Star Trek’s New 88% RT Show Has Been Set Up For 60 Years (So Why Didn’t It Happen Before?)

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The newest Star Trek series is resonating with both critics and fans. It’s earning high marks on websites like Rotten Tomatoes, and offers a fresh take on the Star Trek universe by focusing on the experiences of Starfleet cadets as they train for their careers.

The biggest draw of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is watching a new generation of characters discover the meaning of Starfleet’s values and history, especially when those ideals have almost been forgotten. Interestingly, this show has been in development for years! As you’ll see below, Starfleet Academy has a surprisingly complex and winding backstory – one of the longest of any Star Trek TV series.

Star Trek VI Was Almost An Academy Story

While stories about Starfleet Academy are common in Star Trek, the Academy itself first appeared on screen in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and a whole movie was almost dedicated to events there in Star Trek VI.

In 1991, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Star Trek, Harve Bennett, a veteran writer and producer of the films, brought back David Loughery, his co-writer from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Together, they began developing a story initially known as Star Trek: The First Adventure, but also considered under the titles Star Trek: The Academy Years and Starfleet Academy – ideas originally pitched to Bennett by producer Ralph Winter during the making of Star Trek IV. This planned movie would have been a prequel to the original Star Trek series, showing how a young, impulsive James T. Kirk and a reserved Spock first met at Starfleet Academy and formed their famous friendship.

During a party for his daughter, Winter pitched the idea of a Star Trek prequel while they were already developing the plot for Star Trek IV, which involved whales. As he explained in The Making of Star Trek VI, he envisioned a series of films that could become a major franchise, focusing on the origins of Kirk and Spock as cadets at Starfleet Academy. He even got the studio to approve script work on this idea during the production of Star Trek V, believing it to be a strong story that hadn’t been fully appreciated.

The main reason the studio and producers liked the idea of a Starfleet Academy movie was that it would have allowed them to replace William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. This would have lowered the increasingly high salaries of the two actors, who, by then, had significant bargaining power as the stars of the original series and the movies. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home had earned $133 million – the second-highest amount of any film in the franchise up to that point – but after that, production costs began to rise by $10 million per movie. The studio saw a simple way to reduce those costs with this new film.

For years, details about the unproduced script have been circulating online. Some of the most talked-about ideas included casting John Cusack as a young Spock and Ethan Hawke as a young Kirk. The story also featured a villain who was a Starfleet cadet and a prince from a world that relied on slavery – he became a major rival for Spock. Another plot point involved Dr. McCoy being an older cadet and Kirk’s roommate, struggling with a personal loss. The script envisioned a more battle-worn version of the USS Enterprise and included a subplot where Kirk and Scotty worked together to develop new warp technology, ultimately saving the ship and defeating the villain.

The film served as an early example of the prequel movies that became common in Hollywood during the 2000s. Ultimately, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and the original Star Trek cast were paid for Star Trek VI, which, while not a huge box office success, received positive reviews and earned two Academy Award nominations for Makeup and Sound Effects, plus a Saturn Award for Best Science Fiction Film.

Starfleet Academy Got Many Adaptations Before The TV Show

After the idea for Star Trek VI evolved into The Undiscovered Country, the original concept for Starfleet Academy was adapted into various other forms of media. This included a 1997 computer game set during the original series, which also inspired a related novel. In the 1990s, a series of young adult books featuring characters from The Next Generation era, and a Marvel comic series focusing on Nog from Deep Space Nine, were released. Even DC Comics acknowledged the concept with an issue titled “Starfleet Academy!” in their 1980s Star Trek comic series.

Around the late 2000s, there was talk of a Starfleet Academy TV show being proposed to Paramount. Although the show never happened, J.J. Abrams used some of its ideas as the basis for the beginning of his 2009 Star Trek movie. That film, which started a new timeline, showed Kirk and Spock as rivals when they were both cadets at the Academy, but they eventually became close friends and colleagues. While the movie only quickly covered their time at the Academy, a series of novels published in the 2010s expanded on this story, showing how Kirk first met and befriended many members of the Enterprise crew while still in school, before his initial conflict with Spock.

The new series, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, continues the story begun in Star Trek: Discovery. Discovery took place in the 32nd century, after a catastrophic event called ‘The Burn’ destroyed the galaxy’s dilithium supply, crippling warp travel and significantly impacting galactic civilization and Starfleet. Now, with Discovery‘s crew having resolved the crisis of The Burn, Starfleet Academy follows a new generation of cadets as they train to explore a universe in need of rediscovery and rebuild relationships between cultures – some old, some entirely new.

Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is streaming on Paramount+.

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2026-01-28 16:12