Over the 49 year history of Star Trek, the franchise spread itself across a lot of mediums, including TV, comics, books, film, and video games. But along the way to the Trek we know, there have been plenty of projects that never made it past the idea stage, including the Enterprise Vegas attraction pictured above. There’s no real way to figure out the total number of ideas for Treks that never were; there’s not a lot of documentation on the games, for example, so we have no idea how many great Trek games died at the concept stage before we got the final products.
And for a lot of the unproduced Treks we do know about, there isn’t all that much out there on the internet. While there are a few exceptions, most of the unproduced Trek ideas have only a few paragraphs on Memory Alpha, at best, as their obituaries. Most of them are episode concepts for the shows, but there are a few movies and show ideas there too.
In no particular order, here are 10 awesome Trek projects that never got made.
10. Planet of the Titans
Planet of the Titans was one of the many abandoned pre-The Motion Pictures ideas to revive Star Trek. Like TMP, it was a film set after the five year mission of Kirk and company on the Enterprise and featured a redesigned Enterprise (done by Ken Adam of James Bond fame and illustrated by Ralph McQuarrie of Star Wars fame). But that’s where the similarities end. The film revolved around Starfleet and the Klingons struggling over possession of the homeworld of the Titans, a mythical race with advanced technology that died out long ago. When the planet is pulled into a black hole, Kirk has to take the Enterprise into the black hole to defeat the aliens responsible for the Titans’ disappearance. In the process, the Enterprise winds up in the distant past of Earth, where the crew become the Titans of Greek myth by giving fire to primitive man.
The film fell apart due to a few factors. First, the screenwriters who wrote the first script draft had their work rejected by Paramount and quit. Then director Philip Kaufman tried to write his own version of the script, but Paramount pulled the plug, apparently unsatisfied with how the production was going. The script and story idea were shelved (probably because they didn’t leave much room for sequels), although some study models (small models meant to help producers/directors visualize designs) of the Adams/McQuarrie Enterprise wound up serving as background ships in Star Trek III and The Next Generation.
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5 Comments
Star Trek – Final Frontier sounds great. I do think Trek should return to TV, it is where it is best. Nice article.
Q: The Movie
That’s all I have to say. Good work, Sir.
I always thought that Trek anthology series with different stories from different eras would work. One-off characters could be expanded upon, cetain story lines could be explored, etc. With all the sets, props, and CGI that’s sitting around Paramount, there’s a lot of production already done.
Excellent article. I’m a pretty big Trek fan, and a lot of this was new to me. The piece on Brannon Braga was very evenhanded, and made me reevaluate his work. I still don’t like his Trek, but any piece that argues for less nerd rage in the world is great by me.
I’d love to see a show like Federation or Final Frontier. It’s a great premise and meta commentary on how the franchise lost its way (J.J. Abrams’ immensely entertaining Star Trek movie notwithstanding).
I think the books have already done this, but I always thought Section 31 would be an interesting, darker direction to take Star Trek in.