Star Trek: The First Captain Of The Enterprise You Never Knew About
4. The Blueprints For The Rest
From the same pitch document that Roddenberry used to sell Star Trek to Desilu Studios, he wrote that April's:
primary weakness is a predilection for action over administration, a temptation to take the greatest risks onto himself.
Doesn't this sound familiar? Though the draft that would become the final shooting script for The Cage (originally titled 'The Next Cage', would switch some things about the character around, with the most obvious change being the name, this would define some of Pike's actions and virtually all of Kirk's actions.
In fact, though Hornblower was the inspiration for all of Roddenberry's leading men, each main caption up to Jean-Luc Picard shared this trait. With Picard, Roddenberry slowed down a little (arguably, too much in season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation).
The original idea for Star Trek was inspired by films like Forbidden Planet and Robinson Crusoe On Mars. One the casting memo that Roddenberry sent to Kerwin Coughlin on October 14th, 1964, Leslie Nielsen and Paul Mantee, the leads of Forbidden Planet and Robinson Crusoe respectively, were both sought as leads, to play Robert April.
While neither would end up playing the captain, even as the captain changed, Roddenberry's dream of casting a movie star came to fruition when Jeffrey Hunter was cast as the captain of the Enterprise, although he of course would play Christopher Pike - even if this character was simply April with another name.