50 Years of Star Trek Page #8

how startling that was.

You had this multi-cultural crew,

not just multi-cultural,

but it was male and female as well.

I mean, I know that when Roddenberry

did the first pilot

and Majel Barrett was Number One,

the studio was like...

- Yeah.

Who's gonna believe a

woman in charge of a starship?

Narrator:
Coming up,

"Star Trek" invents the cell phone.

The tech that predicts our future.

The thing that's really

amazing about "Star Trek"

is that it definitely

has inspired people

to sort of, you know, proceed

down that path, right?

- Yeah.

- A lot of technologists,

of course talk about the StarTAC

Motorola phone, right?

The flip phone coming

from the communicator.

But it gives people a

vision to sort of think about,

"Well, why isn't that possible?

Well, the PADD is an obvious thing,

which the iPad, I think, was

designed after specifically.

- Didn't they say...

- Yes.

- He took the design from iPad...

- Yes.

Well, they wanted to call it a PADD,

Personal Access Display Device,

which is what we called it on the show,

but Paramount wouldn't allow it.

And what's really neat, I mean,

the computer

interaction is things like we get

- with Siri and Alexa.

- Well, yes, exactly.

I mean, you literally

talk to a computer,

and it, you know, responds

to your queries.

Wow, you don't even think about that.

- Yeah.

- I mean, I think this is

a really... kind of a neat dynamic

of science sort of

influencing science fiction

and in return, getting

some sort of inspiration back.

The only thing they got

really, really wrong for me

is the fact that they plugged Data in.

I feel like he'd have Bluetooth.

[laughter]

They got to put him in

his charger every night.

[laughter]

When I see someone in a restaurant

and they have the Bluetooth in their ear

while dining with someone else,

I usually shout out, "Let it go, Uhura."

[laughter]

And you know what?

They know what I'm talking about.

- Oh, there you go.

- And they feel horrible.

Gene was clearly a visionary.

He went and studied, though,

the technologies that would be involved

in order to make his show credible.

Believability was a

huge thing for my father.

If you go back and read some of

the original writers' guides

and bibles for the original series,

He says in there, you know,

"Believability is essential."

He brought Harvey Lynn, his cousin

who worked with the

RAND company, to advise.

And that's where a lot of

the technology came from.

I think because I

loved the space program,

"Star Trek" to me at

that point felt real.

It felt like they all

took it kinda seriously.

There was a real ship like that.

I do remember when I was a kid

I thought that was a real ship.

I thought, you know, "There's a big ship

that flies around in

space. I see it every week."

The technology absolutely

captured my imagination.

I mean, especially the

idea of being able to

live in this giant spaceship.

He wanted to do adult

stories, adult science fiction,

so he knew that in order to

make that kind of a show work,

he had a very credible

design for his starship.

But there's a reason

the Enterprise hangs

in the Smithsonian Institute.

It is such... not

just an iconic ship,

but such a beautiful ship.

It's a magnificent aesthetic

achievement.

Roddenberry said, "We

want our audience to believe

that for the hour

they're watching 'Star Trek, '

they're really on a

spaceship out exploring the galaxy.

So we have to design the bridge.

We have to think about navigation.

We have to think about

what powers the ship."

And then he thought, "You know,

why don't we set up a system

in the sick bay called the biobed?

A crewman comes in, lays

down on the biobed,

and on a computer screen above the bed,

it instantly displays all

of their vital signs."

Narrator:
The creators of "Star Trek"

designed and engineered

gadgets for the crew

that are decades ahead of their time.

And inspire the devices that

are second nature to us today.

But also the smaller

things like the tricorder

or the communicator, which, I mean,

you know I have one in

my pocket right now

that's not dissimilar.

Leonard Nimoy, years ago,

he told me the flip

phone was purposely designed

to look like a communicator.

That the inventor of the flip phone

wanted it to be a

pastiche of "Star Trek."

A guy named Martin

Cooper in the 1970s

was tasked by Motorola and Bell Labs

to create a, you know, one

of the first cell phones.

A portable telephone that, you know,

you could carry and walk around with,

and it would ultimately be small enough

to fit in a pocket.

And Cooper explicitly

said, "When I was designing

that first handheld phone, I thought,

You know, this thing is kinda big.

It's a little bulky, but

if I fold it in half,

that'll save... that'll save space.

It'll make it smaller

and easier to carry.

Plus, it'll be really cool to flip open

Like the communicators on "Star Trek."'"

You have these PADDs that

are now iPads and everything.

Well, we didn't have iPads

then, so it was... it was like

we were doing it, we'd

be making things up.

But if you set it down

too hard, you gotta do...

It would make a clunk.

You'd have to take the whole shot over.

The PADDs that they used,

which had nothing on them,

we'd use them in the

stories to somehow advance the plot,

or they're looking at a report.

Never in a million

years did any of us think

this would be a thing.

It was total science fiction to us.

It was 20 years after

"Star Trek:
The Next

Generation" premiered

that Apple introduced the iPad.

And that's, you know, that's

a dead ringer, really,

for the PADDs that we had on "Star

Trek:
The Next Generation"

20 years earlier.

People forget this. They

look at it now, they say,

"Oh, 'Star Trek's' so

dated. It's so primitive."

They have no idea.

Supermarkets didn't

have sliding doors yet.

That's how prescient "Star Trek" was.

It was Roddenberry's

idea for the holodeck,

which I always thought was

revolutionary, you know?

Virtual reality was being explored

in science fiction novels,

but he was really the

first to kind of put

true, thorough virtual reality,

certainly onto a television show.

The holodeck, which

was a wonderful invention

taken to imaginative creative

extremes in "Next Generation,"

has its origins in the "Star

Trek" animated series

that most people don't know.

The holodeck was in an episode

of the "Star Trek"

cartoon, "Practical Joker."

That was the first time we saw that.

If you look at "Star

Trek," the original "Star Trek,"

you will see Spock holding little cards

and data cards that he would slip

into a slot on the computer.

They look exactly like

the 3 1/2" floppy disks

that were created 20 years later.

It's remarkable to think, you know,

Siri's getting pretty close

to the computer on the Enterprise.

"Star Trek," I think,

on the technology side,

partly it's the

extraordinary vision of Gene and the people

that he worked with in

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes