re film.
The original series lasted three seasons on television, and the reasons for its demise continue to be argued to this day. The series was created by Gene Roddenberry, a writer who had once been a Los Angeles police officer and who started writing for television in the late 1950s. He had had another series on the air in the early 1960s called The Lieutenant, a military series. He developed the idea for Star Trek and sold it to the NBC network with the statement that the series would be like Wagon Train in space (linking a proposed series to something the executives already have on the air and understand as a concept is often helpful in getting their attention). The series went on the air in 1966, and over its the-year life it had multiple time slots, forcing fans to search for it if they wanted to watch it. The ratings never developed high numbers, perhaps because of the switching around involved, and the series was canceled in 1969. In syndication, though, its popularity increased:
While Star Trek lasted only three seasons on first run television, in syndication the series spawned a fan following that numbers in the millions. From that first series has sprung an incredible number of spin offs: an animated series, three television series, numerous feature films, and hundreds of novels and consumer products. At the present time, the original Star Trek series is broadcast regularly in over 100 different countries around the world ("What is STAR TREK?").
The film version was finally released in 1979, a decade after the original series went off the air. It was developed around the same characters, played by the same actors, and making use of the same elements that had been featured in the series and that had become ingrained in the minds of its television fans. This included elements such as hardware, character traits for the players, and an overarching social and moral sense that had made the original series ...