Star Trek New Series: 10 Reasons It Should Be Captain Worf

4. Star Trek Belongs On The Small Screen...

The first ST movie, 1979€™s Star Trek: The Motion Picture was produced in response to the success of a little known George Lucas movie called Star Wars (perhaps you€™ve heard of it?) However, as enjoyable as the movies are, the Star Trek formula is made for TV. Roddenberry€™s initial pitch for TOS, describes the show as €œa one-hour dramatic television series. Action-adventure-science fiction. The first such concept with strong central lead characters plus other continuing regulars. And, while maintaining a familiar central location and regular cast, explores an anthology-like range of exciting human experience€. Put simply, Star Trek is a TV series, first and foremost. In fact, all Star Trek setups follow the same basic, TV-friendly outline, at least as far as locations are concerned; there€™s the main command bridge (or, in DS9€™s case, ops), the engineering deck, a few crew quarters and a long series of repetitive, dreamlike corridors. Matte paintings, studio sets and location shoots provide the majority of the alien worlds needed, but a great many Star Trek episodes, from every incarnation of the series, can be effectively described as €˜bottle episodes€™ (an industry term for an episode done entirely on set with no location filming, few, if any guest stars and often shot using leftover or pre-existing locations/sets). Episodes where the ship is stuck in space, a day repeats itself over and over or crewmembers are believed dead (but are actually out of synch with the known universe) are usually bottle episodes. Watch them again, nobody goes anywhere in those episodes. With this in mind, the average Star Trek adventure doesn€™t fit particularly well on the big screen. In fact, until 2009, all Star Trek movies were actually big budget payoffs to storylines, characters and events established by earlier TV episodes, even if the central scenarios were not.