Gene L. Coon
| Gene L. Coon | |
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| Born | Eugene Lee Coon January 7, 1924 |
| Died | July 8, 1973 (aged 49) |
| Pen name | Lee Cronin |
| Occupation | Screenwriter & television producer |
| Nationality | American |
Eugene Lee Coon (January 7, 1924 – July 8, 1973) was an American screenwriter, television producer and novelist. He is best remembered for his work on the original Star Trek series.
Gene Coon served in the United States Marine Corps for four years during and after World War II, seeing combat in the Pacific theater and serving in China and in occupied Japan.
Coon graduated from the Frederich H. Speare Professional School of Radio Broadcasting in Hollywood, California in 1948. The same year he joined fellow Marine Andy Petersen (they served together in China and in occupied Japan after the war) at radio station WREL-AM in Lexington, Virginia as an on-air personality. After about a year in Lexington, he returned to Hollywood.
Coon wrote mainly for television. His writing credits included Peter Gunn, Dragnet (for which Gene Roddenberry, using the pen name "Robert Wesley," also wrote in addition to providing technical advice), Bonanza, Zorro, Have Gun – Will Travel, Wagon Train, and The Wild Wild West, as well as the premiere episodes of The Four Just Men and McHale's Navy. He also became a producer for The Wild Wild West and later became a producer and writer for the original Star Trek.
His Wagon Train scripts contained strong moral lessons concerning personal redemption and opposing war, and he later repeated very similar themes in his Star Trek scripts. (The latter series, though it owed much to C. S. Forrester's novels about Horatio Hornblower and Jonathan Swift's satire Gulliver's Travels, had had to be sold to the NBC television network using the unofficial nickname of "Wagon Train to the stars.") Coon joined Star Trek in the middle of the first season; David Gerrold credited him with being a skilled showrunner before Coon left in the middle of the second season. Coon was responsible for many rewrites of Star Trek scripts. He continued to contribute scripts for the third season, but he had to do so using the pseudonym Lee Cronin, as he was under contract to Universal Studios.
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