After several attempts to bring Star Trek to the screen, in 1977 Paramount decided to produce a second television series, appropriately titled Star Trek: Phase II. Barry Diller, at the time president of Paramount, had grown concerned by the direction in which Star Trek had been taken in the latest movie script - Planet of the Titans, by Chris Bryant and Allan Scott. After the film had been canceled in preproduction, Diller had gone to Gene Roddenberry and suggested it was time to take Star Trek back to its original context - a television series.

Though Paramount was at fisrt reluctant to put aside the development work that had been undertaken for the canceled movie, Roddenberry wanted to reunite as many members of his original production team as possible and start the design process again. These paintings were part of that process, giving us a glimpse of one possible Star Trek that never was.

Ralph McQuarrie is best known to the public for his stunning production designs for the Star Wars films. His imagination helped guide the final appearance of Darth Vader and his storm troopers, and he also created many of the matte paintings of planets and satellites that appeared in the film. After Star Wars wrapped in 1977, McQuarrie was invited to England to work under Ken Adam to help develop the designs for a new Star Trek movie, ultimately abandoned to make way for STar Trek: Phase II, the television series.

Their Enterprise-design, however, was abandoned, and Roddenberry asked Matthew Jefferies to update the famous starship to reflect the refit that would be part of the series' backstory. Jefferies' redesign changed the engine nacelles from tubes to thun, flat-sided modules, and tapered their supports. He also added the distinctive photon torpedo ports on the saucer connector.

Unlike the first redesign of the Enterprise, Jefferies' new version was built this time by Don Loos, who had built the original ship for the original series. But when Paramount abandoned its plans to create a fourth television network and subsequently transformed the second Star Trek series into the first movie, that Enterprise was packed away as movie director Robert Wise brought in a new art director - Harold Michaelson - who started a second redesign of the ship, essentially keeping Jefferies' new lines, while adding the extensive detail that was necessary for a motion-picture miniature.

Mike Minor, who had provided many of the wall paintings seen in the original series, as well as having designed the Melkotian from "Spectre of the Gun", and the Tholian web, part of the Emmy-Award-winning visual effects in the episode of the same name, also returned to contribute to the updating and redesign of the series. Jim Rugg, another veteran from the first season of the original Star Trek, was brought back to be in charge of special effects.

Mike Minor's initial designs for the new Star Trek series are clearly the evolutionary step between the original series and The Motion Picture. The bridge-wall control modules survived almost intact to The Motion Picture (note the holographic starmap projector in front of the captain's chair), while the transporter room is essentially a redress of the original set with a more streamlined console and new all displays. The recreation room concepts, also by Mike Minor, show several crewmembers playing some kind of anti-gravitational game, and some engaging in intimate conversation.

As early as the original series' third season, Gene Roddenberry had spoken of making a Star Trek motion picture. At the 1968 World Science Fiction Convention held over the Labor Day weekend in Oakland, California, he drew enthousiastic applause when he told a rapt audience his plans for filming a prequel to the series, telling the story of how Kirk and his crew had met at Starfleet Academy. For that weekend at least, Star Trek was on a roll. But the Tuesday after Labor Day, the real world intruded and kept the opening of the first Star Trek movie at bay for more than a decade.

Yet the idea of a movie continued as Roddenberry's dream throughout that decade, sometimes coming tantalizingly close to becoming reality, only to be snatched away by the capriciousness of Hollywood deal making. In the spring of 1975, Paramount entered into a deal with Roddenberry in which he would write the script for a low-budget Star Trek feature, tentatively to cost between two to three million dollars.

When Roddenberry delivered his script - The God Thing - in August on that year, Barry Diller, the president of Paramount, rejected it, but asked Roddenberry to write another. At the same time, the studio also invited other writers, cinluding Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg and Star Trek veteran John D.F. Black, to try their hand at pitching a suitable story. In the meantime, Gene Roddenberry went backt to work on a second script, this time with cowriter Jon Povill. Once again, Paramount passed. But despite the trouble they were having finding a script, the studio's interest in making a Star Trek movie continued to grow.

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