Primary title screen for seasons 1 and 2
The opening title sequences for Star Trek: The Original Series featured the USS Enterprise flying through space and past planets, narrated by William Shatner: "Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."
As ITV is a commercial channel, the advert break for Star Trek: The Original Series featured a still screenshot of James T. Kirk, Spock, Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, Pavel Chekov, Christine Chapel, Uhura, Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy and Hikaru Sulu are all sitting inside USS Enterprise. Also, there's no music.
As Robert H. Justman explained to Star Trek: The Magazine, footage of the Enterprise for the opening titles was expected to be produced by the Howard Anderson Company in Summer 1966. By August 1966, Gene Roddenberry and Justman were running out of time to get the footage, and insisted on a viewing, where most shots "jiggled and joggled" to the point of being nearly unusable. Roddenberry and Justman took what they had, along with footage from the two pilots ("The Cage" and "Where No Man Has Gone Before") and cobbled together the sequence. Justman considered his major contribution to be the suggestion that the Enterprise "deliver" the cast credits as the ship zoomed by, rather than the names just pop on the screen as suggested by Roddenberry. (Star Trek: The Magazine Volume 1, Issue 1, pp. 10-11)
- Main Title Theme (Season 1) file info (composed by Alexander Courage)
- Main Title Theme (Season 2-3) file info (composed by Alexander Courage)
Gene Roddenberry wrote lyrics for the "Theme from Star Trek" in order to secure a partial writer's credit for the song. These lyrics were never recorded as part of the original theme song, and thus were never aired. (citation needed • edit)
The opening tagline of Star Trek includes a split infinitive: "To boldly go where no man has gone before." This fact was memorably highlighted by Cambridge-educated sci-fi writer and satirist Douglas Adams who wrote in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that, "all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before, and thus was the Empire forged." The pilot episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, "Broken Bow", has Zefram Cochrane delivering that phrase without the split infinitive as "to go boldly." The English rule forbidding split infinitives appeared in the mid-19th century; however, modern reference books do not include this rule, and the "to boldly go" from Star Trek is a prime example of where a split infinitive is perfectly acceptable. (citation needed • edit)