Rod Roddenberry Reflects on His Father’s Impact and The Timelessness of Star Trek

Rod Roddenberry: You know what people always told my, told me my father was a visionary, a genius, these sort of things. I did a documentary that came out in 20, 2012 called Trek Nation where it was important to me to humanize my father because everyone put him so high up on a pedestal. And it’s Almost. It’s really hard to identify with someone like that. But bringing him down to a more human, palatable sort of form allowed me as a son to connect more. And I hope for audience members they could see him and all his flaws, but still realize he was still an incredibly brilliant thinker who thought about the future of humanity, saw the worst that we could be and saw the best that we could be. And people presented him as a futurist. And I would say that’s 100% it because his perspective was always 50 to 100 years ahead of us.

There are many great thinkers out there in the world. There have been and there are and there continue to be. Some of them simply just don’t have the prestige and aren’t known. But what puts my father in that category is that he lived in that future. If you go back 100 years and you think about the kinds of things back then that they thought were absurd, blasphemy, offensive and terrible, and look at some of those things today, they’re commonplace. Now let’s jump 100 years into the future. What do we think is absurd and insulting and offensive and rude that will be commonplace and socially acceptable in the future? It’s just my father was already there, so he was able to put that into Star Trek and sort of look back and say, why are we all bickering about this nonsense of skin color right now? I guarantee you in the future it will be a non issue.