ALL SCI-FI

[Maurice]

I think I've mentioned this in the past, but since 2020 I've co-authored a series of articles about the actual, non-mythologized history of the original Star Trek and its place in the media landscape which spawned it. The articles are on our Blog, and we have a Twitter feed, a Bluesky feed, and a Facebook page.

In the past 3 years we've published almost 30 pieces and turned one article into a video.

Below is the text from our first brief piece, which is our mission statement.

To Baldly Show What No Fan Has Known Before

Apr 20, 2020


This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

—Mr. Scott, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1959)


FACT TREK was in a sense, inevitable

In the 59 years since STAR TREK was conceived its fans and its makers have told many tales of its inception, its casting, its making, its struggle to stay on the air, its rabid fanbase, its life-after-death, its legacy, and its place in the broader landscape of TV history. Many such stories have been told and retold so often that they have taken on the veneer of fact and rarely, if ever, been challenged.

But these stories are not always true. Many are misremembrances years and decades after the fact. Others began as anecdotal acorns and grew into mighty oaks of mythology. Some have been and ever shall be self-serving. Others are calculated to sell you something. Yet others are after-the-fact reconstructions which connect the wrong dots and produce a distorted picture.

As a result, a lot of STAR TREK history is a mess.

Eventually there needed to be some corrective. This is our humble attempt at it.

“Is There In Truth No Beauty?”

We think there is.

We think the actual story of the show’s production, its very human and flawed makers, and its true accomplishments deserve the spotlight far more than the tasty, self-aggrandizing mythology that’s grown up around it.

We have several projects in the works under the FACT TREK umbrella. The bigger ones take a lot of research and vetting to pull together. But in all this research we find wonderful little nuggets that we think are worth sharing, and so we’re initially launching a FACT TREK Twitter feed of such morsels.

Here’s a taste of some things we’ll explore:

Some Fiction

STAR TREK wasn’t a secret rating success. It wasn’t the first American TV drama to use “hell” as expletive. It didn’t feature the 1st “interracial” kiss on TV. It never won an Emmy in any category. Its 2nd pilot wasn’t unprecedented. Friday night at 10pm was not an automatic death slot. Gene Coon didn’t invent the Prime Directive nor did Dorothy Fontana invent Cordrazine…they merely renamed them.

Some Facts

Conversely, there are things about STAR TREK no one seems to know. It won a Photoplay Award. Sam Peeples pitched a story that was accidental plagiarism. Roddenberry suggested bringing back Yeoman Rand. John Meredyth Lucas stopped the process of writing story memos thus impeding the historical record. Many asides in the memos of men in the production office make Mad Men look like a documentary.

How do we know?

Citation, citation, citation

As the making of STAR TREK red-shifts into the distance, we increasingly lose visibility into the world and medium it inhabited. To truly judge the show’s merits and failings, and the difference between innovation and popularization, you have to have context, and some understanding of the world that bore it and the shows that neighbored it.

Towards this end, we’ve accessed a lot of primary sources, most notably extensively studying the Gene Roddenberry STAR TREK papers, contemporary newspapers, trades, etc. We’ve pored through thousands of pages of documents, cataloged and cross-indexed them and tried to piece together the complicated puzzle of what was really going on with the show. Our aim is to provide verifiable factual information where we can point directly to reliable sources.

A very few others have attempted something like this, but to do it properly is hard work. Correlation does not equal causation, so you have to be constantly on guard to divine the truth as opposed to only seeing what you want to see.

Join us…

Follow Fact Trek on Twitter/X, or Bluesky, and/or on Facebook.

Bookmark our blog posts page for compilations of our social media content

—30—
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"The absence of limitations is the enemy of art."
― Orson Welles

[Maurice]

Here's the video I mentioned that we did based on our article...

John Belushi’s Last Trek
During a live commentary for a Virtual Screening of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), author Mark A. Altman made a bold claim about The Blues Brothers and Saturday Night Live actor John Belushi: that he spent part of his last full day on Earth on the set of Star Trek II.

As Fact Trekkers, we decided to get to the bottom of this. We searched through available production records and several accounts of John Belushi’s final days to see if we could verify or debunk this Belushi-Star Trek II anecdote.

Here's the video link.
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* * *
"The absence of limitations is the enemy of art."
― Orson Welles