10 Movies That Did Star Trek Better Than Star Trek‏

9. Forbidden Planet

What it gets right: Being Star Trek before Star Trek Gene Rodenberry himself cited this classic 1956 movie as an inspiration when he originally came up with Star Trek. A rare dramatic outing for Leslie Nielsen, better known for his poker-faced turns in the Naked Gun and Airplane! films, Forbidden Planet also took the unprecedented step of taking sci-fi entirely seriously, in an age of silly B-movies and pulp fiction. A loose update of Shakespeare's The Tempest, the movie was also the very first time on screen that we saw a human crew travelling on a spaceship, believe it or not. Besides half-inching that novel concept for his own series, Rodenberry was also inspired by Forbidden Planet's serious (but never dour) take on the material, drawing both on the Bard and Jungian psychonalaysis, with the theory of the unconscious mind playing a big role in proceedings. Plus there was a big scary robot kidnapping women and taking them to his leader. The crew has a very similar make up to the Enterprise, and is also pretty diverse, plus that rocky alien landscape looks awfully familiar.