Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek (August 19, 1921 – October 24, 1991).
Supply: Wikipedia.
The film man Roddenberry began out as a bomber pilot within the second World Warfare. From there he went into civil aviation and crashed his aircraft a couple of occasions, which seemingly motivated him to change into an airplane crash investigator. Later he left flying to change into a policeman, and shortly he discovered himself the Police Chief’s speech author. He went on to change into a TV author in parallel to his life as a police officer, till lastly, in 1956, he left the pressure to change into a full-time author.
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Roddenberry was famously a supporter of multiculturalism. In actual life, he was fired from a sequence set in 1860’s Mississippi, after he found (and opposed) that the producers didn’t need any black folks on the present. A number of of his early reveals and ideas have been in regards to the coexistence and cooperation between black and white folks. He was additionally behind the primary famous interracial kiss on US television between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek.
From the 60s all the best way to the mid-90s, what distinguished Roddenberry’s Star Trek from different TV reveals was its relentless optimism in regards to the future. Mankind would unite, lastly. Males would put apart their variations and work collectively to create a greater, wiser, calmer, extra enlightened world. Wars and ailments can be not more than unhealthy recollections of a distant previous. Exploration can be achieved with a way of surprise and respect, and wouldn’t change into exploitation, because it so typically did in actual human historical past. Whereas different science fiction works of the time handled the ecological destruction of the planet, the rise of evil AI or interplanetary warfare, Star Trek, beneath Roddenberry’s affect, was at all times a spot the place the an elite caste of philosophers dominated a universe that grew to become higher and higher.
Particularly right this moment, the place the world appears to be more and more ruled by males who’re both out of their minds, or criminals, or each, Roddenberry’s imaginative and prescient stays up there in our collective thoughts as a promise, an obligation, a fairy story, a lullaby: a spot to dream of, a spot to yearn for, a spot to work in the direction of, a spot that everybody can be proud and glad to name house.
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