In the nineteen seventies, Star Trek had become an overwhelming success, taking off from being just another cancelled television series, and quickly become a phenomena which swept the world. After a successful three year run on the American TV network NBC, Star Trekwas cancelled, leaving many fans world wide outraged.

It was during this time, that Gene Roddenberry, the series creator, began working on other projects, producing scripts and pilot episodes which were shown to various networks, including Genesis II, The Questor Tapes, and many more. One project however had him very excited. It was something which had never been tried before, and could change the way people look at science fiction. This project was known as Battleground: Earth.

The concept was well ahead of its time, and was supposed to be a unique science fiction/drama series set in the not too distant future when a group of aliens landed on Earth under a banner of peace. The project was shared with Twentieth Century Fox, who were impressed with gene's talents as a story-teller. They immediately wanted to produce a Pilot episode for the series, believing it had a lot of potential to become the next big thing.

However, at the time, Gene was flooded with work. When the order came in for a pilot episode, Gene himself was in England filming a two hour tele-movie for NBC entitled Spectre. And when that was finished, Paramount had another project for him - Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Since the cancellation of the three year series, the fanbase of the show had swelled, and so most of Gene's time was spent working on the franchise. Once the first film was completed, more movies were commissioned and a new series took to the airwaves - Star Trek: The Next Generation.

But this still didn't stop Gene. Throughout the production of the Star Trekfranchise, he still had an ongoing passion and desire to get the Battleground project which he had worked so hard on off the ground. Unfortunately, Gene Roddenberry passed away in October 1991, leaving his desires for the project unfulfilled.

But in the mid-ninteen nineties, Majel Barrett Roddenberry (known for her role in Star Trek as Lwaxana Troi), Gene's wife, discovered what became known as "The Lost Manuscript" - a collection of Gene's works including scripts, potential ideas and rough concepts for various projects. One of which was Battleground: Earth.

The Battleground project went into production with a Canadian entertainment company known as Tribune Entertainment. At the same time the series started to come together, a feature film was release starring John Travolta known as Battlefield Earth, and so to prevent any confusion, the name of the show was changed, and as a tribute to its creator, his name was added to the title. And so Gene Roddenberry’s EARTH: Final Conflict was born. Its success soon led the way to developing other Roddenberry related projects, including Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda (which was an amalgamation of multiple concepts).

For more information about the Roddenberry Creations and the Roddenberry family, please visit Roddenberry.com.