10 Films That Wanted To Be Star Trek
8. Forbidden Planet
Now, looking at the year of release - 1956 - a very obvious question springs to mind. How could Forbidden Planet want to be Star Trek nine years before The Cage was even written? Well, this is a slightly more subjective entry than the others on this list. Forbidden Planet was, in many ways, quite ahead of its time, and would easily have been an episode of the original series.
Morbius, Altaira, Adams, and Robby the Robot are characters right out of Star Trek's very bible. Adams is clearly an inspiration for Kirk - encounter stranded women, woo the stranded woman, bring stranded woman away with him. Robby is also credited as one of the first depictions of an android beyond a simple automaton, serving as inspiration for Data.
The core threat of the film shows the battle between the conscious and unconscious, along with the war between ego and ID. With that, the main villain of the film is a dream, one made manifest by alien technology that the protagonists don't understand.
Star Trek itself owes more than a little to this seminal SciFi film, while Forbidden Planet, had it simply come along a little later on, might well have suited William Shatner and Majel Barrett in the heroic roles - and probably would have, had Gene Roddenberry half a chance to say something about it.