Star Trek: Everything We Know About Starfleet Academy

12. Tale As Old As Future Time

No one could say they hadn't given it a lot of thought. In fact, the idea of setting a Star Trek at the Academy has been around for so long — almost as long as Star Trek itself — that it probably deserves tenure at the hallowed institution.

As related by Garfield and Judith Reeves-Stevens in The Longest Trek: Writing The Motion Picture, it was all the way back in 1968 that Gene Roddenberry told the World Science Fiction Convention in Oakland California that, "he was talking to Paramount about making a feature film version of Star Trek that would tell the story of how Kirk, Spock, and McCoy met at the Academy". For one timeline at least, that particular encounter would have to wait until 2009.

Skip ahead to the 1980s, one suggestion in the running for what would go on to become Star Trek: The Next Generation was, according to Rick Berman in The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years, to set the series "on a starship that was run by cadets in Starfleet Academy".

The idea for a movie version of Starfleet Academy never went away either. To coincide with the 25th anniversary celebrations, what was then provisionally titled Star Trek: The First Adventure / Starfleet Academy / Star Trek: The Academy Years was greenlit by the studio and even fully scripted by Harve Bennett and David Loughery. A regime change at Paramount put paid to the professorial project in favour of The Undiscovered Country, although Bennett never gave up on the idea, continuing to pitch it to Paramount well into the 2000s.

If you can stretch your mind back to the 1990s, you might also remember Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, the PC game, released in 1997, as well as a veritable bounty of Starfleet Academy novels during the decade featuring the younger selves of the crew of The Original Series, The Next Generation, and Voyager.

Canonically speaking once more, and though mentioned numerous times in dialogue, we've only actually seen (the Prime) Starfleet Academy a handful of times on screen. You can count Kobayashi Maru in Star Trek II, then a series of firsts in First Duty, a re-used shot in Time's Arrow, 8472 fakery in In The Flesh, a notable flashback in Lower Decks, and finally, at least some study time in Prodigy before the 'synth' attack on Mars.