Green Shadows, White Whale

In 1991 Bradbury was able to combine his various stories of Ireland with bridges that told the tale of his Irish adventures writing the Moby Dick screenplay for John Huston in 1953-1954 to form the autobiographical novel Green Shadows, White Whale. Chapter 29 describes how Bradbury was able to merge these complex projects by revisiting the rough winter he spent under Huston’s demanding direction. In the process, Bradbury was able to capture the defining spirit of the Ireland he knew with good humor and only a touch of satire. Bradbury loved the beauty of the countryside and the people, but he would never return. The chapter analyzes this ambivalence through Bradbury’s reflective poem “To Ireland,” and concludes with the comments that Bradbury offered at the 1991 memorial service for his friend Gene Roddenberry.

Beyond Eden

Chapter 13 opens with commentary on Bradbury’s 1980 Omni magazine article “Beyond Eden,” an essay commissioned to support the projected Space Shuttle program. In this essay, Bradbury defined his Space-Age Trinity—God, humanity, and the machines of interplanetary flight. The chapter goes on to document Bradbury’s April 1980 interviews with friends who had achieved prominence in the new generation of science fiction films: producers Gary Kurtz and Gene Roddenberry, director Irvin Kershner, and special effects artist John Dykstra. Bradbury never completed the article on the future of science fiction films that these interviews were intended to support, but he did articulate a maturing sense of Toynbee’s “challenge and response” as a way to focus the kind of human growth required to reach other worlds.

Case Study #4: Star Trek by Gene Roddenberry

Star Trek began as a 1960s television series led by a swashbuckling starship Captain, an intellectual off-world first officer, and a multicultural, heart-of-gold crew. In the third of a century since its appearance on our home screens, the series Gene Roddenberry created has become a world-wide phenomenon.Star Trek is also a rich treasure trove of administrative literature: The setting — usually a starship, sometimes a planetary government organization. The characters are clearly delineated, colorful, share common goals, distinguish between their personal and professional roles and concerns, and serve well as archetypes for distinct organizational personalities. And the missions are clear, benevolent, in the public interest, and frequently controversial.As you watch an episode of one of the four Star Trek series, how many of these facets can you observe?That’s public administration, all right, but in a very different wrapper

A Series on the Edge: Social Tension in Star Trek's Title Cue—ADDENDUM

Permission to use notation for the theme from “Star Trek” was received after the article by Getman in the August 2015 issue of Journal of the Society for American Music was published. The captions for Examples 1, 2, and 4 should carry the following credit:Theme from “Star Trek(R),” words by Gene Roddenberry, music by Alexander Courage. © 1966, 1970 Bruin Music Company. Copyright renewed. This arrangement © 2015 Bruin Music Company. All Rights Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

Fashion’s Final Frontier": The Correlation of Gender Roles and Fashion in Star Trek

Since its creation in 1966, Star Trek has been a dominant part of popular culture and as thus served as the source for many cultural references. Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry wanted to realize his vision of a utopia but at the same time, he used the futuristic setting of the show to comment on the present time, on ac-tual social and political circumstances. This means that each series can be regarded as a mirror image of the time in which it was created. The clothing of the characters in the different series is one part of that image. The uniforms of The Original Series show influences of the 1960s pop art movement as well as the mini-skirt trend that experienced its peak in that decade. In the course of almost 40 years, however, many things changed. In the 1990s, in Deep Space Nine and Voyager, a unisex uniform replaced the mini-dresses, with few exceptions; the colorful shirts gave way to ones that were mostly black. This trend continues into the new century. This essay interprets the evolution of the female officers’ uniforms from femi-nized dresses to androgynous clothing over the development of the series as a reflection of the change of gender roles in contemporary American society. The general functions of the female characters’ uniforms are the central object of its analysis while the few, but noteworthy exceptions to this pattern are given specific attention. Finally, one of the most intriguing lines of enquiry is, how the prequel series Enterprise, supposed to be set before The Original Series, but produced and aired from 2001 to 2005, fits in the picture.

Star Trek and Gene Roddenberry’s “Vision of the Future”: The Creation of an Early Television Auteur

Gene Roddenberry propagated a narrative of himself as a “visionary” writer-producer and the primary author of Star Trek in the 1960s. From the 1970s onwards, Paramount Pictures (and later, CBS) co-opted that narrative to market what would become the Star Trek franchise. This paper will examine to what extent this narrative can be substantiated, and to what extent certain aspects can be contested.

Space-age Hornblowers, or why Kirk and co. are not space cowboys: The Enlightenment mariners and transatlanticism of Star Trek

Many mistakenly perceive Star Trek to be, simply, a “Wagon Train to the stars,” a space western/opera that projects the U.S. American frontier into outer space. However, by introducing his starship captain in archetypal terms as a ‘space-age Captain Horation [sic] Hornblower,’ and by making him a descendant of ‘similar [naval] men in the past,’ Star Trek (1966-1969) creator Gene Roddenberry makes it clear that his starship captain is not based on the quintessential cowboy hero found in the U.S. American national imagination (Roddenberry, 1964: 5). In this article, I seek to (re)map the character contours of the principle Star Trek captains and compare them with C. S. Forester’s ‘man alone,’ Horatio Hornblower, as well as with Hornblower’s romanticised predecessors. I will demonstrate how ‘Starfleet’s finest’ fit the role of the sentimental naval officer/hero of the Romantic period. Ultimately, it will become clear that Roddenberry used Horatio Hornblower as an archetypal blueprint to craft the Star Trek captains as interstellar masters and commanders, as well as spaceborne naturalists and scientists, extending the historio-mythical continuum of British maritime heroes into Star Trek’s fictional, yet “historical” future. The “Hornblowers in space” represent the central node in the decidedly transatlantic double consciousness of the Star Trek continuum - a maritime endowment which has largely escaped scholarly attention.

Racial Issues and Star Trek's Deep Space Nine

HIGHLY OFFENSIVE FERENGI: RACIAL ISSUES AND STAR TREK'S MULTICULTURAL DEEP SPACE NINE STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE is the third official Star Trek series based on the ideas of the late Gene Roddenberry. The popularity of the Star Trek series has earned them an honoured place in America's popular culture.(1) Likewise, scholarly attention to Star Trek points to its importance to the study of media culture.(2) Star Trek, even before its broadcast of television's first interracial kiss, has always had two missions. The first, its entertainment mission as part of the television industry, is the well known: "Its five year mission is to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man [sic] has gone before."(3) Deep Space Nine's creators, Berman and Pillar, state the second is the less publicly articulated mission of addressing matters of socio-cultural...