10 Times Gene Roddenberry Hated Star Trek
1. The Animated Series
Star Trek: The Animated Series was basically created to keep the love of Trek alive in the zeitgeist long enough for the movies to be made. The show is actually quite good. The storylines are very reminiscent of The Original Series, though sometimes even grander, as the animated format allowed the writers to tell any story they wanted, regardless of budget constraints.
Gene Roddenberry, however, disagreed.
He famously hated the show because of a few minor story errors, but these errors were nothing worse than what was seen on The Original Series (the fact that The Next Generation's ships are way slower than Kirk's Enterprise, for example). Despite this, when Roddenberry's office reobtained the creative licences for Star Trek (at the end of The Next Generation's first season), he officially made The Animated Series "non-canon." According to Gene, it never happened.
Nowadays, matters are a little more complicated. We've seen references to The Animated Series in Deep Space Nine, Lower Decks, and other Trek instalments, and it seems like it's making a return to canon once and for all! As David Gerrold, a writer for The Animated Series, put it: "Arguments about 'canon' are silly. I always felt that 'Star Trek Animated' was part of Star Trek because Gene Roddenberry accepted the paycheque for it and put his name on the credits."