Star Trek: Voyager Drew Inspiration from a Forgotten ’60s Sitcom

Every Trekkie knows that Star Trek wouldn’t exist without ’60s sitcoms. I Love Lucy star Lucille Ball’s company Desilu produced the show, and she used her clout to help Gene Roddenberry get an unprecedented second pilot after CBS execs passed on the first. But a different ’60s sitcom helped continue the Star Trek legacy by inspiring the design of the starship Voyager.

Oscar-winning designer Doug Drexler visited the All Access Star Trek podcast to reflect on the process of designing the hero ship of Star Trek: Voyager. “I was a big fan of My Favorite Martian with Ray Walston,” Drexler revealed. “His spaceship was like a one-man sportster almost, which was hidden in a garage. And I love that design so much. I had a model of Uncle Martin’s spaceship on my desk. I did one [design] that had the elongated nose. And they decided: ‘That’s it.'”

Another CBS series, My Favorite Martian aired 107 episodes between 1963 and 1966, each detailing the misadventures of reporter Tim O’Hara (future Incredible Hulk star Bill Bixby) as he tries to hide the martian who crash-landed in his home and masquerades as Uncle Martin (Ray Walston). The series was popular enough to get a Filmmation cartoon in the 1970s and a movie adaptation in the 1990s starring Christopher Lloyd and Jeff Daniels. But to most Star Trek fans, the show is best known as a show Walston was in before going on to portray Starfleet Academy caretaker Boothby in The Next Generation and, of course, Voyager.

For Drexler, of course, the appeal wasn’t necessarily the plot, but rather the space ship design. And ship design was a major concern for Voyager. Where the first non-Enterprise show Deep Space Nine largely took place on the titular space station (except for the adventures aboard the Defiant), Voyager would be all about the ship. The series returned to stand-alone episodes, following the crew of the titular vessel as it makes its way through the unexplored Delta Quadrant.

Given the importance of the ship, producers were welcoming as many ideas as they could get. “A general call was made to throw Voyager design ideas into the pot,” Drexler remembered. And designer Mike Okuda asked Drexler to come up a forgettable alternative that executives can reject—”something to hate,” in his words. So Drexler threw together the My Favorite Martian design and sent it in.

“When Mike returned from the meeting, I found out that those sketches threw a monkey wrench into the whole thing and that they wanted to develop one of them,” Drexler said. “Egad. I felt bad about that.”

And that’s how a simplistic ship idea, based on a goofy concept from a decades old TV show led to the setting of a new Star Trek series, a series that Paramount intended to launch its network UPN. Which, come to think of it, sure sounds like the plot of an old ’60s sitcom.