Star Trek: Pitch And Guide> The New Story Bible Review Set

I’ve been wanting to do another story bible/writer’s guide deep dive review since I finished Beast Machines: Transformers. In the past I’ve also covered Star Trek: The Next Generation, Batman: The Animated Series, and the sales pitch for the original  ThunderCats. It’s interesting to see what concepts made it to the final product, but I hadn’t figured out what to do next.

During my hiatus week I decided to do a Google search for story bibles and see what came up. I came across three different websites that collected a few as part of an instructional series on how to write a story bible, the guide by which writers were told how to write the show, the lore, the personalities, and everything else a writer is supposed to do and now thanks to writers and showrunners who really don’t care about what they’re working on no longer do well. This one had a few potential offerings, though given the shows I watch I can hardly judge Ben And Burman as I just learned they exist when I came upon this page. Still, there’s some fodder for the future.

One of the items on the page was for both the pitch and writer’s guide for the original Star Trek as well as the other pre-Bad Robot disasters. I’ve already done The Next Generation, and while I wish I could have done the first show first, being first and all, I still have a great opportunity I’m not passing up. So let’s prep ourselves for the next one in this series of articles.

First off, I’m not going to be able to copy/paste text from these PDF files. They appear to be photocopies scanned into the computer. The less I have to quote the better, but I don’t see that as a viable option. I got spoiled on the last two guides. However, it’s not just the guide. Also on the page is the first draft for the sales pitch that Gene Roddenberry would shop around, meaning there should be a lot of fun changes between even the first pilot, “The Cage”. In fact I skimmed through it and already I see stuff I want to talk about versus what made it to television. There are 16 pages total in the file, meaning I should be able to get one, maybe two articles. Three if it surprises me with how much I have to discuss. You’re going to be surprised by how many sample plots from just the pitch actually made it to the show.

The actual writer’s guide is 53 pages, and will represent the bulk of this series. However, it actually have a table of contents, with 10 content breaks, and thus at least 10 articles I can make. It also appears someone put some additions for this site or whatever site they got it from. Remember, the site I gained these from posted them to teach people how to write story pitches and writer’s guides for a TV show to help get their ideas in front of executives and hopefully turned into a series. I think I can have some fun with that. This is the third revision, and we’ll get into that more when I get to the guide itself.

Actually, I may be wrong, since I just skimmed it. It’s quite possible that the writer of the writer’s guide added in the early questions to test potential writers for the show. That’s something I didn’t see in the Next Generation guide, the only one that Roddenberry worked on unless he had more to do with the Animated Series that I though. Also, I would love to review that writer’s guide at some point. On all three sites I came across they did have the guides for Filmation’s He-Man & The Masters Of The Universe as well as their failed pitch for a spin-off featuring He-Man’s son, He-Ro. Yes, I see what you did there and you probably shouldn’t have. Why would Prince Adam name his son after a pun of his alter ego?

It’s not even just a writer’s guide. There are sections on set pieces and props. We also get names for the actors playing the roles, something the original version of the TNG guide I was working from did not have. It didn’t even have Worf listed at all, as he wouldn’t become prominent until later on. Of course this one won’t have Chekov as he wouldn’t be brought in until someone wanted Star Trek to have it’s own Davy Jones ripoff. Not kidding, look at Jones in the original Monkees TV show and tell me they didn’t rip off his hairstyle and shove it onto Walter Koenig, only making him Russian instead of British. (Koenig was neither. At least Jones was actually from England.)

So what do I hope to get from this installment? Well, of course there’s the usual stuff. On the geeky side I get to see what was planned versus what made it to the show. What differences in characters, names, and events can we point to and decide if we’re better or worse off? It’s also interesting to see how a show like this is planned, the reason this site is hosting these in the first place. This one is a bit special, though. We’ve already looked at the sequel series, made decades later. Roddenberry was older, more experienced at this. We also had two series, five or six movies, and a bunch of comics, novels, and even video games by the time Star Trek: The Next Generation came out. None of that exists here. There is nothing to work on. This is where Star Trek lore began, even though the guide is the third revision, and the pitch on its first and the most changed of the two. We get to see where it all started on the creative side of the production and compare it to the first edition TNG writer’s guide I’ve already reviewed. That should be a nice bonus.

We’ll find out in our next, and first official, installment as we begin our look at the original pitch for Star Trek.