Gene Roddenberry: What He Called Wagon Train To The Star

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Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek’s creator, originally pitched the series as what he called “Wagon Train to the stars” (Wagon Train was a popular television programme in the late 1950s that depicted the westward colonisation of the United States). Roddenberry had written extensively for television programmes that featured adventures in the American west, elements of which he incorporated into Star Trek, most notably the structure of a self-contained episode each week that featured an adventure plot. In Roddenberry’s vision of the future, humanity would go beyond the limits of the solar system to explore the universe, but this exploration would occur in the context of a society that was no longer dominated by capitalist imperatives. Roddenberry’s

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