The original Star Trek went off the air before the Apollo II landing. [...] In my version of history, Paramount does make the Phase II show in the mid-seventies. And then they transitioned into Wrath of Khan and not Star Trek: The Motion Picture, because of the run of the lengthy and glorious, and critically acclaimed run of Phase II, it’s a year later that The Wrath of Khan comes out. But it’s still The Wrath of Khan that we know and it was essentially the same story. I love The Wrath of Khan and I couldn’t bear to change that. So it’s the same thing.”
This is why RDM is eternally in the third grade: he relentlessly adheres to a mythological "smart fan consensus" while smugly looking down on everyone else from his treasured seat at the Cool Kids table.
I'll be the one who says it: The Motion Picture is a far more glorious film than The Wrath of Khan. And while it might have been interesting if Phase II had had a "critically acclaimed run" (gotta kiss up to those critics), one wonders where Gene Roddenberry fits into RDM's "version of history". He's the one who really wanted to do TMP, even to the point of actually writing the novelization. (Admittedly, Roddenberry lost touch with reality shortly after getting TMP to the screen, but we won't hold that against him).
In my version of history, RDM earns his living as a plumber.
The idea would be had there been the second tv series in the 70s then TMP/Vger wouldve been the pilot episode as would've been the case (TMP was actually adapted from the 2hr pilot for the Phase II series)
This is the correct version of the story. According to Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens's book Star Trek Phase II: The Lost Series, the original treatment was by Alan Dean Foster and called "In Thy Image". It then became a first-draft script by Harold Livingston before work on the series stopped. When it finally became the movie we know and love today, both Foster and Livingston were given writing credits.
Wrath of Khan is my favorite Trek film but I also really enjoyed The Motion Picture. One of the things I liked about Trek was that you could make very different types of stories. I don’t think you could do that with Star Wars.
Two things. I probably like TMP and TWoK about equally... for different reasons. AND I believe that Andor disproves your point about Star Wars as it is actually a grownup space opera and far better than, for example, the awful Federation series.
I just first heard about Andor on RLM about two weeks ago. I would think that the Star Wars TV shows would be able to have more diverse storytelling than the films.