Ultimate Geek Fu: The Origin of Star Trek

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Yorktown-

What? Yorktown? What happened to the Enterprise? For that matter, who the heck is Captain Robert M. April?

These two changes -- and quite a few more -- can be found in Gene Roddenberry's initial proposal for the television series Star Trek. You can find out all about the female first officer and the Latino helmsman, too. What's more interesting than a few name and gender differences is just how much of Roddenberry's initial vision for the show actually ended up appearing in various episodes. Further more, some of the concepts that never made it into the original series turned up twenty years later in The Next Generation.

I don't know that I'd call this a primer for writing television series proposals, but it does give a unique change to compare the original vision of a landmark series with what was beamed to television sets around the country -- including the one in my living room -- between 1966 and 1969.