Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had worked with Kelley on previous television pilots, and Kelley was Roddenberry's first choice to play the doctor aboard the USS Enterprise.

Gene Roddenberry in 1964 had not seen The Fly upon his first draft of " The Cage ", but it was brought to his attention, and this is how the transporter was considered.

In an interview with Gene Roddenberry in a 1991 edition of ' The Humanist ' magazine, he implied that it might also have had its roots in his belief that Christian Missionaries were interfering with other cultures.

Frakes had grown a mustache and beard between seasons, and Gene Roddenberry asked him to keep it, because he thought it made Riker look more dignified.

As evidenced in some of his letters and memos, Roddenberry was fond of circle-and-triangle designs and had wanted to use them for purposes of theatrical unity as early as the first season's " The Return of the Archons ".

Andromeda is one of two TV series ( to date ) based upon concepts Roddenberry had created as early as the 1960s and 1970s.

The name Dylan Hunt had also been used for the hero of two TV movie pilots Roddenberry had produced in the mid-1970s, Genesis II and Planet Earth, which had a similar premise.

Gene Roddenberry had intended his new female communications officer to be called " Lieutenant Sulu.

Soon after the first scripts for Star Trek were being written, Gene Roddenberry spoke of a new character, a female communications officer and introduced Herb Solow and Robert Justman to Nichols, who had worked for him on The Lieutenant.

Actor James Doohan claimed that Paramount chief Frank Mancuso, Sr. had fired Bennett following negative reaction from the core cast, Roddenberry, and fans.

Rick Berman has explained that Roddenberry, although terminally ill, had given him his blessing for its development, but that he had no opportunity to discuss any of the ideas with Roddenberry.

He parted company with the producers at the beginning of the first season, after a dispute before the Writers ' Guild in which the Guild required that Gerrold be paid additional wages for the work he did helping to create the series, because he had largely written the show's bible rather than Gene Roddenberry.

Gerrold wrote this script in response to being with Roddenberry at a convention in 1987 where he had promised that the upcoming Next Generation series would deal with the issue of sexual orientation in the egalitarian future.

Although McIntyre was unaware at the time of any controversy surrounding her giving Sulu a first name, editor David Hartwell had to clear the name with Gene Roddenberry and George Takei in order to supersede Paramount's objections.

According to Ellison, Roddenberry later claimed that Ellison's original script had Scotty dealing drugs, but Scotty did not appear at all in that script.

Roddenberry later admitted that when he made the comment, he had not read Ellison's draft in years.

Paramount had pitched ideas to Roddenberry earlier in the year as it was the twentieth anniversary of the original series, but Roddenberry turned them down and initially didn't want to do a new series.

Roddenberry began putting together a production crew which included colleagues who had worked with him on the original series, including Robert H. Justman, as well as David Gerrold and Eddie Milkis.

The Vulcan homeworld, also named Vulcan, was mentioned in the original series, episode " The City on the Edge of Forever " ( 1967 ) to be orbiting the far left star of Orion's belt, i. e. Alnitak, and in the script-adaptation anthology Star Trek 2, author James Blish put the planet in orbit around the star 40 Eridani A, 16 light years from Earth, an identification later adopted by Roddenberry.

The earliest reference to Vulcan names following a set pattern dates back to a May 3, 1966 memo from TOS producer Robert H. Justman to Gene Roddenberry ( later reprinted in the book The Making of Star Trek ) in which Justman recommended that all Vulcan names begin with " SP " and end with " K ", and have exactly five letters.

Gene Roddenberry had distributed a memo that suggested that though it would be unlikely to feature Leonard Nimoy as Spock on the series due to financial considerations, he suggested a reasonable alternative would be to feature Mark Lenard, who played Spock's father, Sarek.

Frakes stated: " I started with the cattle call, then the casting director, the producer, then other directors, to Gene Roddenberry, and then through the Paramount execs, including the vice-president himself and the heads of television.

After casting Koenig, Roddenberry wrote a letter to Mikhail Zimyanin, editor of Pravda, informing him of the introduction of a Russian character, and an NBC press release announcing the character at the time stated that it was in response to a Pravda article.

However, for the rejected pilot " The Cage " ( 1964 ), Roddenberry went with director Robert Butler's choice of John Hoyt to play Dr. Philip Boyce.

For the second pilot, " Where No Man Has Gone Before " ( 1966 ), Roddenberry accepted director James Goldstone's decision to have Paul Fix play Dr. Mark Piper.

According to The Star Trek Encyclopedia, the registry number " NCC-1701 " was devised by Matt Jefferies, art director of the first Star Trek series, inspired by an old science fiction cover that Gene Roddenberry liked, with a starship flying through space.

With a second season of Star Trek to be produced, Roddenberry interviewed Koenig on the recommendation of director Joseph Pevney.

Writer Samuel A. Peeples told Roddenberry these attributes made Spock too alien, and suggested " he should at least be half-human and have the problems of both sides ", believing the human traits made the character more interesting and able to comment on the human condition more believably.

Had Nimoy turned down the role, Roddenberry would have approached Martin Landau.

Roddenberry asked which he preferred, and Doohan replied " Well, if you want an engineer, he better be a Scotsman because, in my experience, all the world's best engineers have been Scottish ".

The original design concept was influenced by a request from Gene Roddenberry that the instrument panels not have a great deal of activity on them.

Writer D. C. Fontana has stated in an interview that Roddenberry would have admired the later series for its dark themes, referring to Roddenberry's military service record in World War II.

Roddenberry identified early on that he did not think a series with the original crew from Star Trek was likely to be practical, nor did he want to recast the roles or have a " retread " crew – a series of different characters in very similar roles to the original series.

This episode served double duty, not only as an episode of Star Trek, but as a backdoor pilot for a proposed spin-off television series, that would have been produced by Roddenberry, under the same name, Assignment: Earth.

However, Gene Roddenberry himself is said to have taken issue with the depiction, particularly Duane and Morwood's assertion in The Romulan Way that the Rihannsu " were never Romulans.

However, Roddenberry died soon after his interviews and the announced plans to have a gay crew member on TNG never materialized.

Science-fiction writer David Gerrold was with Roddenberry when he promised that Star Trek: The Next Generation ( referred to by fans as TNG ) would integrate LGBT characters into the series and thus drafted a script for an episode that would have had two male crew-members that were a couple, in the backdrop of an allegory about the mistreatment of people infected with AIDS.

Other fans have suggested that office politics, including a labor dispute between Gerrold and Roddenberry, prevented the script from getting produced, rather than bigotry or hypocrisy on the part of Roddenberry or the studio.

In a 1988 TV special, series creator Gene Roddenberry said that, as with the first pilot, this one still had a lot of science-fiction elements in it, but at least it ended with Kirk in a bare knuckle fistfight with Mitchell and that's what sold NBC on Star Trek.

According to Gene Roddenberry and Stephen Whitfield, the prominence of a woman among the crew of a starship was one of the reasons that the original Star Trek pilot was rejected by NBC, who, in addition to calling the pilot " too cerebral ", felt that the alien Spock and a female senior officer would be rejected by audiences, although Roddenberry also related the tale of how women of the era had difficulty accepting her as well.

Produced by Paramount for the NBC Network, Roddenberry ’ s original 1964 pilot for Star Trek, called " The Cage " and starring Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike, was regarded as being too intellectual and slow-moving by the network: however, they had sufficient faith in the ideas behind the program to commission a second pilot, which replaced the character of Pike and all but one of the rest of his crew with the new crew commanded by Captain James T. Kirk, played by William Shatner.

Fontana has pointed out in recent years that the " raining kisses " scene was actually an embellishment by Gene Roddenberry -- one of the few he applied to third season scripts — and that the original script submitted had only an embrace and kiss, with most of the passion being delivered by the Romulan commander.

Kulpa met Star Trek creator and producer Gene Roddenberry when he served as Alderman and presented Roddenberry with one of his original Star Trek cartoons from the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.

The Questor Tapes was one of a series of television movies in which Roddenberry was involved, which also included Genesis II, Planet Earth, and Spectre.