Star Trek Producers Were Warned About Starfleet Academy Over 60 Years Ago
By Chris Snellgrove | Published
Since then Starfleet Academy was cancelled, talk about the show has grown exponentially. Brutal battle lines were drawn between two factions: older fans who wanted the system to be more uniform Star Trek: The Next Generationand younger fans who praised the franchise for trying something new. Many of that second group grew up bewildered, criticizing minority haters as to why their beloved new sci-fi show was canceled. The original team, however, has maintained that they just wanted a Star Trek game and not a teenage game set in space.
What may surprise you, however, is that network executives have warned Star Trek about creating a Starfleet Academy-style show over 60 years ago. While NBC decides which episodes of the The Original Series When it came to airing first, management decided they didn’t like “Charlie X” because it focused on a young boy with superpowers. As written in These Adventures: TOS Season Onethose executives think this makes the show seem like nothing more than a staged teenage melodrama. They decided not to air “Charlie X” as the first episode, but due to its low production costs (it all took place inside the Enterprise), it ended up being the second episode.
Teen Drama in Space
In retrospect, “Charlie X” was a solid episode. Sure, it felt like it I The Twilight Zone instead of Star Trek, but Robert Walker does a great job as the titular Charlie. Furthermore, this episode was for one game, and no other The Original Series The episode can channel those same “teenage drama” vibes. However, 60 years later, Alex Kurtzman and the other creators of NuTrek ignored what those NBC executives said at the time and decided to give us the ultimate sci-fi teen drama show: Starfleet Academy.
Since Starfleet Academy cancellation, there was endless talk about why the show was cancelled. Everyone knows it got the ax because it didn’t get enough viewers to justify its exorbitant production costs, but why did fans avoid the new show the way they didn’t, say, Picard or Strange New Worlds? For many old-school Trek fans, the reason they hate it The SFA it was that it looked like a teenage drama in space. Ever since the first preview came out, it’s exactly what fans have feared the new show would be, and it justifies those fears every time.
Star Trek Meets Dawson’s Creek
Between delivering the life-and-death adventures of Star Trek, Starfleet Academy focuses on wacky teen hijinks all the time. This included prank fights with fellow students, absurd love triangles (will a gay Klingon end up with a twink thug or a bisexual disaster?), bar fights, and multiple arcs (for Caleb, SAM, and Genesis) about the problems of all the different moms and dads. It’s what all the skeptics feared: a recent CW-style teen melodrama with the Star Trek name attached to it.
Given its sudden cancellation, it is reasonable to assume that many fans rejected the new show (there are unconfirmed reports that it only reached 40,000 viewers per episode). They were weird because it didn’t feel like Star Trek in this way Strange New Worlds (itself a direct prequel to The Original Series) or even Picard he did. In this way, the fandom confirmed what those NBC executives tried to warn the producers of Trek about 60 years ago: that this new sci-fi venture needed to be more than a rehashed version of the teenybopper soap opera.
Modern franchise producers like Alex Kurtzman have learned their lesson. Starfleet Academy is something clearly not what the fandom wants. Paramount seems to have learned this lesson as well, and they are preparing to successfully relaunch the entire franchise with a brand new Star Trek film that ditches the Kelvinverse continuity. At this point, no one knows exactly what the film will be about. But based on the failure of the new Star Trek spinoff, it’s a safe bet I won’t focus on teenage melodrama in space!
