My objection to Star Trek and Star Wars is that they seem to have pigeonholed science fiction so that people tend to think that SF is one or the other, while fans like me feel that science fiction is a lot of other stuff, too.
Both series, when they started, were extremely fresh, in part because they introduced the general public to ideas that were common coin in literary SF, and might have made it into a couple of films, but which Hollywood types had avoided because they were afraid people wouldn’t “get it”, or wouldn’t accept. The classic example is Mr. Spock’s greenish skin and pointed ears, which the publicity goons at NBS airbushed out and recolored in the publicity stills sent out, until Roddenbery confronted them. But there was a lot of other stuff, too.
As I note above, Star Trek wasn’t the first SF for adults. It wasn’t even the first non-anthology SF show for adults, but it was considerably splashier than its predecessors, and featured humans on a non-cigar-shaped spaceship flying at faster-than-light speeds*. What’s more, they got a lot of noted SF writers (and the to-be-noted ones) to write for the series – Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Normal Spinrad, Robert Bloch, David Gerrold. They credited one to Fredric Brown. That’s something the later Trek series really didn’t do (although the aborted Star Trek – Phase II had scripts and treatments by known SF writers, as well, as did the short-lived animated series, which had stuff by David Gerrold and Larry Niven).
I do love the Trek seriues, asnd the movies, but the Trek universe ios too caught up in itself, and people need to be reminded that this isn’t the only possible image of the future.
Star Wars, on the other hand, came when, despite other SF properties being around, there wasn’t any big thing going on. Trekkies were holding their conventions, but the hoped-for Star Trek movie looked no closer, and Harlan Ellison had even written an article saying why he didn’t think it was ever going to happen.
Star Wars was unique because it embraced all those tropes that Hollywood had been avoiding for years – the Spaceport Bar with multitudinous aliens, some VERY non-human aliens, dogfights in space, weird space religions, robots as part of everyday life – lots of robots, not just one or two. The public ate it up, despite the fears of the head honchos that they wouldn’t Get It.
Of course, it’s a kid’s-eye view of Science Fictioin, as Lucas admitted at the time. Heck, he’d made an adult science fiction film before – THX-1138. He then said he retrogressed to his teen years for American Graffiti, before embracing his inner child with Star Wars.
SW took those SF tropes and strung them out on the Planetary Romance framework that had evolved into Flash Gordon, and which SF writers had been making fun of in the 1950s. Heinlein has Hazel Stone writing serials about rebels fighting the Galacti Emperor in her spare time in The Rolling Stones. Arthur C.; Clarke made fun of Space Epics where they still fought with swords in Tales from the White Hart. L. Sprague de Camp inveighed against SF Nobility with made-up names like Darth Vader and titles like Lord of the Sith and nouveau Ruritanian fiction.
The public didn’t care – they hadn’t read that stuff, and SW had a visceral good-vs.-evil punch, with obvious Bad Guys and underdog Good Guys. For the sequel, he persuaded Golden Age SF writer Leigh Brackett (who’d been writing John Wayne scripts since she gave up SF) to get back in the SF saddle to writer The Empire Strikes Back** Despite their problems, the original SW trilogy really hit home, and I’ve watched them more times than I can count.
The sequels and spin-offs didn’t quite do anywhere near as well. I don’t rewatch the second trilogy, or the animated series.
Again, though, the SW vision from the earliest films is a pretty childish place, while the second trilogy is a confusing one. But it’s a peculiar mishmash of ideas making up its reality. I’m not satying mainstream SF doesn’t have its share of illogical and questioinable premises, but not as many as the concentrated Sytar Wars franchise has.
Because of the concentration on SW, I suspect other, very different visions haven’t been able to come out, possibly because they are too different from the SW/ST model, and the Hollywood suits don’t like taking chances. We’ve been lucky to get two different versions of Dune, but I don’t think they did really well. Heinlein (Starship Troopers, The Puppet Masters, Jerry was a Man) and Asimov (Nightfall, I,Robot) have only reached the Big Screen in grotesquely altered versions. James Cameron and the Wachovskys, Ridley Scott, and Veerhoeven have produced very different visions of the future. But we need more. And different.
*I, and plenty of others, feel pretty sure that Roddenbery strip-mined the film Forbidden Planet for a lot of the details, despite his claims to have searched through SF magazines an illustrations. But watch that film and then watch an episode of ST. He even stole the flying-saucer ship shape from FP!
**I know others say that others rewrote her script after her death and before filoming, but the claim that none of her innovations survived vto see celluloid isn’t true – there’s Brackett stuff in the version I saw.