Behind the Scenes: Star Trek and the Vietnam War (Part I).

It’s release time again; if I count correctly it was 53 days between the release of the last video on my YouTube channel, “San Francisco That Survived,” and the one that went up yesterday (August 21, 2026), “Star Trek and the Vietnam War, Part I.” This article is going to be a bit shorter than my usual behind-the-scenes video companion articles, for two reasons. First, because it’s only the first part in a two-part series, I don’t feel like it’s really done. I’m still working on Part II, which I hope will go up on the channel in about a week or ten days. Second, as I’m planning to do a behind-the-scenes for Part II, I don’t want to bore you at that time by repeating myself. But as it is customary to do these companion articles for my videos, I’m doing this one, and as is also customary, it’s embedded below.

The video sets out to do exactly what it says on the tin. In a few weeks we’ll be upon the 60th anniversary of the television premiere of the original Star Trek series, whose first episode, “The Man Trap,” aired September 8, 1966. With as much as Star Trek has become a cultural phenomenon over the past six decades, it’s easy to forget that, before the very long legacy of Star Trek existed, the show had a very particular historical context, and it came into public consciousness during a very specific tumultuous period in recent American history. In the fall of 1966 the United States had just entered its second year of the most intensive and direct phase of its involvement in the conflict in Vietnam. As I point out in the video’s opening minutes, 19 Americans were killed in Vietnam on September 8, 1966. By the time the original run of Star Trek ended on June 3, 1969, the war had escalated yet again; 56 died on that latter date. This video tracks the development of both enterprises (no pun intended), Gene Roddenberry’s “Wagon Train to the Stars” space adventure show, and the grim bleak business of the Vietnam war, side-by-side.