For many years, it was thought that the first series created by Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was The Lieutenant. However, new research from the Roddenberry Entertainment podcast Mission Log: Gene-ology has revealed that the first series created by Gene was actually Wrangler.
Gene-ology Episode 58, “Wrangler,” is now available wherever you listen to your podcasts. To mark the occasion, Comics Beat caught up with John Champion and Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry to learn more about the discovery, and what implications it has for fans of Gene and his body of work.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
AVERY KAPLAN: What were your initial reactions to learning about the important role played by Wrangler in Gene’s body of work?
JOHN CHAMPION: It was a total surprise. Everything that we had ever seen before this point was about the career trajectory that we already knew, which was writing for other people and then creating The Lieutenant. And then shortly after that cancelation, he came up with Star Trek.
So digging through files, and seeing those two words, “created by,” was a total surprise. And it led us on this great, very satisfying bit of research to try and uncover as much detail about it as we could.
EUGENE “ROD” RODDENBERRY: We have a couple podcasts, one being Trek Files. My parents did a great job of keeping documents for so many different things, and its been wonderful to go through them.
But John and Larry Nemecek had the opportunity to really go through these things. And credit to the people who were digging through these files. John, who found the document first?
CHAMPION: It was me and Holly Amos, our archivist. It was really just gathering all of the pre-Star Trek materials for Gene-ology. And in getting those materials over to Earl Green, who is the co-host of Gene-ology, he’s the one who got back to us and said, “Did you look at page 2 of this pilot?”
Because we’d seen everything else, which said “written by Gene Roddenberry.” But what we had not really taken notice of was “created by.” And that led us to try to retrofit all the other available material to try and put together the story of this show. Because it didn’t show up in Memory Alpha, it didn’t show up David Alexander’s biography about Gene. And IMDb is woefully incomplete here.
So we had to do all of this other work: go to the LA Times archive, go thouroughly through our own archive, and just piece together everything we could and try to figure out, “why is this bit missing from the official story?”
So those are the key people involved. We really owe it to Holly for gathering the materials, to Earl for identifying it and then a team effort to put it into context, which truly is what was missing all this time.
RODDENBERRY: My father’s just like any other writer: a lot of things were written that never made it out, or weren’t good — whatever the case may be. I thought that this was maybe just be another one of those.
But the fact that it aired, even briefly, and was truly my father’s first created TV show. That seemed very significant.
KAPLAN: Taken outside of its context, I’m curious if you could describe your feelings about Wrangler in a vacuum?
RODDENBERRY: I can tell you that when I first saw it with John — we went to UCLA and we watched the DVDs they have. Loading in the first DVD and starting where we started was really a weird episode. I think we started it halfway through, and it showed Pitcairn manhandling a woman and treating her not in the way that normally my father would portray the Star Trek characters.
I know that I said “Star Trek,” but I’m saying, the characters that my father wrote for other shows always had ethics, and treated people with equality, and really had a more worldly point of view. This character in this particular episode — which we find out the details later, was sort of a ruse — was manhandling her and saying, “oh, like a woman, get back in the kitchen.” He didn’t say that, but stuff like that. And it was really shocking to me.
Jumping to your main question here, as we continued to watch more episodes and really started to understand the show, I was really surprised to see my father’s writing style in these characters.
Because you see bits of the other characters that he’s written in Pitcairn. It’s 100% something that he created, or at least the characters, for sure. Because you’ll see: there’s Kirk, there’s Picard. There’s plenty of other characters, and it’s just my father’s writing style.
CHAMPION: My initial impression of it was that it was very much a product of its time. And it happened to be at a time that there were already a lot of Westerns on the air, and it may have felt like those stories had already been done and already been mined.
But as a fan of vintage TV anyway, if I try to separate the Roddenberry connection here, I was really taken in by the technical quality. Because shooting on video at that time was extraordinarily difficult, and they pulled it off.
When the show was good, it was very good. What Rod just described, an episode that does not hold up so well… Definitely those moments are present in the series.
RODDENBERRY: That’s not one of the better ones. You’ve got to see the whole thing to really understand what’s going on.
CHAMPION: But overall, as somebody who has seen a fair number of Westerns and just appreciates good TV storytelling, this works. Not breaking a whole lot of new ground, but you can absolutely see the little moments where Gene is shaping the kind of storytelling that he would do later.
KAPLAN: As discussed in the episode, anyone can visit UCLA and watch Wrangler (by going through the proper channels). Would you recommend this to fans of Gene’s work?
RODDENBERRY: Fans of Gene Roddenberry, not just of Star Trek… Frankly, anyone who likes Westerns or good dramas from back in the day. Or who is a fan of the Gene Roddenberry style of writing. Absolutely.
If you’re a pure Star Trek fan, and love the sci-fi and the Kirk element, I don’t want to say no… But I don’t think it’s going to appeal to you unless you like that genre, or if you are a hardcore Gene Roddenberry fan.
CHAMPION: I don’t disagree with that. It takes understanding a bit of historic context. And maybe you already have to be a geek about vintage TV… which I am anyway, so that helped.
But it is nice if you’re being a completist about Gene’s specific work, to be able to see that and fill in the little gap between the late 50s and the early 60s.
KAPLAN: John, I’m curious what your research process looks like on a topic like Wrangler. When obvious sources like Star Trek Creator: The Authorized Biography of Gene Roddenberry fall short, where do you turn first?
CHAMPION: There’s a little bit of a shotgun approach. Just looking for any scrap of evidence that I could get from anyway. So, our own archive here at the office: very helpful. I went so far as to purchase vintage TV Guides, thanks to Rod and the company budget. Vintage press materials that I could track down. The archive at UCLA. And then going through vintage issues of the LA Times. And trying to connect all those dots.
What was interesting and important for us, was we had the pilot script from 1959. It was the only document we had here that says “created by Gene Roddenberry.” Unrelated to Wrangler, there’s an interview with Gene in an issue of the LA Times from early 1960s where he’s talking about writing for the TV landscape, censorship, et cetera. And there just happens to be a line in that that says, “creator of Wrangler.”
So it was lucky little accidents like that that allowed us to complete the picture. And then we stepped a little outside of that, trying to find out what information we could about Wrangler’s star Jason Evers, and the guest stars. By the way, there are a lot of guest stars and a lot of other overlap with Star Trek, from just a few years before.
KAPLAN: I’m not sure how long ago the Gene-ology episode was recorded, but I did want to ask about your current opinion regarding why Wrangler was seemingly buried by Gene, when (by your accounts) it is a servicable and historically significant TV show?
RODDENBERRY: That is the question. I can only speculate that like anyone in any industry, but particularly in Hollywood (whether it was then or now), you want to put your best foot forward. And I think The Lieutenant was the bigger, more popular show; it was more mainstream.
So I think when saying “I’m Gene Roddenberry, look at my body of work,” The Lieutenant fit the mold better than Wrangler. Wrangler seems experimental in a way, being on video and all that. But the truth is, I am speculating. I wish there was some other bit of juicy gossip that I knew. But I think that between the two, he went with The Lieutenant because it suited the industry at the time.
CHAMPION: I think all that is fair. And if you look at Gene’s work from the time, you’ve got two really big shows back-to-back at the same time: Have Gun – Will Travel and then The Lieutenant.
And even though Have Gun was not Gene’s show, he wrote so much for it and really shaped that character of Paladin. And then you compare to The Lieutenant, which is also a much more sophisticated show than Wrangler. Like Rod said, he probably wants to put his best foot foward.
Also, when I think about the context, Wrangler was a summer replacement series. So it’s designed to have a short shelf life. In the best of all possible outcomes, it would have been this huge hit in the six or seven weeks it had to air, and the network would have come back the next year and say, “Oh no, we want more, maybe we’ll give you a full season the next time around.” But that almost never happened.
So the expectation was probably that nobody would see this outside of its initial run. There weren’t reruns for shows that had such a short shelf life, anyway. So maybe he just thought, “It’s going to be forgotten anyway, so I don’t need to toot my own horn about a show that people can’t watch.”
The most recent episode of Mission Log: Gene-ology, “Wrangler,” is currently available wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Keep up with all of The Beat’s Star Trek coverage here.
