Star Trek (1966): 15 Shocking Facts You Totally Missed
Star Trek (1966): 15 Shocking Facts You Totally Missed
Star Trek turned a short 3-year television run into one of the most important science fiction stories ever told.
Premiering on NBC in 1966, it sent the USS Enterprise and her crew on a 5-year mission that only lasted three.
It starred William Shatner as the confident Captain James T.
Kirk, Leonard Nimoy as the logical Mr. Spock, DeForest Kelley as the grumpy Dr. Leonard Bones McCoy, Nichelle Nichols as Communications Officer Lieutenant Uhura, George Takei as Helmsman Hikaru Sulu, and James Doohan as Chief Engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott.
Across 79 episodes, Star Trek struggled to find an audience, almost got canceled twice, and was finally pulled from the schedule in 1969.
Yet, behind the wobbly sets and tight budget was a story full of near cancellations, borrowed religious gestures, a war hero hiding a real injury, sneaky royalty deals, and a studio boss who stepped in when everyone else wanted to walk away.
These are 15 shocking facts about Star Trek.
Stick around for number 15 to see how the cast of the Enterprise finally reached the stars decades after the cameras stopped rolling.
Before we engage warp drive, hit like and subscribe so you don’t miss any of our deep dives into classic TV that refuses to fade away.
Number one, Lucille Ball refused to cancel the show.
Star Trek almost died before anyone saw a single episode.
In 1965, NBC rejected the show’s first pilot called “The Cage”.
The network was confused by it, and the studio producing the show, Desilu Productions, was nervous.
That was almost the end of the story.
Then, Lucille Ball stepped in.
Lucy owned and ran Desilu, which made her one of the most powerful women in Hollywood.
She decided to pay for a second pilot out of her own studio’s money.
Her board of directors thought it was a terrible idea.
Her accountants warned that another expensive space show could sink the whole company.
She approved it anyway.
There is a famous story that Lucy did not even understand what Star Trek was about.
She reportedly thought it was a show about entertainers traveling to perform for American troops overseas.
Once someone explained that it was actually about a spaceship and an alien with pointed ears, she did not change her mind.
Her second pilot became the episode called “Where No Man Has Gone Before”.
This time, NBC approved it.
Without Lucy, there is no Enterprise, no Spock, no films or conventions or spin-offs.
The entire franchise exists because one woman overruled her own board and bet on a show nobody else believed in.
Number two, the female first officer erased from history.
Long before audiences ever met Mr. Spock, the original first officer aboard the Enterprise was a woman.
In the 1965 pilot “The Cage”, Majel Barrett played a character known only as Number One.
She was calm, analytical, unemotional, and completely in command.
NBC rejected her.
Network executives argued that audiences would not accept a woman giving orders to men, especially a woman who did not appear warm or agreeable.
It didn’t help that Barrett was romantically involved with Gene Roddenberry, and the network was uneasy about an unknown actress holding such a prominent role on screen.
When NBC asked for a second pilot, Number One was quietly removed, but Roddenberry did not throw the character away.
He transferred all of her traits, the calm logic, the emotional restraint, the cool intelligence, directly into Spock.
In the first pilot, Spock had actually been more emotional and reactive.
After the rewrite, he became the deeply logical figure audiences would come to recognize because those qualities originally belonged to Number One.
Majel Barrett remained part of Star Trek in a new role as Nurse Christine Chapel.
She later married Roddenberry and voiced the Enterprise computer across multiple Star Trek series for the rest of her life.
Number three, Spock was almost red and NBC thought he looked satanic.
Spock almost looked very different.
Gene Roddenberry originally wanted him to have red skin to make him seem more alien.
The plan fell apart as soon as the test footage was reviewed.
Most Americans in 1966 still had black and white televisions, and red makeup showed up as a muddy gray on those screens.
It did not look alien, it just looked strange.
The idea was dropped quickly.
NBC then had a different concern.
The network looked at Spock’s pointed ears and sharp eyebrows and decided he looked satanic.
Executives worried that religious viewers would complain.
Early publicity photos were actually edited to round his ears and soften his eyebrows so he would look more human.
Makeup artist Fred Phillips solved the color problem by switching to a yellow-green tint.
It looked fine on set, but when the film was developed, the lab kept assuming something was wrong and corrected Spock back to a normal pink skin tone.
This happened over and over.
Even the technicians could not believe a green-skinned officer was on purpose.
Once the show aired, audiences did not see a devil.
They saw the breakout star of the entire series.
Number four, the Vulcan salute came from a childhood memory.
The Vulcan salute is one of the most famous hand gestures in the world.
It did not come from a script.
Live long and prosper.
Image of Surak.
It came from Leonard Nimoy peeking during a religious service when he was a little boy.
Nimoy grew up in Boston and attended an Orthodox Jewish synagogue with his family.
During one special blessing, the congregation was told to close their eyes or look away.
Tradition said that a holy presence arrived at that moment, and no one was supposed to watch.
Young Leonard looked anyway.
What he saw stayed with him forever.
The priests held their hands out with their fingers split into a V-shape.
That shape formed a Hebrew letter called shin, which is tied to one of the names of God.
The gesture was solemn and ancient, and it stuck in the mind of a curious boy.
Years later, while filming a second season episode called “Amok Time”, the script needed a Vulcan greeting.
Nimoy suggested the hand shape he remembered from his childhood.
The director agreed.
The cameras rolled, and an ancient religious symbol quietly became part of science fiction history.
Nimoy later said one of his greatest joys was knowing that millions of fans around the world were unknowingly blessing each other every time they said, “Live long and prosper.”
Number five, the kiss that terrified a network.
In 1968, Star Trek aired an episode called “Plato’s Stepchildren” that included a kiss between William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols.
Today, the moment seems mild.
In 1968, it set off alarm bells across NBC.
The network was worried about a backlash, especially from stations in the South that might refuse to air the episode.
Executives demanded a second version of the scene.
In that version, Shatner and Nichols would lean in but never actually touch.
The studio hoped this safer take could replace the real kiss and avoid any trouble.
The two actors had other plans.
According to Nichols, she and Shatner ruined every single alternate take on purpose.
They crossed their eyes.
They flubbed their timing.
They made goofy faces.
On the very last attempt, Shatner reportedly stared straight into the camera so his expression could not be cut around.
Production ran out of time and money.
The only clean take left was the real kiss.
NBC braced for a flood of angry letters.
The letters never came.
Instead, the network got a huge wave of positive mail with many viewers saying they did not understand why anyone would be upset in the first place.
The audience was already ahead of the executives who had spent weeks trying to protect them.
Number six, Scotty was a real-life war hero.
Long before James Doohan played the chief engineer of the Enterprise, he was a soldier in World War II.
Doohan served as a lieutenant in the Canadian Army and landed on Juno Beach in France on June 6th, 1944.
That day is known as D-Day.
Under heavy gunfire, he led his men through a minefield and helped take out two German snipers.
For most soldiers, that would have been enough action for a lifetime.
For Doohan, the day was not over yet.
Later that night, he was moving between command posts in the dark when a nervous Canadian guard mistook him for the enemy and shot him six times.
Four bullets hit his leg.
One shattered his right middle finger.
The sixth bullet was aimed straight at his cheSt. It should have killed him.
Instead, it hit a silver cigarette case in his pocket, which was a gift from his brother, and stopped right there.
He lost the finger, but he kept his life.
When Doohan joined Star Trek as Montgomery Scott, he worked hard to hide the missing finger.
He used careful camera angles.
He placed his hand a certain way.
We don’t have any spare circulating pump for a thing like that.
I haven’t seen a PXK in 20 years.
In extreme close-ups, the show sometimes used a hand double.
He did not want viewers distracted by a war injury every time Scotty worked the controls.
Most fans never noticed.
A few sharp-eyed viewers eventually spotted the missing finger, especially during “The Trouble with Tribbles”, where Scotty’s hand briefly shows up buried in a pile of fuzzy aliens.
It turns out the Enterprise’s chief engineer really had been the toughest guy in the room the whole time.
Number seven, the tribbles that would not go away.
“The Trouble with Tribbles” was meant to be a fun, lighter episode of Star Trek.
It was about small, fuzzy creatures that multiplied out of control and took over the Enterprise.
On screen, it was harmless silliness.
Behind the scenes, it became a problem that followed the crew around for weeks.
To create the look of thousands of tribbles, the prop team only built about 500 of them.
They were simple puffs of fake fur stuffed with foam rubber.
Some had wind-up toy dog parts inside so they could wobble across the floor.
They were cheap, effective, and very cute.
They were also nearly impossible to get rid of.
After filming ended, the tribbles stayed.
They kept showing up for weeks in strange places, in lighting rigs, in desk drawers, inside air vents, tucked into equipment cases.
Nobody remembered putting them there.
DeForest Kelley later said the little fur balls just kept appearing like tiny surprises for an already exhausted crew.
The problem got worse because the cast thought it was hilarious.
People started hiding tribbles in each other’s costumes and lunch bags.
Kelley once pulled a tribble out of a patient’s body during a totally different episode just to make the other actors laugh.
The props had stopped multiplying and started pranking.
The famous avalanche scene where a storage door opens and buries Shatner in a wave of fur took eight takes to get right.
The crew members dropping tribbles from above could not see Shatner underneath, so they just kept throwing more to be safe.
When production finally ended, many tribbles disappeared into personal collections, others were donated to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where they are still on display today.
Number eight, the fans who saved the show.
Long before hashtags and online petitions, Star Trek fans pulled off one of the biggest letter writing campaigns in television history.
They did it with typewriters, stamps, and a lot of determination.
In late 1967, word got out that NBC planned to cancel Star Trek after its second season.
Fans refused to accept it.
A dedicated Star Trek fan and her husband organized a letter writing effort unlike anything television had seen before.
They created a simple plan called the rule of 10.
One fan would write a letter to NBC and then convince 10 friends to do the same.
Each of those friends would recruit 10 more.
The idea spread fast, and the letters arrived at NBC in droves.
NBC officially said it received more than 116,000, but the real number, including petitions and group mailings, was reportedly closer to a million.
The flood became so huge that the network changed its mind and announced the show’s renewal for a third season during a live broadcaSt. They also politely asked fans to please stop sending mail.
The second wave came after the show was finally canceled.
College students at Caltech, MIT, and Berkeley held torchlight marches with signs that read, “It is totally illogical to cancel Star Trek.”
In the 1970s, fans pushed NASA to name the very first space shuttle Enterprise.
They pressured studios to bring the show back through reruns, conventions, and eventually the first Star Trek movie.
The show survived because its viewers refused to let it go, and their campaign became the model that fan movements have followed ever since.
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Now, back to the secrets and the surprisingly long afterlife of the starship Enterprise.
Number nine, the theme song trick that made Roddenberry rich.
The opening theme of Star Trek sounds grand and inspiring.
Composer Alexander Courage wrote it that way on purpose.
What most viewers never knew is that Gene Roddenberry spent years collecting half the money from that music without ever writing a single note of it.
Here is how it worked.
Courage’s contract had a standard rule common in the music business at the time.
If someone added lyrics to the theme song, that person would be legally entitled to half of the royalties every time the song played.
Royalties are the small payments a songwriter gets each time their music is used.
So, Roddenberry wrote lyrics.
They were not good lyrics, they were never meant to be sung.
They included lines about love wandering through starlight, the kind of words that sounded more like a greeting card than a TV theme.
Roddenberry never planned to put them on the air, he just wrote them down and filed them.
That one move made him a co-writer in the eyes of the royalty system.
Every time Star Trek aired, half of the check that should have gone to Courage went to Roddenberry instead.
Courage was furious.
He knew the move was legal, but thought it was completely unfair.
The two men never worked well together again, and Courage did not return to score later seasons.
Meanwhile, Star Trek kept airing.
Reruns spread around the world, films followed.
Those unsung lyrics ended up earning millions of dollars for Roddenberry and later his estate.
Number 10, the communicator that inspired the cell phone.
On Star Trek, the handheld communicator was pure fantasy.
A small device, a quick flip of the lid, an instant conversation across huge distances.
In 1966, it looked impossible.
A few years later, an engineer at Motorola turned that fantasy into reality.
Martin Cooper invented the first handheld mobile phone in 1973.
He has openly said that Star Trek helped inspire him.
He watched Captain Kirk flip open his communicator and talk into it, and he believed the real world deserved something similar.
That story has been repeated for decades.
Cooper later shared a fuller version of the truth.
His real childhood inspiration had actually been the two-way wrist radio used by the comic strip detective Dick Tracy.
That was the first thing that sparked his imagination as a kid.
But when documentary crews started showing up with cameras, the Star Trek version made a better story, and he leaned into it.
Motorola leaned all the way in, too.
When the company released a mobile phone called the StarTAC in 1996, the name itself was a tribute to the starship Enterprise.
The flip-open design was no accident, either.
It was a deliberate nod to Kirk’s communicator.
Science fiction from the 1960s had finally landed in people’s pockets 30 years later.
Number 11, the hometown of a captain who has not been born yet.
In 1985, the small town of Riverside, Iowa, made an unusual decision.
They officially declared themselves the future birthplace of Captain James T.
Kirk.
The whole idea came from one single line in a 1968 book called The Making of Star Trek.
That book mentioned that Kirk had been born in a small town in Iowa.
That was the only clue.
No specific town, no county, nothing on a map.
Riverside just volunteered.
The town council voted unanimously to claim the honor.
Gene Roddenberry gave the town his personal blessing.
That turned Riverside into something unique in the Star Trek world.
It became an unofficial part of the official story.
Over the years, the town leaned into the role with real enthusiasm.
They built a museum called The Voyage Home.
They placed a marker at the exact spot where Kirk will one day be born.
A local bar even added a plaque for the location where Kirk will be conceived.
Every June, Riverside hosts a festival called Trek Fest full of parades, costumes, panels, and appearances by Star Trek actors, including William Shatner and George Takei.
It is a real-world birthday party for a man who has not been born yet.
Then in 2009, the reboot film simply titled Star Trek made Riverside official on the big screen.
The movie showed Kirk’s Iowa hometown for the first time and confirmed what the town had been quietly claiming for nearly 25 years.
Captain Kirk was born in the future, claimed in the present, and finally confirmed by Hollywood decades later.
Number 12, the girdle rumor that won’t go away.
There is a rumor about William Shatner that has followed him for 60 years, and most fans repeat it as fact.
The claim is that Shatner wore a girdle under his Starfleet shirt to keep Captain Kirk looking trim for the camera.
It gets brought up at fan conventions, repeated in online forums, and mentioned in articles about classic television.
None of it is true.
Shatner has denied it in interviews, in books, and in person with the kind of patience you would expect from a man who has been asked about his underwear for half a century.
The rumor probably sticks around because 1960s television studios cared a lot about how their leading men looked.
The pressure was real, but the specific belief that Shatner must have been squeezing into something under his uniform is simply wrong.
The story likely started because Kirk’s shape changed a little between seasons.
That happens when a person works long hours on a tough show for 3 years straight.
From there, the rumor grew.
A joke at a convention turned into an online claim.
An online claim turned into a piece of trivia that fans still argue about.
Shatner has been a good sport through all of it.
His answer has always been the same.
No girdle, just an actor doing his job.
Number 13, the famous line that was never actually said, “Beam me up, Scotty.”
Feels like a huge part of Star Trek.
Scott, prepare to beam us up.
The phrase has shown up on T-shirts, bumper stickers, coffee mugs, and parodies for more than 50 years.
Millions of people who have never seen a single episode can quote it.
There is only one problem.
Captain Kirk never says it, not one time, not in any of the 79 original episodes.
Kirk comes close many times.
He says things like, “Scotty, beam us up.”
Or “Beam me up.”
Or “Scotty, get us out of here.”
The words change from scene to scene, usually depending on how much danger the crew is in, but the exact version that everyone remembers never appears in the show.
By the 1990s, even the cast had given up trying to correct anyone.
James Doohan titled his 1996 autobiography “Beam Me Up, Scotty.”
At that point, fighting the phrase would have been pointless.
The line had grown bigger than the show that inspired it.
It had become shorthand for an entire era of television, spoken by people who had no idea they were quoting something that was never actually said.
Number 14, Martin Luther King Jr. convinced Nichelle Nichols to stay.
After the first season of Star Trek, Nichelle Nichols was ready to walk away.
Broadway had come calling, and she missed the stage.
Her resignation letter was basically written.
She planned to go back to her first love, musical theater, and leave the Enterprise behind.
Then she attended an NAACP fundraising event in Beverly Hills.
During the event, an organizer came up to her and said that someone in the room wanted to meet her.
They called him her biggest fan.
Nichols turned around expecting to see a regular Star Trek viewer.
Instead, she found herself face-to-face with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When Nichols mentioned that she was leaving the show, King stopped her cold.
He asked her not to quit, not because of money or fame, but because of what Lieutenant Uhura meant to people across the country.
For the very first time on American television, a black woman was not playing a maid or a punchline or a silent background character.
She was smart, professional, respected by her crewmates.
Then King told her something she had not expected.
He said Star Trek was the only program that he and his wife Coretta allowed their children to stay up late to watch.
It was more than entertainment to him.
It was a picture of a future that was behaving better than the present.
The following Monday, Nichols went back to Gene Roddenberry’s office and took back her resignation.
According to her own account, Roddenberry got emotional and said, “Finally, someone gets it.”
Number 15, the Star Trek cast really did reach the stars.
Gene Roddenberry spent his life imagining a future where humans traveled among the stars.
After he died in 1991, the stars came for him.
The first flight happened quietly in 1992.
A small portion of Roddenberry’s ashes flew aboard the space shuttle Columbia for a short trip in Earth orbit before coming home.
It was a symbolic gesture arranged by his widow for a man who had always pointed upward.
The second mission went much further.
In 1997, Roddenberry became part of the first memorial space flight in history that anyone could pay to join.
His remains were launched into orbit alongside those of counterculture figure Timothy Leary, an unusual travel partner by any measure.
The capsule circled Earth for about 5 years before falling back into the atmosphere in 2002 and burning up like a shooting star.
It was the kind of send-off that almost sounded scripted.
Things got stranger from there.
In 2008, a space tourist brought a small amount of James Doohan’s ashes with him to the International Space Station, where they were stored inside one of the station’s modules.
The biggest voyage came in January 2024.
A company called Celestis launched a memorial mission aboard a large rocket called the Vulcan Centaur.
The capsule carried the remains of Gene Roddenberry, Majel Barrett, Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan, and DeForest Kelley out beyond Earth’s gravity and into an orbit around the sun.
Star Trek had always promised a future among the stars.
More than 50 years after the first episode aired, the people who built that future finally reached it themselves.
Thanks for watching these 15 shocking facts about the original Star Trek.
Which one caught you off guard the most?
