Outside of Star Trek, Roddenberry’s career was somewhat more shaky. During the 1970s Roddenberry made a number of attempts to create new genre series, including creating the pilots for the interesting The Questor Tapes (1974) about an android searching for its origins, and Spectre (1977) about occult investigators (as well as writing/producing one film, the very strange and now datedly laughable Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971) about sex and murder in a high school). The one Roddenberry idea that seemed the nearest to ever making it beyond a pilot was Genesis II, which would have centred around the character of Dylan Hunt, a NASA scientist from the 20th Century who is awoken in the 22nd Century by PAX, an underground scientific enclave that travels the world in shuttle trains, secretly attempting to bring together the disparate post-holocaust societies and rebuild the world. The idea first got off the ground with a tv pilot Genesis II (1973), featuring Alex Cord as Hunt who is revived from cryogenic suspension and engages in a battle to free human slaves from mutant overlords. Planet Earth was a direct sequel. (Planet Earth is frequently described as a remake of Genesis II, largely by people who have never seen it and then go on to describe scenes where Hunt is revived from cryogenic suspension, which do not occur in the film). The film reuses the subshuttle sets from Genesis II but the part of Dylan Hunt was recast with John Saxon. Planet Earth was followed by a further PAX tv movie, Strange New World (1975), which was actually comprised of two episodes that were shot for the proposed tv series that never ended up being made. (To add to the confusion Strange New World was made with John Saxon but without Gene Roddenberry’s involvement and tells a completely different origin story of how Dylan Hunt arrives in the future).

Planet Earth tends to represent Gene Roddenberry at his preachy worst. Genesis II, when it came down to it, was only a variant on the basic premise of Buck Rogers about a man from the present-day waking up in the future and showing people how things should be done with a little 20th Century knowhow and individualism. That is to say Genesis II was a Buck Rogers with Gene Roddenberry’s social utopianism added to the mix. The various stories of Genesis II that did end up being made seemed to offer up yet more variants on the Society of the Week diatribes of Star Trek – they were stories designed to highlight straw societies that were held up as an object lesson to show how American society right there and then was the best of all possible worlds.

Alas, while the Society of the Week model became all the in-thing in almost every science fiction series made after Star Trek, Planet Earth has not dated well. Clearly it was made at a time when the Women’s Lib movement was just gathering steam, but today the concept just seems preachy and laughably out-of-date. Indeed Planet Earth is only distinguishable from the quaint sexism of the all-female societies of 1950s Z-films like Cat Women of the Moon (1953) and Queen of Outer Space (1958) by its relatively higher budget.

And even by the 1970s, stories about ugly-faced mutants running around the post-holocaust landscape were regarded as part of the past. The scenes with John Saxon seducing Diana Muldaur are rather ridiculous, while the rest of the show’s organized revolutions and urgent countdowns to save someone’s life is the stock dramatics of tv science-fiction of the era. The film is probably better budgeted than the average episode of Star Trek – the subshuttle sequences are quite impressive and there is a decent level of costuming. It’s just that, try as it might, Planet Earth doesn’t escape the sense of being a glorified 1950s B movie. To his credit, Gene Roddenberry later disavowed the story and claimed that the all-women society idea was one that was forced on him by the network.

Gene Roddenberry had no luck in getting Genesis II off the ground as a series. Indeed he had little luck at all subsequent to Star Trek. He was instrumental in getting Star Trek back off the ground again with a cinematic revival – Star Trek – The Motion Picture (1979), which was actually based on an unused script written for the Genesis II series – but that proved to be a project that ran wildly over budget and failed to recoup its cost. Roddenberry was blamed for the film’s financial loss and shut out from involvement on all the subsequent Star Trek films. He did make a return to series television with Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94), however the first three seasons ended up being a revolving door of dissatisfied creative talent and it was not until Roddenberry was shut out of the process there too that the show began to grow into its own. Roddenberry died in 1991. He has subsequently had the peculiar distinction of having inspired more series following his death than when he was alive. There have been a further three Star Trek series – Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1992-99), Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001) and Enterprise (2001-5) – and a series based on an original idea he came up with, the lacklustre Earth: Final Conflict (1997-2002). The most interesting of these was the series Andromeda (2000-5). Andromeda was a reworking of the basic idea of Genesis II – but transplanted from post-holocaust Earth to an intergalactic setting. Kevin Sorbo was cast as Dylan Hunt, who was now the captain of a starship who wakes up after his ship plunges into a black hole to find the universe splintered into disparate societies, which he and his crew then set about to unite again.