History Trivia / TheStarlost

** Creator/BenBova, who was brought in as a science advisor (only to have his input routinely ignored), spoke none too kindly of the show in an ''Magazine/{{Analog}}'' editorial and various interviews. A few years afterwards, he turned his frustrating experience into a novel, ''The Starcrossed'', about a scientist taken on as a science adviser for a terrible science fiction series!

* CreatorBacklash: Creator/HarlanEllison publicly denounced the series for years. He started out on as the writer/creator, but later removed this name from the production (using a pseudonym, instead) thanks to ExecutiveMeddling.

** The first serious problem was a SpecialEffectsFailure. A camera system Douglas Trumbull was developing called Magicam that would have allowed moving shots of actors against a blue screen to be combined with models of the set simply did not work well enough to use. As a result the show had to rely on standard (for the time) stationary camera shots of the actors against the blue screen, which were less exciting.

** To fully avail themselves of the Canadian subsidies and credits, Canadian writers had to be involved. Ellison, back in LA, wrote outlines which the Canadian writers then fleshed out into scripts. With this distance from the process, and the low budget, it was inevitable that there would be changes at the production level—and that they would not be to Ellison's liking. Once he saw what was happening to the pilot episode (which, to give you an idea of how much it had been dumbed down, was retitled "Voyage of Discovery" from Ellison's original "Phoenix Without Ashes"), he quit and invoked the clause in his contract which allowed to slap his "[[AlanSmithee Cordwainer Bird]]" pseudonym (meaning to all in the know that he disowned the product completely) on the script and bible. Supposedly this was his worst experience ever in TV and film, even more so than "The City on the Edge of Forever."

** Originally pitched as a Fox-BBC coproduction but rejected by the BBC. The producers were able to salvage it by selling NBC and the Canadian CTV network on it (albeit at a lower budget than originally hoped for). An early potential problem—a writers' strike that was set to begin before Ellison could finished the show's bible—was averted when producer Robert Kline negotiated an exception with the Writers' Guild since the show was being produced in Canada to take advantage of tax credits available there.

** To fully avail themselves of the Canadian subsidies and credits, Canadian writers had to be involved. Ellison, back in LA, wrote outlines which the Canadian writers then fleshed out into scripts. With this distance from the process, and the low budget, it was inevitable that there would be changes at the production level—and that they would not be to Ellison's liking. Once he saw what was happening to the pilot episode (which, to give you an idea of how much it had been dumbed down, was retitled "Voyage of Discovery" from Ellison's original "Phoenix Without Ashes"), he quit and invoked the clause in his contract which allowed to slap his "[[AlanSmithee Cordwainer Bird]]" pseudonym (meaning to all in the know that he disowned the product completely) on the script and bible. Supposedly this is his worst experience ever in TV and film, even more so than "The City on the Edge of Forever," and he is ''still'' angry at the producers even after almost 40 years.

* KeepCirculatingTheTapes: Itfi nally got a full-series Region 1 DVD release in 2008.

** To fully avail themselves of the Canadian subsidies and credits, Canadian writers had to be involved. Ellison, back in LA, wrote outlines which the Canadian writers then fleshed out into scripts. With this distance from the process, and the low budget, it was inevitable that there would be changes at the production level—and that they would not be to Ellison's liking. Once he saw what was happening to the pilot episode (which, to give you an idea of how much it had been dumbed down, was retitled "Voyage of Discovery" from Ellison's original "Phoenix Without Ashes"), he quit and invoked the clause in his contract which allowed to slap his "[[Alan Smithee Cordwainer Bird]]" pseudonym (meaning to all in the know that he disowned the product completely) on the script and bible. Supposedly this is his worst experience ever in TV and film, even more so than "The City on the Edge of Forever," and he is ''still'' angry at the producers even after almost 40 years.

* CreatorBacklash: Forty years later, Creator/HarlanEllison ''still'' castigates everyone who ruined the show.
%%* ExecutiveMeddling

** To fully avail themselves of the Canadian subsidies and credits, Canadian writers had to be involved. Ellison, back in LA, wrote outlines which the Canadian writers then fleshed out into scripts. With this distance from the process, and the low budget, it was inevitable that there would be changes at the production level—and that they would not be to Ellison's liking. Once he saw what was happening to the pilot episode (which, to give you an idea of how much it had been dumbed down, was retitled "Voyage of Discovery" from Ellison's original "Phoenix Without Ashes"), he quit and invoked the clause in his contract which allowed to slap his "Cordwainer Bird" pseudonym (meaning to all in the know that he disowned the product completely) on the script and bible. Supposedly this is his worst experience ever in TV and film, even more so than "The City on the Edge of Forever," and he is ''still'' angry at the producers even after almost 40 years.

** While the show was canceled after 16 episodes, Ellison and Bova salvaged something out of it. In the former's case, it was a Writer's Guild award for his original script for the pilot (novelized with a foreword by Ellison explaining just how badly the show was screwed up). Bova, after publishing a similarly-themed editorial in ''Analog'', got the last laugh when he wrote a novel, ''The Starcrossed'', that was a lightly-fictionalized version of the whole experience.

* HeyItsThatGuy: Appearances by Walter Koenig and John Colicos, not to mention Keir Dullea of course.

** While the show was mercifully canceled after 16 episodes, Ellison and Bova salvaged something out of it. In the former's case, it was a Writer's Guild award for his original script for the pilot (novelized with a foreword by Ellison explaining just how badly the show was screwed up). Bova, after publishing a similarly-themed editorial in ''Analog'', got the last laugh when he wrote a novel, ''The Starcrossed'', that was a lightly-fictionalized version of the whole experience.

** While the show was mercifully canceled after 16 episodes, Ellison and Bova salvaged something out of it. In the former's case, it was a Writer's Guild award for his original script for the pilot (novelized with a foreword by Ellison explaining just how badly the show was screwed up). Bova, after publishing a similarly-themed editorial in ''Analog'', got the last laugh when he wrote a novel, ''The Starcrossed'', that was a lightly-fictionalized version of the whole experience.

* HeyItsThatGuy (Appearances by Walter Koenig and John Colicos, not to mention Keir Dullea of course.)

** To fully avail themselves of the Canadian subsidies and credits, Canadian writers had to be involved. Ellison, back in LA, wrote outlines which the Canadian writers then fleshed out into scripts. With this distance from the process, and the low budget, it was inevitable that there would be changes at the production level—and that they would not be to Ellison's liking. Once he saw what was happening to the pilot episode (which, to give you an idea of how much it had been dumbed down, was retitled "Voyage of Discovery" from Ellison's original "Phoenix Without Ashes"), he quit and invoked the clause in his contract which allowed to slap his "Cordwainer Bird" pseudonym (meaning to all in the know that he disowned the product completely) on the script and bible (Supposedly this is his worst experience ever in TV and film, even more so than "The City on the Edge of Forever," and he is ''still'' angry at the producers even after almost 40 years.

** To fully avail themselves of the Canadian subsidies and credits, Canadian writers had to be involved. Ellison, back in LA, wrote outlines which the Canadian writers then fleshed out into scripts. With this distance from the process, and the low budget, it was inevitable that there would be changes at the production level—and that they would not be to Ellison's liking. Once he saw what was happening to the pilot episode (which, to give you an idea of how much it had been dumbed down, was retitled "Voyage of Discovery" from Ellison's original "Phoenix Without Ashes"), he quit and invoked the clause in his contract which allowed to slap his "Cordwainer Bird" pseudonym (meaning to all in the know that he disowned the product completely) on the script and bible.

** While the show was mercifully canceled after 16 episodes, Ellison and Bova salvaged something out of it. In the former's case, it was a Writer's Guild award for his original script for the pilot (novelized with a foreword by Ellison explaining just how badly the show was screwed up).

* HeyItsThatGuy (Appearances by Walter Koenig and John Colicos, not to mention Keir Dullea of course.)