Cultural influence of Star Trek
Star Trek is one of the most culturally-influential television shows, and is often regarded as the most influential science fiction TV series in history.
The original series, which aired in the late 1960s, has since spawned five successor series and thirteen movies as of July 2016[update], a plethora of merchandise, and a multibillion-dollar industry collectively known as the Star Trek franchise. The franchise is owned by CBS Television Studios, which now owns television properties previously held by Paramount Pictures, the studio that produced Star Trek for many decades; CBS Paramount continues to hold DVD rights to the TV series, and the rights to produce feature films.
Two films have been inspired by the cultural influence of Star Trek: Galaxy Quest, and Free Enterprise.
Gene Roddenberry sold Star Trek in 1964 to NBC as a classic adventure drama, calling it a "Wagon Train to the Stars". But Roddenberry wanted to tell more sophisticated stories, using futuristic situations as analogies for current problems on Earth and showing how they could be rectified through humanism and optimism. The show's writers frequently addressed moral and social issues such as slavery, warfare, and discrimination. The opening line "to boldly go where no man has gone before" is almost from a US White House booklet on space produced after the Sputnik flight in 1957.
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