Steverooo said:
I wonder what Gene Roddenberry had planned for him, and the Engine of Creation? Did he leave behind scripts, or just vague plot outlines, or what?
I've heard jokes that all the stuff that is credited to Roddenberry since his death were taken from one sentence ideas that he had written on scraps of paper and that his estate would try to base a series on a grocery list he once wrote ("Gene Roddenberry's Buy Milk"). I kind of get that impression about concerning Andromeda.
You see, way back in '73, Roddenberry made a pilot called Genesis 2. Alex Cord starred as a man named, wait for it, Dylan Hunt. From what I gather, Hunt was a NASA scientist who was placed in suspended animation who wakes up in the year 2133. While he slept, WW3 broke out. Now, Earth is ruled by 2 factions, the peace loving scientist, The Pax (wow, that's original
), and the evil, Nazi-like Tyranians.
Sound familiar? Suspended animation. The Nietzschean Tyranians. Tyr = Tyranians. The Pax could be seen as the Commonwealth. You can even make the space connection with NASA.
This series wasn't picked up, so Roddenberry tried again with Planet Earth (the next year, I think). This time John Saxon was Dylan Hunt. The basic set up was the same, however, instead of the Tyranians, you now had evil Amazon women. You still have the Nietzschean analogy since they believed that women were superior.
Honestly, that series sounds worse (even with the inclusion of Saxon), so it's no surprise that one wasn't picked up either.
To me, it looks like the estate just dusted off the Genesis 2/Planet Earth script and placed it in space. It is possible that there was a whole series bible that they drew from, but that's iffy. I'm not sure how detailed Roddenberry's plans were for anything he's been involved in since I found out that, until ST:NG, no one associated with Trek had ever bothered thinking up a name for the Klingon homeworld. In fact, in the first ST:NG episode it was mentioned, it was referred to as "Kling". Thankfully, people thought that sounded kind of stupid and it was changed (and they explained away Kling as the name of a Klingon city or something).
