1965 clipping sent to Roddenberry by RAND Corp.’s Harvey P. Lynn, Jr. Date submitted unknown.[8]

FACT TREK NOTE: We can't at this time speak to NASA advisors, but the RAND Corporation advisor refers to Harvey P. Lynn, Jr., who provided feedback and science-related materials for script reference. For instance, he shared a June 13, 1965 article tilted "Antiworld Concept Backed By Antideuteron Discovery" which contains the text "if a spaceman from earth shook hands with a spaceman from the antiworld, both would disappear in a flash of light, heat and radiation"; just the kind of thing that may have inspired "The Alternative Factor". Although in truth Lynn's services did not continue beyond the first season.[9]

The "script checking service" was, of course, de Forest Research. See our piece about Kellam de Forest, which is called de Forest, Kellam (link).

SA: Offhand, did anything funny or really unexpected happen during the filming of the series?

GR: I should say a lot of—that it was probably the happiest crew that ever, as far as I know, has ever been assembled. The crew and the cast. Our schedules are very tight and we kept it that way with constant practical jokes. I think the book by Steve Whitfield, The Making of Star Trek, has pages of the things that went on. It’s very funny reading.

FACT TREK NOTE: Despite the fact Roddenberry is credited as co-author, here he acknowledges that Whitfield (née Poe) was the primary author of The Making of Star Trek.

SA: Gene, it’s a well-known story that Star Trek was saved from oblivion by audience reaction in the form of thousands of pieces of mail received by the network when the cancellation of the show was announced. How did that make you personally feel?

GR: Well, it surprised me, and of course it was gratifying. What particularly gratified me in it, though, was not the fact that a large number of people did that, but I got to meet and know Star Trek fans. And they range from children to Presidents of Universities. And really, a great bunch of people. One of my greatest enjoyments from the show was to find the kind of people we attracted, and some of the relationships we formed with them.

SA: Speaking of meeting and knowing the Star Trek fans, the “Trekkies” as they’re now called, the impact of the show is so great that these Trekkies hold annual conventions. They’ve got another one coming up February 15th. And I think, probably, you spoke at one of those Star Trek conventions.

GR: Yes, I did go to one of them and it was a remarkable experience. I am not sure that I have the strength to do it very often. My temperament is that of the writer. I like to be alone in the quiet room and work there. The sight of 8,000 people sitting out there really makes my knees shake.

FACT TREK NOTE: The con Scott Arthur mentions is likely the 3rd annual Star Trek Lives! convention held mere weeks after this interview in New York City on February 15-18, 1974.[10]

The con Roddenberry refers to having attended previously was the first Star Trek Lives!, held January 21–23, 1972. We printed a full transcript of Roddenberry's talk in our piece 1972 Gives Us the Bird (link).

1972 Star Trek Lives! flier cover [11]

1974 Star Trek Lives! flier cover [12]

SA: When you sat alone in your quiet room and you started on the Star Trek series, did you ever think that it would go that far, to have a convention of Trekkies?

GR: No. I’d hoped the series would be successful, but I was really astounded when it became a cult. The gratifying part of that is I made a real effort in Star Trek to write into it some of my own beliefs and philosophies on non-violence, on the fact that to be different is not necessarily—if someone else is different, it doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad or wrong, and philosophies like that and thoughts like that. It was very gratifying that the Star Trek fans like that part of the show best of all, the fact that the show said something.

SA: I guess you know that part of the reason for the Trekkies is not only to pay tribute to Star Trek, but [to] try to resurrect it. Now comes the bonus question. Why can’t we resurrect—why can’t we have a new series with the same cast of Star Trek?

GR: Well, I’ve wondered that myself. There have been several efforts. NBC started talking about it once and then they asked for a new pilot. And that’s an enormous amount of work and risk and our attitude was we made 78 shows [sic], we didn’t see why we had to try out for them all over again. I think our best chance of getting it back on the air would probably be through the motion picture route. There’s some talk at Paramount of doing a Star Trek feature, a major feature. And I think that if we did a feature or if we were fortunate [and] went like Planet of the Apes did—they did a series of features—I think that would probably lead to getting back on the air.

SA: Is the cast willing to do that? Have you spoken to them?

GR: On a feature basis, that wouldn’t be too much of a problem, because they could do a feature and still take care of their other commitments. If we were just going to go straight on the air, we would have to probably plan it a year or a year and half ahead so that current commitments by all the actors could be gotten rid of.

SA: The cartoon version of Star Trek, is that a compromise, a pacifier?

GR: No, it wasn’t meant as that. NBC wanted a strong show in their morning cartoon timeslot and they were willing to go along with my demand that it not be written down to the kiddie level. I believe that children are much more intelligent than they’re given credit for. So we used regular Star Trek writers and the standard Star Trek type story. It wasn’t a pacifier, it was just an effort to do something a little better on Saturday morning.

SA: We here at WARM [radio] are starting a thing called “Keep on Trekking,” if you’ll pardon that.

GR: Ah, yes, I’ve heard.

SA: All we want to do is try and revive it or possibly something—what good would petitions do or letters do, sending to networks, would it convince them, do you think?

GR: I think they do keep interest alive, certainly. Paramount, who owns the basic copyright along with me, has been getting a lot of letters about a motion picture. I think that’s been helpful.

SA: The series seems to be more popular in the rerun circuit. More people have discovered Star Trek after it has been off and rerun many times. Do you ever watch the old shows?

GR: I started watching them about six months ago and I was really amazed. You know, when you make a show, you see each episode six or eight times by the time you cut it and put music and all of that on it. And by the time they get on the air, you’re pretty tired of them. But after all these years, I went back and began looking at them on a local channel, and kind of enjoyed them.

SA: Looking back, would you do anything differently?

GR: Nothing basic. There are errors we made. There are sets, I think, looking back, we could improve. But as far as any basic differences, no.

SA: Okay

GR: I think we could keep the same configurations of the Enterprise and the bridge, although technology has advanced a lot since ‘64 and our instrumentation and everything could look a lot better. There are new plastics we could use. We would get better looking sets if we did it again.

SA: Okay, enough of Star Trek. [I’ll] give you a break here. Let’s talk about Gene Roddenberry. Now what background do you have to go into science fiction writing?

GR: I think, basically, it’s the background that most writers have. I always have been an omnivorous reader. When you read all your life, constantly, you store away a lot of miscellaneous information that’s very helpful. As I said, I liked science fiction. When I began writing, I was an airline pilot with Pan Am, and I think that helped me a bit in engineering and so on. It’s hard to analyze something like that.

SA: When you write, Gene, you write mostly about the future. Do you have a philosophy? Do you try to incorporate a moral, a message, in everything you do?

GR: Yes. I think that all—I think that any professional writer should have a theme, make a statement, in whatever he’s doing, weather it’s a Mr. District Attorney script or a great novel. To me, the whole purpose of writing is to make statements.

SA: Do you have one philosophy for everything, let’s say, futuristic that you write?

GR: I should say, if I have any overall philosophy, it’s a reverence for living things of all types and a great optimism about mankind. I think for all the foolish things we do, we’re a pretty remarkable creature and I think we’re still in our childhood compared to where we will be going.

SA: Do you think mankind needs saving of some sort?

GR: Oh, I think... My own philosophy is that mankind has, within himself, what he needs. I’d rather think that whatever God is, we are all a part of it.

SA: How about the UFO flurry, Gene? As a man who has created a UFO or two in his time on paper, do you believe in them to be flying saucers? Do you believe UFOs to be visitors from another world?

GR: I think it’s not impossible. I disbelieve most reports, but I think it is not at all impossible that we have been visited or are being visited. And sometimes I hope so. We tend to make such a mess of it ourselves, we could use some outside help.

SA: Do you as a producer, director, author, do you have a favorite movie from that viewpoint?

GR: A favorite Star Trek?

SA: No, a favorite movie, just in general.

GR: Never been asked that question. I really don’t. I’ve... I love movies and I have many favorites. I’m sorry that’s a disappointing answer, but I really don’t.

SA: How about a favorite science fiction writer? Anybody that you like to read more often than others?

GR: Well one of them would certainly be Isaac Asimov, and I think Arthur C. Clarke, and Heinlein would be my three favorites.

SA: Just a few more questions here. All your stuff is really believable. We are able to relate. Is that the secret to good science fiction, do you think, that we are able to relate and identify? Or is there a—

GR: That’s really the whole secret. And that’s why science fiction has so often been done badly. In writing and producing science fiction, you must give the same attention to believability that you do in doing a contemporary show. You must motivate your people, you must use every effort to make the audience believe they are there and that it’s really happening. So often in the past, in science fiction, they used bad directors. When someone said, “Well, why does he do this?” they would shrug and they’d say, “Oh yeah, it’s because it’s science fiction.” That’s not good enough. You should write science fiction with the same care that you use in writing anything else. I think the reason The Exorcist motion picture right now is such a hit is, instead of doing it like many horror films have been done—without motivation—they gave great effort to make it believable. And it shocks you right out of your chair because of it.

SA: Let’s talk about something you’ve done recently, a few things. First of all, Genesis II, about a man in our present who awakens in the post-nuclear war future, trying to help out. A pilot for possibly a new series. This seemed to be more commercial than any of the other Roddenberry creations. Why was that?

GR: Well, I wanted to do another show which had one thing Star Trek had, and that was a chance to visit different worlds every week. At the same time, I didn’t want to do planet hopping again. And so it occurred to me that if our earth went into a new Dark Ages before another civilization is built, society tends to fragment, and really does get like a hundred different worlds all over the earth. I decided that, although we did go two centuries ahead, I’d prefer to have the hero [be] a twentieth century man, and that’s when we came up with the idea of suspended animation to get him there. Perhaps that gave it a commercial look. The status of the show is that we made the pilot for CBS, they decided not to go into a series, ABC became interested in the general idea, and I revised and changed many things in the concept, and now am in the middle of writing a new pilot motion picture for ABC. The show will be recast, with new concepts, and I think this time we may get it into a series.

SA: Do you care to talk about that? The name of it? The plot, anything?

GR: Well, it’ll be on the air sometime this spring, but we don’t have an airdate. As a matter of fact, we begin shooting it in about ten days. I’m at home today working on the script, as a matter of fact, doing a polish on it.

SA: No hints as to what it is?

GR: I don’t even know what the name of the series will be. The working name we’re using right now is Planet Earth. Whether that will be the final name of the series or not, I don’t know.

FACT TREK NOTE: According to Variety, Planet Earth began shooting on Tuesday, February 12, 1974, 14 work days after this recording.[13] This, too, would not be picked up, and a third TV movie—minus Roddenberry—loosely based on the same material, Strange New World, would later air and also fail to get picked up.

*Planet Earth* premiered on April 23, 1974 on ABC TV. [14] [15]

SA: One more thing. Let’s talk about something that was on national TV last night, The Questor Tapes, which I thought was excellent. I think it’s one of the best Roddenberry things besides Star Trek that I have seen.

GR: Thank you.

SA: It was thoroughly believable, about a computerized humanlike robot, and what I liked best about it is you did not moralize. There was probably a horrible temptation at the end to moralize and to flash a red light and say, “This is what it is, and this is what it should be, and you people are doing this wrong.” But you let us do that for ourselves. Do you think that day will come when machines will really overtake and control man? Not like it did there, but like it could have happened?

GR: I think it’s certainly conceivable. The basic question in Questor was “what is life?” If you can create a thing out of a...a mechanical thing that thinks, is that necessarily any less alive than a thinking creation that’s made out of organic matter? I think it is certainly conceivable that computers could become more intelligent than we are.

Image of two reviews from Variety of Roddenberry's The Questor Tapes telefilm, with a note to the effect that the reviews are fair.

SA: One more thing, what about the future of Gene Roddenberry and your writings? Where are you going to go from here?

GR: It’s hard to say. My.... The way I think about that is I think optimistically. I wake up every morning expecting something good to happen, and I’ve been fortunate. Good things do happen. I intend to get some more television going. Hopefully the Planet Earth, hopefully Questor. I’d like to do some features. I don’t want to confine myself exclusively to science fiction, but I do like imaginative things. I really have no plans other than enjoying myself, write as well as I can, and be honest with the audience.

—30—

Revision History

2022—07-22 Original post.

Special Thanks

To Scott Arthur for allowing us to transcribe his recording and share it with you.

End Notes & Sources

* Recording date. Although the YouTube video dates this as being from 1973, we’ve determined the interview was conducted on January 24, 1974, since Mr. Arthur notes that it is the day after The Questor Tapes was first broadcast on national TV (January 23, 1975 from 9-11 p.m., on NBC).

[1] Houstonian Releases A Lost Interview with Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry, Dish-Houston blog (link).

[2] Leonard Nimoy, I Am Spock, 1995, New York, NY: Hatchette Books, p.58–59.

[3] “It was always Nimoy.” Dorothy Fontana, via in-person Fact Trek interview, June 2019.

[4] Herb Solow & Robert Justman, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, ISBN 9780671896287, p.60.

[5] ‘U.N.C.L.E.’ To Rock & Roll; Ackerman On ‘Poppy’ Prowl, Dave Kaufman for Daily Variety, September 28, 1965, p.14.

[6] Shatner's ‘Heroic’ Switch; Spoofing Tarzan, ‘Peyton’, Dave Kaufman for Daily Variety, September 7, 1966, p.8.

[7] Stephen Bowie, The Invaders: The Nightmare Has Already Begun, Classic TV History blog (link)

[8] 'Antiworld' Concept Backed By Antideuteron Discovery. Date and paper unknown, but article is dated June 13, 1965. Identical and similar articles found in other newspapers are dated as early and June 14 (example). UCLA, Gene Roddenberry Star Trek television series collection, 1966–1969.

[9] Letters, memos and clipping from and to Harvey P. Lynn, Jr. UCLA, Gene Roddenberry Star Trek television series collection, 1966–1969.

[10] The 1974 Star Trek Lives! convention at Fanlore (link).

[11] Star Trek Lives! (convention) 1972 flier cover (link) found on Fanlore scanned by Jim Rondeau and Melody Rondeau.

[12] Star Trek Lives! (convention) 1974 flier cover (link) found on Fanlore scanned by Mrs. Potato Head.

[13] Four Go To 'Planet', Daily Variety, Friday February 8th, 1974, p.12.

[14] Tuesday Movie of the Week, Planet Earth, Tone for Daily Variety, Tuesday April 23, 1974, p.7.

[15] Television Reviews, Planet Earth, Mick for Weekly Variety, Wednesday May 1, 1974, p.26.

[16] Telfilm Review, The Questor Tapes, Tone for Daily Variety, Thursday January 24, 1974, p.34.

[17] Television Reviews, The Questor Tapes, Bok for Weekly Variety, Wednesday, January 30, 1974, p.20.

[18] Ad, Daily Variety, Tuesday April 16, 1974, p.7.

The Great Bird Of the Radio, 1974

History of the Recording

The Interview

Recorded January 24, 1974.*

For WARM radio, Scranton . . .

For WARM radio, Scranton . . . For WARM radio, Scranton . . .

Revision History

Special Thanks

End Notes & Sources

Uhura, Black To the Future

Dos Trequis

For WARM radio, Scranton . . .