"Star Trek" is going back to school. The new Trek TV series "Starfleet Academy" is less about exploring the final frontier and more about educating the next generation of explorers, as a group of students from very different backgrounds make their way through the famous San Francisco educational establishment. But although it's taken the famous old franchise 60 years, 13 movies, 12 previous TV shows, and the dawn of the 32nd century to get here, the school is nearly as old as the franchise itself.
The Academy got its first mention in "Where No Man Has Gone Before", the second "Trek" pilot (but the third episode broadcast), when James T Kirk's old classmate, Gary Mitchell, recalled their college days. The Kobayashi Maru, the infamous no-win simulation used to test potential captains, also became a key theme in classic movie "The Wrath of Khan" (1982). But at the start of the 1990s, Starfleet Academy got remarkably close to headlining its own movie.
Its commercial and critical failure — combined with the advancing years of the famous bridge crew and the hefty salaries demanded by William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, and the rest — became a good excuse to explore alternative potential avenues for the franchise.
So, with "Trek" due to celebrate its 25th birthday in 1991, Paramount executive Ned Tanen gave producer Harve Bennett (who'd overseen the four previous films) the okay to work on "The Academy Years", a project he already had in development with "Star Trek V" writer David Loughery. If successful, Bennett believed that "The Academy Years" (sometimes referred to as "The First Adventure") could become the launchpad for a new movie or TV franchise.
"'The Academy Years', like 'Star Trek IV', would have reached beyond the ['Star Trek'] cult," Bennett recalled in "The Fifty-Year Mission" by Edward Gross and Mark A Altman. "It would have interested people who had never seen a 'Star Trek' film, which did not exclude the regulars, but it simply said, 'If you don't understand what it's all about, come see how it all began."
This story would effectively be a reboot for the franchise, a coming-of-age story for Kirk, Spock (the first non-human ever to attend the Academy), and McCoy, revealing how the Original Series' holy trinity came to be friends. In other words, "The Academy Years" would have been "Trek"'s answer to "Young Sherlock Holmes" and "Young Indiana Jones".
"In outline form, it was the story of Kirk and Spock meeting for the first time as cadets here on Earth," Loughery explained. "We've got a young Jim Kirk, who's kind of cocky and wild. He's not exactly what you might think starship captain material might be. He's like one of these kids who would rather fly hot planes and chase girls. Spock is this brilliant, arrogant, aloof-to-the-point-of-obnoxiousness genius. It's the mask he's hiding behind to cover his own conflicting human emotions. He's an outcast, he left Vulcan in shame against his father's wishes, and like all adolescents, he's trying to find a place to fit in, but he keeps screwing it up."
McCoy, meanwhile, would have been an older 30-year-old coming to terms with the death of his father, a wound explored in "Star Trek V". Despite their initial (and dramatically inevitable) differences, the trio would have come together to free an alien planet from slavery. Along the way, Kirk would have had a tragic love affair with a woman whose death would go on to shape his attitude to future relationships, much as Vesper Lynd's demise in "Casino Royale" did for James Bond.
The filmmakers also planned to bookend the story with the reminiscences of the older Kirk and Spock — a cunning ruse to get the headline power of Shatner and Nimoy in the movie. Bennett wanted Ethan Hawke to play the young Kirk and John Cusack to play Spock.
"The Academy Years" may have been touted as a 23rd century answer to 1986 Paramount hit "Top Gun", but not everybody was enamored with the prospect of a movie that — seemingly the victim of a smear campaign — had come to be regarded as a spoof, a "Trek"-tinged cross between "Police Academy" and "The Jetsons".
Although Gene Roddenberry no longer had any official behind-the-scenes power, the "Star Trek" creator still held considerable sway with the fanbase. So when "the Great Bird of the Galaxy" made it clear he did not endorse the project, Bennett and co faced an uphill battle to get their movie greenlit. And even though Bennett later claimed that the door would have been left open for the original crew to return in "Star Trek VI" a year or two later, many of the veteran Original Series cast were sceptical.
The weight of opinion was enough to keep "The Academy Years" grounded in Spacedock, as Paramount opted instead to mark "Trek"'s silver anniversary with Kirk, Spock, and the gang's final adventure in "The Undiscovered Country" (1991). Bennett chose to walk away from the franchise.
But Kirk and Picard's alma mater has never really gone away. While a student, Wesley Crusher came perilously close to expulsion after a stunt-gone-wrong in "The Next Generation" episode "The First Duty" (1992), and William Shatner, Walter Koenig, and George Takei all reprised their roles in a 1997 "Starfleet Academy" PC game.
There was also a series of YA novels featuring various members of the Original Series, "Next Generation", and "Voyager" crews during their Academy days, and a Marvel Comics series featuring "Deep Space Nine"'s Nog studying at the school. In a 2010 interview with TrekMovie, Bennett recalled a mid-'90s meeting with then-Paramount head Sharry Lansing at which the prospect of resurrecting "The Academy Years" was discussed. The comeback was soon nixed, however, when a pilot for another prequel, "Enterprise", was given the nod.
Until now, the closest we've come to a bona fide Starfleet Academy movie or TV show has been JJ Abrams' 2009 "Star Trek", in which a rebellious James Tiberius Kirk enrolls at the school in an alternative timeline. In contrast to "The Academy Years" version, Spock is an instructor rather than one of Kirk's contemporaries, though our introduction to a young James T — where he steals a vintage car — seems remarkably similar to Loughery's opening scene, in which the future captain of the Enterprise would have crashed a crop duster. "Star Trek: Prodigy" could have sent its young heroes to the Academy, but the showrunners took a different path (via CinemaBlend) because they knew the new "Starfleet Academy" was already on the Paramount+ timetable.
The new 32nd-century-set TV show is, of course, very different from these previous iterations, featuring all-new characters who've grown up in the warp-free era of the Burn. That said, "Starfleet Academy" showrunner and "Trek" overseer Alex Kurtzman may just have put his finger on the reason for the Academy's ongoing appeal.
"These cadets are still figuring it out," he told SFX magazine, "and like all students in college, you go through a remarkable journey of self-discovery over the course of those four years. Oftentimes, what you enter into college thinking you want to do, and what you leave college wanting to do, are two very different things."
The first two episodes of 'Star Trek: Starfleet Academy' stream on Paramount+ from Thursday, January 15.
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