[starbase63]

Roddenberry pitched Star Trek as a "Wagon Train to the stars" as "Wagon Train" was one of the many popular westerns that was on tv in 1964. You know how many reality shows there are now? That's how westerns used to be.

[kevin]

Originally Posted by Futureguy

Firefly wound up being a (sadly short) lead-in for Serenity. It had as much, if not more, potential (IMOHO) than TOS did when it premiered. I understood that ST was pitched at one time to be "A western in space?", sort of show to make it appealing to the network "suits". Firefly was presented as a (western) frontier-type (sci-fi adventure) and I feel that it hit the mark.
It does appear that there will be no more Firefly or Serenity follow-ups. Not enough corporate support and I don't see the past episodes being presented in mass distribution as ST-TOS was in the late 60's, early 70's, where it could develop a bigger fan base to justify any more movies.

It usually helps when the network actually wants a show in the first place......then it can try and build it.

Sadly, FOX demonstrated it wasn't something they really wanted to deal with as a series.

[martok2112]

Originally Posted by kevin

It usually helps when the network actually wants a show in the first place......then it can try and build it.

Sadly, FOX demonstrated it wasn't something they really wanted to deal with as a series.

And they did so by having the series run out of order, starting with an episode that many Firefly fans consider to be one of the weakest (although I personally enjoyed it) "The Train Job".

The original pilot of the series was also called "Serenity", and it didn't get shown til way later in the series' short run.

[Saquist]

Originally Posted by starbase63

Roddenberry pitched Star Trek as a "Wagon Train to the stars" as "Wagon Train" was one of the many popular westerns that was on tv in 1964. You know how many reality shows there are now? That's how westerns used to be.

Buth that was just a pitch.
In other words, Gene Lied, big time.

[kevin]

Not really, there's a heap of Western mythos and styles embedded in TOS amongst the many other ingredients of the show.

However, later Trek series (until maybe DS9 in some respects) did not have this element at play as by then the Western genre had vanished from television screens seldom to return.

But since the Western was about the biggest mainstream TV genre there was in the early 60s it's also not surprising that he mooted it as being similar to make execs understand what parts of the format would be.

[tomcatjosh]

They could get money by selling Bond to say... Paramount.