Star Trek Cult Brand Profile

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry couldn’t have been further away from fitting the mold of the typical Hollywood director. He wasn’t born into a Hollywood family, and he didn’t have any connections in the film industry. He was just an ordinary guy with a dream to make it big in Hollywood.

After moving to Los Angeles to pursue writing full time, the first job Roddenberry nabbed was in the public relations department of the Los Angeles Police Department. Building on his job, he worked his way into becoming a consultant for police TV shows, but he hadn’t hit the big time with his own show. In 1960, he began pitching the idea of Star Trek to the major studios. As wacky as it sounds today, it took Roddenberry six years of hustling and pitching before NBC finally bit on Star Trek. Even then, Roddenberry’s real challenges were only beginning. The original Star Trek pulled only mediocre ratings and lasted only three short seasons before NBC cancelled it in 1969.

In fact, the show barely made it into a third season. In 1967, when the cancellation after a second season seemed highly likely, word quickly spread among sci-fi fans that Star Trek was being cancelled. That’s when the husband and wife team of Bjo and John Trimble entered the picture. The two buffs quickly reacted to the news by developing a “Save Star Trek” letter-writing campaign. Gene Roddenberry got down in the trenches with the Trimbles and helped drum up support. The result of their tireless efforts was that NBC received a barrage of letters from fans begging the network to bring the show back. NBC agreed and Trekkers got to see a third season of their beloved series.

Despite cancellation after the third season, Roddenberry refused to shelve his dreams, and hit the sci-fi lecture circuit hard, evangelizing to all who would listen about Star Trek, which by then was starting to run in TV syndication—a run that would have been nearly impossible if not for the third season produced by the letter-writing campaign. At the same time, he constantly pitched studios on doing a Star Trek motion picture. Amazingly, Roddenberry kept up his pace for an entire decade until 1979 when, after seeing the surprise success of a little movie called Star Wars, Paramount Studios finally gave him the green light to direct Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Not only was this first film a big hit monetarily, but it also validated Roddenberry’s original vision, ensuring that Star Trek would be around for many years to come.

While Paramount has been criticized in recent times for not giving enough back to its fans, the reality is that the movie studio helped stimulate the creation of customer communities as long ago as the release of the original film. The year was 1979 when a rabid eighteen-year-old Star Trek fan Dan Madsen began publishing and distributing a small photocopied newsletter for fellow Trekkers. Although Paramount initially approached him and accused him of copyright violations, soon thereafter, Paramount executives looked more closely at the content of Madsen’s newsletters and saw he was really doing them a favor and quickly brought him on board. It allowed Paramount to inexpensively keep interest in its fans around the world and get the benefit of the club’s evangelizing without having to roll up its sleeves and start preaching on its own.

Nine motion pictures, five television series, dozens of books, and endless amounts of merchandise later, Star Trek has grossed hundreds of millions of dollars for Paramount. None of this would ever have come to fruition if it had not been for Roddenberry pleading for support from his fans, and the Trek nation’s wholehearted response. When Roddenberry passed away in 1991, he died knowing that his crazy idea had evolved into an important and lasting mainstay of American pop culture.