The Fifty-Year Mission Quotes

“A lot of people said Star Trek II was such a terrific movie and had a lot of unkind things to say about Star Trek I, but I don’t think they realize that Star Trek II wouldn’t have been so good if someone hadn’t gone boldly where no one had gone before and showed us, in effect, what not to do when it was really important.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek-The First 25 Years

“Star Trek writers came in with supreme egos. I had worked with many of them before and found them, like most science-fiction writers, very unyielding to comment. Harlan [Ellison] was in a class by himself. He gave me an outline on The Mod Squad that would have cost twenty million dollars to produce.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek-The First 25 Years

“I remember seeing an abstract of his rights once, and someone had actually thought of a clause that said the intensity of the musical fanfare, under Roddenberry’s on-screen credit, could be no less than that of the musical fanfare when Shatner’s name was on the screen.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek-The First 25 Years

“I sympathize with the guys who went to go see The Phantom Menace and convinced themselves that it wasn’t as bad as it was. Phantom Menace is worse, I would argue, than Star Trek ever was, but we were kind of in denial. There were some beautiful shots of the Enterprise and we got to see some Klingons, so it wasn’t a total disaster, but in large part it was pretty boring.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek-The First 25 Years

“The gentleman who plays it in the new Star Trek movies is great, but he’s acting. Leonard was Spock. He was always the character.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek-The First 25 Years

“ROD RODDENBERRY There was a great quote that D. C. Fontana said about Nichelle Nichols and having a black officer on the bridge and what my father said to that. Apparently, he would get letters from the TV stations in the South saying they won’t show Star Trek because there is a black officer, and he’d say, “Fuck off, then.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek

“The Star Trek conception is a bottle, and into that bottle you can pour different vintages, but you’re not allowed to change the shape of the bottle.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek

“Like the best science fiction, Star Trek does not show us other worlds so meaningfully as it shows us our own—”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek

“It seemed to me that perhaps if I wanted to talk about sex, religion, politics, make some comments against Vietnam, and so on, that if I had similar situations involving these subjects happening on other planets to little green people, indeed it might get by, and it did. It apparently went right over the censors’ heads, but all the fourteen-year-olds in our audience knew exactly what we were talking about. The power you have is in a show like Star Trek, which is considered by many people to be a frothy little action-adventure; unimportant, unbelievable, and yet watched by a lot of people. You just slip ideas into it.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek

“A future where people worked together and utilized science and reason and logic to try and solve problems, instead of just blowing things up.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek

“With Star Trek, Gene conceived a vision of the future that was unashamedly optimistic: effectively a blueprint for what humanity could become should it eventually succeed in evolving beyond its superstitious, xenophobic adolescence. The show celebrated and glorified the virtues of human ingenuity, scientific advancement, and moral progress. It’s a vision that, to me, is sorely lacking in today’s entertainment landscape. In our era of Hunger Games–flavored dystopian science fiction, there is a conspicuous absence of such worthy models for the future. This should be cause for some concern.”
― Edward Gross, The Fifty-Year Mission: The First 25 Years: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek