Before J.J. Abrams became synonymous with Star Wars, he reinvigorated the Star Trek franchise with a high-octane reboot in 2009. The wildly successful — if divisive — film chronicled the adventures of a young Kirk and Spock with the pair starting off as rivals before becoming friends, it was not the first time someone attempted the idea.
As far back as 1986, Star Trek film producer Harve Bennett pitched a story that looked back at a young, rebellious Kirk as he was starting at Starfleet Academy. The film would’ve been told as a flashback, with themes like racial segregation and slavery factoring heavily into the plot. The project became most commonly known as Star Trek: The Academy Years, and was intended to coincide with Star Trek’s 25th anniversary.
Having just produced his fourth Trek film, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier Bennett began to actively pursue this idea. David Loughery, a Star Trek executive producer, who co-wrote the script with Bennett, explained his rationale in the book, Trek Classic.
“Every time they go to make one of these Star Trek movies, the producers and the studio always run into the same problem in getting the original cast together. The reasons for that are money, power, creative differences, ego, health, unavailability… all of those things. Harve always had this ace up his sleeve, which was if we can’t get everybody together for one of these Star Trek movies, we should do a prequel.”
Envisioned as Star Trek by way of Top Gun, Bennett later said that “all the possibilities were open, the script was beautiful, and the love story was haunting, but it didn’t happen.” He’d even eyed John Cusack and Ethan Hawke for the roles of young Spock and Kirk, respectively. Aside from some ideas for casting and a few pieces of concept art, though, the film would never start production.
After being given a green light by Paramount Studios, it was met with considerable opposition from Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who publicly derided Bennett’s casting choices, saying that he simply “didn’t like it. No one has ever cast a Trek character besides me that’s worked. Braggadocio or whatever, that is the history of Trek. It wasn’t good.”
James Doohan, who played Scotty, was quoted in the 1992 book Charting the Undiscovered Country: The Making of Trek VI stating that Bennett “wanted to take over Star Trek for himself. What the heck, you don’t do that sort of thing, trying to destroy instead of building. He obviously did not realize the strength of the old cast.”
It’s even been alleged that some members of the “old cast,” unhappy with the idea of losing their jobs, went so far as to spread rumors about the film being a lighthearted farce that would be a cross between Police Academy and The Jetsons. Once word had gotten out, fans wrote letters to the studio rejecting the idea of a Star Trek prequel.
Paramount ended up moving forward with the more conventional Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which incidentally ended up being the last film to feature all the original cast members. Bennett was again offered the role of producer, and was even given the option to produce The Academy Years afterward. Despite the offer, he walked away from Star Trek entirely.
Interest in the project stirred again in the mid-1990s, leading Bennett to meet with Sherry Lansing, the head of Paramount, to revisit the idea, though their shared enthusiasm would be short-lived.
“[A] couple of weeks later she called to say they couldn’t go forward because the television department was going to do a pilot that was a prequel. That turned out to be Enterprise. That prequel had very little to do with The Academy Years, but it smashed the revival of the script.”
Bennett gave up entirely in 1999, when the imagined cast of The Academy Years and the Star Trek family suffered a deep loss. From a 2006 interview with Trek Nation: “the steam went out of it when my dear DeForest Kelley died. He was going to be in it along with Bill and Leonard.”
While Abrams was able to bring elements of The Academy Years to life with his 2009 reboot, when asked about it, Bennett said “they lost me when they put the Grand Canyon in Iowa.” He also stated that he wasn’t “the audience for that. Rapid cuts. Explosions. Gore for the sake of gore. Either that makes me a dinosaur or there’s a generational problem, but that’s not J.J.’s fault.”
Bennett died in March of this year at the age of 84, less than a week after Leonard Nimoy. While he’s largely remembered as the man who saved Star Trek when Paramount recruited him to produce The Wrath of Khan in 1982, it’s hard not to wonder what his vision of starting the franchise over from (almost) scratch would have meant for the Star Trek.
