Fun Star Trek Facts

If you're into collecting fun Star Trek facts, you'll love this treasure trove of trivia.

• Gene Roddenberry's concept behind Star Trek was actually inspired by Gulliver's Travels. Roddenberry loved the concept of entertaining an audience through an adventure while conveying a message about morality.
• The first pilot, entitled "The Cage", didn't make the cut. However, the second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before" was a total hit. It was, and still remains, very rare for a television network to give a show a second shot at a pilot.
• The first Star Trek pilot had a different captain at the helm of the Enterprise, Christopher Pike. This character appeared in the first-season episode "The Menagerie," as well as JJ Abrams' 2009 Star Trek movie.
• Star Trek: The Animated Series won an Emmy in 1975.
• So far, the Star Trek television series has spawned 11 full-length feature films. A 12th film is in the works.
• William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk, has written novels featuring his character.
• There are several well-known parodies of Star Trek, most notably Star Wreck, a movie series, and Stone Trek, a cartoon series.
• William Shatner appeared on the television series The Twilight Zone before he played Captain Kirk on Star Trek.
• Nana Visitor, a regular cast member on Deep Space Nine, was also a regular on the daytime soap One Life to Live.
• Creator Gene Roddenberry was told to get rid of the character, Spock, when the first pilot failed. Interestingly enough, Spock is the one character Roddenberry kept from first pilot who ended up being in the original series.
• In the original Star Trek pilot, Spock had green skin.
• Creator Gene Roddenberry married Majel Barrett, who played Nurse Christine Chapel in the original series. to one of the actresses on Star Trek: Majel Barrett. Barrett played Nurse Christine Chapel. She is also the only actor to have appeared in every incarnation of Star Trek. After the original series, she portrayed Nurse Chapel in two Star Trek feature films and was the voice of Starfleet computers in all of the television series and the 2009 motion picture.
• Jeri Lynn Ryan, an actress who played the ex-Borg Seven of Nine, came in fourth in the 1991 Miss America pageant.
• Lee Ann Meriwether, who played a Wiki named Losira, won the 1955 Miss America pageant.
• Leonard Nimroy and William Shatner are the only two actors to appear in every single epidsode of the original Star Trek series.
• Leonard Nimroy, who played Spock, is a vegetarian on the show and in real life.
• The saying, "To boldly go where no man has ever gone before," was inspired by the White House when the Sputnik flight was publicized in 1957. The wording was almost exactly what was written in a White House pamphlet discussing space travel.