If you had killed off Bjo Trimble, there wouldn’t have been a third season, and, in all probability, no Trek movies or sequel series. She was pretty much single-handedly responsible for the Trek fan phenomenon.
If you go back a decade or so it never would have happened without Lucille Ball.
Yea, I think its popularity in syndication, and the success of other sci-fi movies in the late 70’s, means they would’ve gone ahead even if they couldn’t get any of the original cast back. Paramount was going to make a sci-fi film, and the fact that they already owned a property with a passionate following made a ST film more or less inevitable, with or without the original cast.
How successful it would have been from there presumably depended on how successful the resulting hypothetical movie would’ve been.
Sorry to reply to this so late, but it didn’t dawn on me until now: what if you’re both wrong? Voyager says TMP wouldn’t have really been the same; you say it might have been better; but imagine this: Shatner doesn’t do TMP, and, well, it just plays out much the same and winds up getting about the same response.
And then Shatner agrees to come back for Wrath of Khan, which plays out as it did here in the real world and gets the appropriate response – but holy crap, the view of Shatner will be legendary; contrarians will argue that he wouldn’t have helped TMP into something more energetic and dramatic, but they’ll of course be derided.
Vulcans thrive on technicality
Why not? After all, Saturday Night Live turned the Enterprise into the Love Boat with Patrick Stewart as the captain. 
I’d vote for** Nicholas Meyer**, director of Wrath of Khan. The first film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, did do good box office for 1979, $80+ million, but it cost almost $50 million to make*!* When it was released it was the most expensive film ever made. Compare that to Star Wars which only cost $9.5 million. Plus the critics were not kind at all to ST:TMP and the Trekkies were at best heavily divided over it.
And the blame for all of this rested squarely on Roddenberry’s shoulders. He was a control freak and not overly concerned about making the kind of film the studio felt the fans (and especially the general public) would want. And they were right. ST:TMP is a rare example of a film that was only successful thru the shear will (and semi-self-delusion) of an extremely devoted fan base.
After its near disaster (i.e. a very modest cost vs profit ratio) Roddenberry was kicked out of production. Nicholas Meyer, who was not a Trek fan at all, was brought in. He watched all 79 episodes and came up with the brilliant idea for WOK. Star Trek II made nearly as much as ST:TMP, around $80 million, but it cost only $11 million to make. And critics and fans alike absolutely loved it. Had it tanked that would have been it. No more films, no Next Generation etc., nothing. The franchise would have died then and there.
I don’t think any of them were strictly necessary. As much as I hate to say this, TNG might have been better off without Roddenberry’s involvement at all.
I would have happily watched a series starring Jeffrey Hunter.
I do wonder how many of these ideas are thinking in more modern terms. We weren’t in the big reboot/sequel era yet. Leaving out Spock was something they were willing to do, but I don’t know about Kirk.
Me too - I thought Jeffrey Hunter was terrific, but he wasn’t even interested in filming a second pilot for TOS, let alone a recurring role - preferring instead to concentrate on working in feature films. And, of course, it becomes a moot point after he dies tragically in 1969.
Still, your point holds up. Roddenberry loved Shatner’s portrayal of Kirk, but Shatner was far from the only charismatic actor on television.
Star Trek II: Return of the Tholian Web
How involved was Roddenberry in TNG, though? AIUI, Roddenberry’s involvement was the concept and the characters, and Rick Berman was the main showrunner. Then Roddenberry died in 1991, so Berman ran the whole ball of wax, except for DS9, which was Ronald Moore’s baby.
Wait… if Shatner’s not involved, how do you film the flashbacks?
Uhh … use footage from TOS? :dubious: 
I think regardless of who might have died in the 70’s, it would have just killed the movies from happening, not all of Star Trek. Certainly there still would have been conventions, comics, novels, maybe another cartoon, but most of all, I think by the time of TNG there would have been another attempt at a show, even without the movies, just because of things like first run syndication making it time where making a risk like Trek with a whole new cast had enough upside with minimized downside to make it worth taking .
For those keeping score, even though it isn’t considered canon, the (rather good) animated episode The Slaver Weapon is the only bit of Trek media set in TOS time in which William Shatner does not appear.
Kirk also does not appear in The Cage, which is considered canon.
True, but from a showbiz point of view The Cage was never actually released as a standalone episode, only as the alien recording in the two-part episode The Menagerie…
Roddenberry would certainly bear some responsibility, but, to be fair, it wasn’t him who cancelled pre-production on the Star Trek movie he was working on in favour of Phase II, intended to be the cornerstone of the new Paramount network. Nor did he make the decision to continue production on the series – commissioning scripts, building sets, signing actors to pay-or-play contracts – when it was already clear that the network would never fly and the TV series wouldn’t happen. And Roddenberry wasn’t the one who rolled all those costs into the STTMP budget.
By all accounts, Roddenberry was a difficult man to work with, and I’m sure it suited a few people within Paramount to let him take the rap, but he didn’t direct the movie, or edit it, and he didn’t set the budget.
I can’t believe I’m defending Gene Roddenberry.
It was released on video, IIRC, back in the late '80s. Whether it’s actually been aired, I can’t say for sure.