Star Trek has been doing crossovers pretty much from the beginning, long before the MCU or the DCEU or Star Wars or any other modern franchise. And they’re set for another one in the new season of Strange New Worlds, which will be a first for the franchise too, as the animated characters from Star Trek: Lower Decks will make their live-action debuts for an adventure with Captain Pike and his crew.
But why doesn’t Star Trek get credit as the OG shared universe? And how extensive is the world of Trek’s interconnectivity? We spoke to the folks behind Strange New Worlds about the very topic of the Trek Cinematic Universe, so let’s dig into the franchise’s long history of crossovers and how it has deepened and strengthened Star Trek as a whole over the years…
Monsters, Apes, and Norman Lear
Of course, right off the bat, there will be folks who argue what a cinematic universe even is, and what counts as the quote/unquote first of the kind. Putting aside comics, books, and even radio dramas, and sticking just to movies and TV, there are series like the James Bond films or the Planet of the Apes movies which were early examples of ongoing franchises, even if that term wasn't necessarily used at the time.
Indeed, Strange New Worlds co-showrunner Akiva Goldsman says Star Trek wasn’t the first shared universe. “Star Trek actually comes to crossovers early, but not formatively,” he tells IGN.
As is the case with a lot of nerdy subjects, the devil is kind of in the details. Going back further than Bond or Apes or even Trek, you find things like the Universal horror movies and the Godzilla series.
But these played pretty fast and loose with continuity, and they mostly didn’t even have TV incarnations. (The Planet of the Apes shows actually seemed to break continuity either on purpose or because they just didn’t care about a shared universe.) As for the Universal Monsters, one of the big appeals of them when I was a kid – and yes, I’m old, but no, I’m not that old – was that they used to meet up and fight each other. But if you go back and take a look at how that played out, it wasn’t exactly a coherent plan to create a cinematic universe.
What is commonly considered the first film in the series, Dracula, debuted in 1931, but it wasn't until 12 years later that the first crossover happened in 1943’s Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. And really, the various characters had to be jammed together in ways that often broke the continuity of the earlier entries. Still, these monsters definitely mashed together.
As for the realm of TV, Goldsman rightfully points to the work of legendary TV producer Norman Lear as being key to the idea of the crossover.
You have to go back to the very first episode of Star Trek, 'The Cage,' for the set-up for the first crossover of the franchise: 'The Menagerie.'
“I think that Norman Lear probably invented the crossover,” says Goldsman. “Star Trek is the author of all things, but in fairness, I think that we saw crossovers in the ’70s in a way that were pretty delightful.”
Lear of course was the mind behind All in the Family, which in turn begat Maude, which in turn begat Good Times. And then there were about a half-dozen other spin-offs of that series as well.
But you have to go back to the very first episode of Star Trek, “The Cage,” for what I think is also the set-up for the first crossover of the franchise: “The Menagerie.”
Captain Pike Returns
In that pilot episode, Jeffrey Hunter played Captain Pike, but when the show wasn’t picked up by the network, Hunter bailed. As most fans know these days, a second pilot was made, which allowed for William Shatner to step in as a new captain named James T. Kirk, and of course Star Trek as we know it was born.
But when creator Gene Roddenberry needed to buy the production schedule of his still young show some time, he wrote a story that would utilize most of the footage from the unaired “The Cage.” The resulting two-parter was called “The Menagerie,” and it effectively features the first Trek crossover, albeit with a version of Star Trek that had never even been seen by audiences at the time – and one which featured a different crew and a fairly different look.
Captain Pike was now made canon, but his story wouldn’t end there. Just ask Strange New Worlds star Anson Mount, who would revive the character in a season-long run on Star Trek: Discovery decades later before spinning off into his own show.
“I think it's one of the great benefits of working within a franchise,” says Mount of the concept of the shared universe. “And not just in the sense that it's a larger world, but that you have different iterations of different takes on storytelling the same canon.”
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