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But three seasons and 79 episodes were just enough to put the show's reruns into syndication, and there they were an enormous hit. By the end of the '70s, the success of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had prompted Paramount to give its TV space crew a crack at the big screen. Star Trek: The Motion Picture displeased hard-core fans. But it made a sturdy $82 million at the box office and launched a series of films that peaked in 1986 with Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which grossed $110 million. Only Roddenberry felt left out. Though listed as executive consultant on all the films, he was largely supplanted by other producers. "He was pretty bitter about the films," recalls writer Tracy Torme. "He really felt like they took the films away from him."
Yet Roddenberry got a second chance on TV, when Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted in 1987. The show, set 80 years after the original, introduced a new Enterprise crew and had a much bigger budget. But still there was turmoil: Roddenberry's insistence on rewriting scripts alienated many of the writers. Things settled down when Rick Berman, Roddenberry's second-in- command, and co-executive producer Michael Piller took control. The show soon hit its stride, with an accomplished cast, better special effects and some of the most imaginative sci-fi writing ever for TV. The series was ended last May, at the height of its popularity, because Paramount wanted to switch it to the big screen exclusively.
Deep Space Nine is a drearier show, set in a kind of outer-space bus stop, where another imposing commander (Avery Brooks) presides over a melting pot of alien riffraff. The upcoming series, Voyager, aims to return to the exploration theme of the earlier series. Its premise: a Starfleet ship, chasing a band of rebels who oppose a Federation peace treaty, is transported (through a pesky space-time anomaly) to a distant part of the universe. The Starfleet crew and the rebel band must then join forces to find their way back home. The new show also responds to one longtime complaint about the Star Trek series: the lack of prominent roles for women. The captain of this Starfleet ship is played by Kate Mulgrew (replacing Genevieve Bujold, who quit the show after two days of shooting).
The Star Trek mystique has grown big enough that there's money to be made in debunking it. Two cast members from the original show, Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) and George Takei (Sulu), have written books in which they describe Shatner as an egomaniac on the set. Shatner has given his side in two volumes of Trek reminiscences, and some ex-colleagues charge that he has exaggerated his creative role. "The only thing that surprises me about Bill's (first) book," says Majel Barrett Roddenberry, who played Nurse Chapel in the original series and later married Roddenberry, "is that he managed to get it in the nonfiction category."