Without further delay, here is my answer. I'm sure you have all been waiting with baited breath for this 3,000 word monstrosity. I am of course, being facetious. I would also love your feedback. Caveat: The one thing that did not transfer over when I pasted the behemoth into this forum was all the links that I had taken the time to insert. Apologies.
The Vision of The Great Bird of The Galaxy-Part I
The “logic” in the logical Mister Spock
WB Doran
It is a television show that represents a phenomenon never seen before or since. Next year, 2026, will represent the 60th year since Americans were first introduced to the vision of the man that Majel Barrett called The Great Bird of the Galaxy.
Star Trek, The Original Series (TOS), may have outlived its creator, producers, writers and most of the original cast and crew. But the vision of our future bestowed upon us by creator Gene Roddenberry simply will not die. It is still going strong. Not long after the program was axed by NBC in 1969, it rose from the dead in the form of syndicated programming. It hasn’t been off the air since and continues to grow in popularity.
The show survives today both on broadcast television (
H&I Network) and streaming (
PLUTO) in America. But that’s just peanuts now. Star Trek TOS, or just TOS, currently airs in markets all over the world. No other television production effort has gone on to create the footprint that exists today: This includes eleven spinoff television series, 13 movies, hundreds of books, comic books, websites, dozens of audio recordings, fan conventions that pack fans in by the tens of thousands and so much more.
Paramount TV’s “79 Jewels” as they are now called refuse to die. That represents the number of TOS episodes that came out of
Desilu Studios during the production years of 1965-1969. They represent a license to print money. The United States of America has all of its gold stored at Fort Knox. Paramount TV has TOS. I sometimes wonder which is worth more.
Despite every word that has been written about this television show, questions remain. I was struck with one of them while listening to my iPhone one night. I usually have something blaring out of that phone by my bed while I try to fall asleep. Even with the power of
Google, numerous books and interviews on
YouTube, I have been unable to find an answer. Perhaps one of you might?
Who put the “logic” in the logical Mister Spock? How did it get there? Where did this brainchild come from? Why? It is a specific plot point that actor Leonard Nimoy used to create a beloved character and a race of people. But
where did it come from? There are reams of written and broadcast materials about the logic of Spock. Even more material exists about how logic ruled the growth of Spock’s home world, the Planet Vulcan. But where did it come from? What inspired Roddenberry to create a TOS character ruled by logic?
By the way, I will never forgive Director J.J. Abrams for destroying the planet of Vulcan in his first movie reboot. I tend to gloss over that point. The same way that I gloss over the death of John Wayne in his final film, The Shootist. It took a decade or more for people to forgive actor Bruce Dern for the crime of
shooting and killing John Wayne in The Cowboys. He admits now that acting roles dried up for a while after he delivered the coup de gras. Forgiving Abrams may take a bit longer. I don’t care if it was a different timeline. Paramount should have axed that idea.
My research for this effort includes
Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry by David Alexander,
Inside Star Trek: The Real Story by Herbert Solow and Robert Justman and
Star Trek Compendium by Allan Asherman. Interviews with key staff at Desilu Studios who helped Roddenberry put TOS together were also utilized. I also looked at source material from Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, Majel Barrett and others who were there from the very beginning. None of this research, however, paid off with the answer I was looking for.
I can only tell you what my deepest suspicion is. It is the answer that blared out of my iPhone one night, waking me from my slumber. I must warn you that I could be wrong, dead wrong. But, from what I’ve learned about Roddenberry and others who worked with him in the early days of putting TOS together, the explanation fits. However,
“that sounds right” isn’t the best conclusion. It is, however, all that I have.
Roddenberry’s first vision of Spock would come decades before he even thought up his version of
“Wagon Train to the Stars.” Not long after the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the creator of Star Trek found himself as a young recruit in the U.S. Army Air Corps stationed at Corsicana Airfield, 40 miles south of Dallas Texas. It was a rough wakeup call for Roddenberry, where the day did not start with a military bugle. His instructors set off a cannon instead. 5:30 AM. Every morning. On the dot.
Roddenberry was already a licensed pilot when he arrived in Texas. But that did not matter. Because he found himself thrown in with flight instructors who did every job imaginable to flunk or force him out of Army Air Corps training. In reality? His instructors were preparing him for the hard life of combat that was about to start on Guadalcanal Island in the South Pacific. Some instructors were just bullies. Others were tough. The worst of the worst was a prankster named Sgt. Emmanuel Schifani.
“Schifani was the company’s practical joker, who enraged the cadets by turning on the lights and blowing the sergeant’s whistle, waking everyone up and getting them dressed and out on the parade grounds before anyone realized it was 2:00 AM,” Alexander wrote in
Star Trek Creator. This is a memory that Roddenberry never forgot.
Neither did another cadet, who was already a famous artist for Walt Disney productions. He served as an illustrator for some of the most famous Disney hits before the war. They included Fantasia, Dumbo and The Reluctant Dragon. There was no love lost between Bill Williams and Sgt. Schifani. Williams would use his artistic talents to draw a none too flattering caricature of Schifani in the back of his class cadet book.
"This caricature was to lurk in the back of Gene’s memory for over twenty years,” Alexander wrote. “It would unconsciously make its contribution, along with the Roman god Pan, to Gene’s creation of a pointy-eared Vulcan named Spock.”
The vision of what Spock would eventually look like was not even half of the battle. Roddenberry’s vision changed daily. The early version of Spock was that of a red-hued Martian. He wasn’t even half human yet. But that’s not all. The original Star Trek script also had Spock ingesting energy through a plate in his stomach. NBC wanted that plan scrapped, immediately. Roddenberry caved to the pressure.
But network honchos still were not happy.
“We had trouble with NBC,” Oscar Katz recalled. He served as Production Manager for TOS. “I can’t remember who it was, but it was about the guy with the ears who was going to scare the shit out of every kid in America.”
Nimoy agreed.
“The network said we are very dependent on the numbers in the Bible Belt, and they will not accept in their homes a character who looks devilish with these pointed ears,” Nimoy recalled in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning decades later. “So, get rid of the pointed ears or get rid of the character. This was the network attitude.”
Fortunately, this time, Roddenberry did not cave. He stood his ground. His vision of Spock, a now green-hued character from the Planet Vulcan, would stay in the show. But he would not be ruled by logic. That character trait was reserved, instead, for another character in the first pilot. Her name was Majel Barrett, She would play the role of “Number One” in the first pilot show delivered to NBC. That pilot show was called “The Cage.”
For reasons that are still unknown, and will likely never be known, NBC rejected the show. Roddenberry would later inform reporters that NBC rejected the pilot because
“they didn’t like the idea of a strong female lead.” In other words, they didn’t care for Barrett or her role. Both Grant Tinker, who served as Chairman and CEO of NBC, and Jerome Stanley, Vice President of Film Programs at NBC, would dispute this in
Inside Star Trek: The Real Story. The book was published in 1996, five years after Roddenberry had passed.
“That, I can tell you because I was involved, wasn’t true at all,” Tinker would declare.
However, neither Stanley nor Tinker would reveal the true reasons as to why the first pilot was rejected. Tinker would only reveal that, “many of the problems spotted in the first pilot,” had been addressed in the second pilot that NBC did approve: Where No Man Has Gone Before. According to Star Trek Compendium, first published in 1981, the first pilot was rejected because it was “too cerebral.”
NBC still was not thrilled with the character of Spock, but Roddenberry stuck to his guns. He also enriched Nimoy’s character somewhat, by transferring the “logic” character point to Spock. Furthermore, Spock’s home planet of Vulcan would be described as a world ruled by logic. Nimoy would also tell CBS News years later that this character point of logic would be aided by the use of one, defining word written into nearly every Star Trek script: That word was
fascinating.
This short history lesson, however, does not explain why Roddenberry wanted at least one Star Trek character to be infused with logic. It’s my belief that Roddenberry may have been inspired to create this kind of a character thanks to another NBC science fiction and fantasy production effort. He was a fan of doing this. He would routinely tell his creative team at Desilu Studios to draw “inspiration” from science fiction and fantasy movies, early television shows and even early radio broadcasts.
“You may recall we saw MGM’s Forbidden Planet with Oscar Katz some weeks ago,” Roddenberry wrote in a memo that Alexander reprinted in the official biography. “I think it would be interesting for Palo Guzman to take another hard look at the spaceship, its configurations, controls, instrumentations, etc. while we are still sketching and planning our own. We have no intention of copying either interior or exterior of that ship. But a detailed look at it again would do much to stimulate our own thinking.”
Roddenberry was a fan of borrowing plot points that he believed were good ideas and would fit on Star Trek. One of those borrowed plot points, or creations, was the transporter that TOS utilized to beam the crew onto the surface of other planets, ships or space stations. According to the Alexander biography, the idea came from straight from a
1939 serial film featuring Buck Rogers.
It’s my opinion the logic character point that Spock would become infused with and later define for numerous other actors to follow stems from two NBC radio anthologies. The first was called Dimension X. The second, which was a clone of Dimension X, was called X Minus 1. Dimension X ran for only a single season in 1950 before it was discontinued. X Minus 1, which lasted for three seasons on NBC Network Radio, debuted in 1955.
Both shows were similar in that they borrowed heavily from science fiction and fantasy stories that had been printed decades earlier in pulp science fiction magazines. Alexander, in his official biography of the Star Trek creator, states that Roddenberry was a big fan of the pulps. The most popular of these that Roddenberry devoured as a young boy and teenager included titles such as Amazing Science Fiction, Astounding Stories, Weird Tales and countless others.
Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts served as staff writers for NBC in New York and developed most of the scripts that were brought to audio life for both Dimension X and X Minus 1. Both programs were enormously popular with listeners who were fans of the science fiction and fantasy genre. Both shows were unlike previous attempts at audio science fiction efforts. They were aimed at adults, not children. Each show was also unique in that it featured a story that did not revolve around a central figure or hero such as Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon.
Buried in both NBC programs is a script for a show transcribed by Kinoy. It is called
“Knock.” The script is based upon a short story written by Fredric Brown. First published in a 1948 edition of Thrilling Wonder Stories (yet another pulp magazine), the short story is based upon a two-line prompt. It is as follows:
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door ...
Kinoy follows Brown’s short story faithfully in the audio play that he developed. There are only three characters in Knock: One man, one woman and an invader from another planet. He calls himself a Zan. The lines that each character spoke in Brown’s short story would be repeated faithfully in both audio presentations for Dimension X, and five years later with X Minus 1. Kinoy did not change much. There was, however, one minor addition.
For some unknown reason, Kinoy made a conscious decision to insert a character point of logic for the Zan invader. The word “logic” or “logical” appears in both scripts for Dimension X, and later, X Minus 1. The words are not inserted just once, twice or even three times. Kinoy, for some reason, inserted the words of “logic” or “logical” a total of 12 times. The Zan character speaks of logic or logical decisions throughout a 27-minute audio script.
The Zan invader is a logical creature in Kinoy’s script. The Zan home world, furthermore, is ruled by logic. This is the story that came blaring out of my iPhone one night that woke me from a sound slumber. I am not aware of any other character that is ruled by logic in any radio or television program, or short story, before Nimoy’s character appeared on TOS. I do know that Roddenberry listened to these radio shows. He also watched similar programs on the early days of television religiously. Alexander’s biography confirms as much.
The Zan character that Kinoy would create for radio listeners, however, was more than just logical. The scripted lines that Kinoy wrote for both broadcasts created a Spock-like character long before anyone had ever heard of Leonard Nimoy, Gene Roddenberry or Star Trek. In fact, the two lines I have selected from the TOS episode titled The Corbomite Maneuver and Kinoy’s Zan creation in Knock are almost interchangeable. Decide for yourself:
SPOCK:
Has it occurred to you that there's a certain inefficiency in constantly questioning me on things you've already made up your mind about? (The Corbomite Maneuver)
ZAN:
It is not necessary to repeat information which is correct in the original statement. (Knock)
There is a big difference between the two characters, of course. Roddenberry’s creation of a logical Vulcan resulted in a character that was both a humanist and a pacifist that abhorred violence. Kinoy’s creation of a logical Zan resulted in characters that annihilated nearly every single living creature on Earth, except for a select few that would be saved for the creation of a zoo. That’s more than just a minor difference.
Both Dimension X and X Minus 1 are tributes to the
Golden Era of Science Fiction and the pulp magazines that were devoured by young children and teenagers decades earlier. The scripts from both shows would heavily influence later creative efforts by Rod Serling in multiple episodes of The Twilight Zone, multiple episodes of Gene Roddenberry’s TOS and, later, Star Trek The Next Generation (TNG).
Writer Fredric Brown would also have a later influence on TOS. Intentionally or unintentionally, Gene L. Coon’s script for a TOS episode called Arena was nearly identical to a short story written by Brown that also carried the same name. It was published by
Astounding Science Fiction in 1944. Although Brown’s short story differed somewhat from the TOS episode written by Coon more than two decades later, it was close enough to make Desilu Studios a bit nervous. The problem was solved when TOS credited Brown for the story, and also paid him for the right to use it.
I could spend the better part of the next five years reading every book or magazine article that has been printed about the early, creative years behind TOS. I probably will. The answer I am looking for might be revealed in one of those books. Then again, it might not. There might be another answer, or it could be lost to history.
If Roddenberry really was inspired by Kinoy’s creation of a logical Zan character, then who or what inspired Kinoy? Was he inspired by something that he read or heard? Does this inspiration also stem from the pulp magazines of the past? Although I have read my fair share of the most famous short stories to come out of these magazines from the Golden Era of Science Fiction, I have not read all of them. The answer I am looking for could be buried there. Or it could be somewhere else. Provided it exists at all. Or it could just be an original idea.
One action I cannot take is to contact one or both men about my suspicions. The Great Bird of The Galaxy, as long-time wife Majel Barrett called him, passed in 1991. Kinoy, who like Roddenberry served in WWII, passed in 2014. Many of the men and women who worked with Roddenberry on the creative effort behind Star Trek are also gone. The same is true for the creative team that worked alongside Kinoy to bring both NBC Radio shows to life.
I have managed to learn a few things that stem from this research. It’s my belief that Gene Roddenberry’s creation of a “Wagon Train to The Stars” television program in the mid 1960’s was a tribute to the science fiction and fantasy stories that he read as a child and young teenager. Furthermore, Roddenberry’s experience as a pilot in the South Pacific during World War II also served as a heavy influence on his creative efforts.
Thanks to volunteer efforts at the Internet Archive website, you can read Brown’s short story called Knock as it appeared in a 1948 edition of
Thrilling Wonder Stories. Kinoy’s audio production of Brown’s work can be heard on YouTube. The Dimension X production is
here. The X Minus 1 production, which I consider to be a tad better (personal preference), is
here.
