The science fiction multimedia franchise of Star Trek since its original debut in has been one of the most successful television series in science fiction television history and has had a large influence in popular culture as a result. The original series, which aired in the late s, has since spawned ten successor series and thirteen movies as of October [update] , merchandise, and a multibillion-dollar industry collectively known as the Star Trek franchise.
The franchise is owned by CBS Studios , which currently owns television properties previously held by Paramount Pictures , the studio that produced Star Trek for many decades. Paramount Global continues to hold DVD rights to the television series, and the rights to produce feature films.
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Two films, Galaxy Quest and Free Enterprise , and a television series, The Orville , have been inspired by the cultural influence of Star Trek. The fact is, never in the history of any entertainment medium has there ever been a story, an idea, a situation, a set of characters, or a theme that has approached the magnitude or impact of Star Trek. But Roddenberry wanted to tell more sophisticated stories, using futuristic situations as analogies for current problems on Earth and showing how they could be rectified through humanism and optimism.
The series' writers frequently addressed moral and social issues such as slavery, warfare, and discrimination. The opening line "to boldly go where no man has gone before " is almost verbatim from a US White House booklet on space produced after the Sputnik flight in October A major inspiration for Star Trek was the science fiction film Forbidden Planet , whose influence is especially apparent in the pilot episode " The Cage ". Earlier British science fiction series with marionettes [ 7 ] and soap operas [ 8 ] had interracial casting, but this was the first American live-action series to do this.
At a time when there were few non-white or foreign roles in American television dramas, Roddenberry created a multi-ethnic crew for the Enterprise , including an African woman Uhura , a Scotsman Montgomery Scott , an Asian man Hikaru Sulu , and an alien , the half- Vulcan Spock. The original series is also credited with American television's first interracial kiss, between a white man and an African-American woman, although this had happened earlier in a British medical soap opera, Emergency — Ward Star Trek ' s contributions to television history include giving women jobs of respect, most notably through the casting of Nichelle Nichols , a black actress, as Uhura, the ship's communications officer.
