Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Best Villain Created Decades Before Original Series
Every Star Trek: The Original Series fan recognizes the alien known as the Gorn immediately. The episode from the William Shatner-led series is one of the most memorable, though probably one of the goofiest looking because of the costume worn by the actor playing the alien combatant. Most fans don’t know that both the premise of the TOS episode and the Gorn were mostly created by a science fiction pulp writer named Fredric Brown in a 1944 short story.
The Gorn, who have appeared prominently in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, were conceived in a 1944 short story, before they even appeared on the original series.
The Star Trek: TOS episode is aptly called “Arena,” and features an alien menace called the Gorn. Fredric Brown’s short story, also called “Arena,” was first published in Astounding Magazine in June 1944. At that time, Astounding Magazine was helmed by science fiction legend John Campbell. Cambell requested his writers turn in action-filled stories that featured Earthmen going up against monsters and alien combatants and winning because those heroes were tougher and smarter.
That’s the kind of hero James T. Kirk plays in the episode. He finds himself and his enemy transported to a harsh, alien world. The Star Trek episode features a series of battles in which the Gorn proves himself physically superior, so Kirk has to MacGyver a cannon and gunpowder to turn the tables on his foe. The whole time, the crew of the Enterprise look on helplessly.
At first blush, it’s not hard to see the resemblance of the Gorn’s 1967 episode’s alien costume and the Japanese monster Godzilla. Godzilla was theatrically released in 1954, and other monsters followed.
Maybe this episode also inspired Richard Dean Anderson’s run as MacGyver, the hero who could stop a nuclear weapon with a paperclip, a piece of gum, and duct tape.
From Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories magazine launched in 1926 with a rocket ship on the cover to the end of the pulps in the 1950s, science fiction was one of the most successful genres in the field.
At first blush, it’s not hard to see the resemblance between the Gorn’s 1967 episode’s alien costume and the Japanese monster Godzilla. Godzilla was theatrically released in 1954, and other monsters followed. The Gorn costume would be laughed out of Hollywood these days unless, perhaps, it was featured on a kid’s show. The Gorn on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds are a combination of puppets and an animatronic costume that looks disturbing and menacing.
Star Trek owes a lot of its success to embracing the science fiction pulpiness of the field. From Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories magazine, launched in 1926 with a rocket ship on the cover, to the end of the pulps in the 1950s, science fiction was one of the most successful genres in the field.
The otherworldly stories captivated the imaginations of readers, then spilled over into radio listeners once they were adapted for broadcast, and into movies. Jules Verne, now considered a science fiction writer by most readers, wrote a novel that inspired Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon released in 1902.
From there, once television was booming, the transition from those media to the small screens in the living rooms in the United States was a foregone conclusion.
Gene L. Coon served in the capacity of what today’s industry calls a showrunner. He wrote the Star Trek episode that introduced the Gorn. Joan Pearce, a script researcher, alerted Coon to the striking similarities between Coon’s script and Brown’s short story. As a result, Brown was offered a story credit on the episode.
