As the remaining Trek fans wait (and hope) for the promised improvement to Enterprise, I thought some of you might be interested in Trek that might have been.
There are a slew of scripts, plots, and almost produced Star Trek TV shows and movies that, at least on paper, look better than what we've seen from Paramount in the last decade or so...
Among them:
- Star Trek: Phase II, a mid 70s series with the original cast - except Spock. After the success of Star Wars, paramount brought it to the big screen, instead.
Several "Phase II" scripts were reworked for Star Trek: The Next Generation.
You can see clips from the "Phase II" pilot on the ST: The Motion Picture DVD.
- Harve Bennet, producer of ST: Wrath of Khan, pitched this movie to Paramount several years back:
"It was Kirk and Spock at Star Fleet Academy," Bennett says. Spock is the first Vulcan to attend the academy. It was a story of prejudice against Spock, who almost dies in it. It's the story of Kirk's first and last love, with a cadet lady who dies heroically saving the planet or something similar. But its undertone is about racism. It's about redbloods vs. bluebloods vs. greenbloods. And at the end Kirk is alone. He and Spock part, and you understand why Kirk is going to run around the galaxy chasing illusions and skirts."
- George Takei pitched a series of Sulu's voyages on the Starship Excelsior.
- The orginal premise of "Enterprise" was "Birth of the Federation" and would have take place in several time periods. Paramount found it to be too complicated and insisted on a ship named "Enterprise."
- Enterprise was almost something like, "Star Trek: Top Gun" or Trek: 90201 - young bucks at the Academy.
- One leaked plot for the second "Next Generation" movie had the Enterprise on a covert mission (If discovered, Star Fleet would deny authorization) to the Borg homeworld to explode a "Genesis" bomb. It required several incursions into Romulan and Klingon space, making the Enterprise crew "war criminals" and setting up future movies. The script was leaked so the movie never reached production.
- Another plot for the second Next Generation movie involved Spock and the Romulans and would have been loosely based on the novel "Unification."