Dick: FJ was not involved with the conceptual aspects of the game at all, but gave permission for the authors to use his ship types and designs in the game and in related artwork. FJ also gave separate permissions to GameScience to manufacture the little injection-molded plastic starships used to play the game (including clear ones for when your ship is cloaked--how fun is that!!!). (The miniature ships also make great Christmas ornaments.) This is years and years before "Micro Machines" from another manufacturer became so tremendously popular.

In the SFB universe, FJ's design work still is accepted and used extensively by fans. There are a ton of Star Fleet Battles gaming web sites on the Internet, and many of them have really nice computer-generated artwork featuring FJ's ship and space station designs.

Dick: Andrew and FJ corresponded to discuss chess (FJ played avidly), and Andrew used FJ as a sounding board for ideas regarding the tri-d chess rules. FJ had published a very abbreviated set of tri-d rules in the Tech Manual, and Andrew wrote his rules based on the chess board presented in the TM. I think what Andrew asked FJ is whether it was OK for him to write a more detailed set of rules for the board presented in the TM, and FJ deferred to Andrew re writing more detailed rules instead of writing his own.

Many years later, after FJ's death, Andrew contacted me for help when he first began his lawsuit with Franklin Mint, and I was able to provide him with copies of all his correspondence with FJ, including copies of an article (written by Andrew) in the Star Trek Poster Book #16. The complete story, direct from Andrew Bartmess himself, is on http://www.grigor.org/startrek.htm, or, if he has reached some sort of agreement with Franklin Mint not to publicize his side of the story any more, the "official" statement will be there.

I will only make one comment here: it is very, very difficult for a private citizen to go up against a large corporation such as Franklin Mint or Paramount Pictures in a legal battle. Even if the corporation is completely in the wrong, they have the financial resources to hire the best lawyers and keep things tied up in court until you are out of time, patience, and money. In this case, Paramount Pictures claims it owns the rules that Andrew wrote because they were printed in a publication copyrighted by Paramount (the Star Trek Poster Book #16), and that Paramount was therefore within its rights to license said rules to Franklin Mint without crediting the person that wrote them. [Let this be a lesson to everybody who writes for an outside source to put copyright notices on their work: "Contents of this article are copyrighted by the author and may not be reproduced elsewhere without express written permission, etc. etc."]

I understand Andrew's frustration. On multiple occasions, Paramount has licensed items under the Star Trek aegis that actually belong to FJ and not to Paramount Pictures. Hollywood Pin Company was producing cloisonne pins of FJ's "two faces and starfield" UFP logo along with pins of other logos that were legally owned by Paramount. The pins were stamped "copyright Paramount Pictures" on the back. FJ was still alive then and was very unhappy about the situation. I contacted Hollywood Pins about paying royalties and properly licensing the design, and they chose to discontinue the pins rather than retool the die with the proper copyright info crediting Franz Joseph Designs instead of Paramount. I do not blame Hollywood Pins for manufacturing the items, as they thought they had obtained the proper licensing from Paramount. I do blame Paramount for issuing "umbrella" licenses for designs they do not own.

When I make it to Star Trek conventions, I see a lot of FJ Tech Manual related merchandise that is not properly licensed. Coffee cups and t-shirts with the FJ "two faces and starfield" UFP logo on it. Patches of the "two faces" UFP, 41 Eridani, 61 Cygni, Alpha Centauri, and Epsilon Indii designs. Mass-produced plans for Dreadnoughts, Destroyers, Transport/Tugs, et. al. I regret to say that Jackill's Technical Readout Data Sheets, etc. of FJ's designs are completely unlicensed and illegal (with no addresses on them anywhere so I can write the producers to correct the situation). [2001 update: Eric "Jackill" Kristianson contacted me via email, and apologized profusely for not having properly credited FJ in his Data Sheets, which are now out of print. He hopes to compile all the Data Sheets into a web site someday, and will give the proper credits when that happens.] One person was even photocopying the entire Technical Manual (minus the copyright page) and selling it (when confronted, he said he thought it was out of print and in the public domain. NOT!!!). I or my attorney write "cease and desist" letters, and it stops for awhile, and then it crops up someplace else. It's frustrating. Many people just don't understand the concept of intellectual property and licensing, and that the design they're copying and selling is the result of someone else's hard work. They just seem to think that it's pretty artwork that's free for the taking. This problem has only been exacerbated by the Internet, where an "everything's free for the taking" attitude prevails.

Side note here: FJ never objected to single, fan-produced, not-for-resale use of his logos (like the fan who made a 41 Eridani t-shirt for herself with fabric paints, or the fan who chopped up two AMT Enterprise model kits to build a Dreadnought), and, as administrator of FJ's estate, neither do I. The violations I'm talking about in the paragraph above refer to mass-produced, definitely-for-resale, profit-making ventures, and they should have licensing agreements with and pay royalties to Franz Joseph Designs. Period. End of sermon.

Dick: At the time the Technical Manual was published, it only conflicted with the TV series on some very minor things. In FJ's own words (with my annotations in brackets): "The work that went into the Plans and the Manual was very carefully researched, checked against film clips, the episodes, and the book [Whitfield's Making of Star Trek], also the Concordances [Bjo Trimble's Star Trek Concordance, then out in two volumes], and was rigidly restricted to the theme and format as developed by Gene [Roddenberry]. Changes have only been introduced where they did not affect the authenticity, but did correct glaring errors. And where the fans indicated they wanted authenticity, glaring errors included, that material has not been used. Every effort was made not to dictate to another man what he should have done, or not done, with his creative ideas."

When casually looking through the Tech Manual, I can only find five blatantly discrepant things with what was seen in the original series. [There could be more -- I did say "casual."] (1) The rank stripes for officers higher than captain (Commodore, Admiral) did not correlate with what was worn by actors depicting officers of those ranks on the series. (2) Nurse Chapel's "red cross" insignia patch is ignored. (3) The "boomerang" insignia patches for the Enterprise were treated as the insignia patches for the entirety of Star Fleet, when, on the original series, each ship had a different-shaped patch. (4) The bridge has a toilet, and a gangway ladder to the deck below. (5) The ship has multiple transporters, including large cargo transporters, which were never shown or referred to on the original series.

When faced with the choice of blindly documenting what was on the TV series, no matter how illogical it was, or trying to draw something that made sense, FJ chose the latter. In the case of (1), high-ranking officers appeared so infrequently that costume designer William Ware Theiss just sewed a big gaudy piece of braid on the uniform sleeve so it would look impressive. It made no sense when compared with the broken-and-solid stripe rank pattern established for ensign through captain, and if I recall correctly, there wasn't even consistency on the TV series for a given higher rank (I think two different characters, both ranked admiral, had two different sleeve braid types). So FJ did his own extrapolations. In the case of (2), if Dr. McCoy was wearing a Sciences Division insignia, then Nurse Chapel should have been wearing one, too. In the case of (3), it just seemed stupid to have a different abstract shape for each ship. Say you're an alien species dealing with Star Fleet for the first time. How are you supposed to know that a boomerang is one ship and a rectangle is another, and they're both Star Fleet? Illogical. GR must've thought so, too, because by the first movie, and then throughout all subsequent movies and TV series, the Enterprise boomerang suddenly became the overall Star Fleet boomerang. In the case of (4), these were both necessities that belonged on the bridge. Indeed, later versions of the Enterprise designed by Andy Probert have a "Head: on the bridge. And the gangway was a necessity so the bridge crew would not be trapped in case of a power or turbolift failure. (While this plot device was used repeatedly on the original Star Trek series, there is no way such a design flaw would exist on the bridge of a real military vessel, and it was corrected in later "canon" versions of the Enterprise.) In the case of (5), multiple transporter stations would be a natural redundancy for a military ship relying on them to move personnel and cargo. In ST:TMP, the Enterprise still appeared to have only one transporter station (so they could do the "accident" sequence), but as of the ST:TNG series, multiple stations and cargo transporters were implied.

Maybe some of FJ's "improvements" were ahead of their time and didn't jive with what was on the original TV series, but later versions of Star Trek have adopted these corrections as canon. Gee, maybe FJ wasn't an idiot after all! [Other FJ "improvements" later adopted as "canon": presence of an auxiliary/battle bridge, different classes of saucer-and-nacelle type ships in Star Fleet, and (I'm told) "paired-bubble" phaser banks. I'm also told that most of the terminology used to refer to parts of the warp nacelles originated with FJ's blueprints.]

As for any discrepancies in the drawings of the props, uniforms, consoles, etc., there were inconsistencies and changes from item to item and season to season within the TV series itself. As a professional costumer, the classic example I can cite is a rec room scene where none of the women's uniforms had the same back collar treatment or hemline length. Which configuration do you pick for the book? They're all on Star Trek, they're all in the same episode, they're all technically "right," but they're all different. Some of the props (particularly pistol phasers) had slightly different shapes or paint jobs. Again, what do you pick if you can only draw one? And the sets were constantly being tinkered with, particularly the bridge. (There were four different variations in Star Trek's first season alone.) FJ just looked at all the available documentation and took his best shot. I will say that all the items in the Tech Manual are based on actual photos and film clips, and that whatever configuration FJ drew existed somewhere at some point during Star Trek's 3-year initial run. Whatever was photographed in Stephen Whitfield's The Making of Star Trek was the default if no better information was available, or if there were conflicts. FJ also tried to make Stardate 3113 ("Tomorrow Is Yesterday") the cutoff point, as this is supposedly the point when the TM was accidentally broadcast to 20^th Century Earth.

I've had people complain that FJ made up the "offensive/defensive" ray gun. It actually appeared in an original series episode (I forget which one), and I think photos of it were in The Making of Star Trek, or FJ never would have included it in the Tech Manual.

The only original series prop that FJ outright refused to draw for the Tech Manual (despite overwhelming fan requests) was the phaser rifle. He thought it was ugly and looked cobbled together. We found a good photo of William Shatner holding it, and I swear the shoulder brace on the stock was a 20^th-Century plastic shovel handle(!). So it was never included.

As for discrepancies between the speculative stuff (ship types, Star Fleet HQ, etc.) in the Technical Manual and Star Trek canon since 1979, the answer is simple. The Technical Manual had been under development for Ballantine Books, under Paramount's auspices, for 2+ years and the drawings were just under two months short of completion when GR signed the contract on March 12, 1975, to do the first Star Trek. By the time the movie made it through umpteen script revisions and actually got filmed and released, the Tech Manual had already been in print for 4 years.

FJ kept meticulous records as to which drawings he was working on and how long they took, and NONE of the "non-canon" material in the TM was produced after the contract for the motion picture was signed. Further, GR had already seen all of FJ's extrapolative material in 1973 and 1974. FJ was very concerned about doing anything extrapolative in GR's universe, and made a point of sending "in-production" materials from the Technical Manual to GR on a regular basis, including all the speculative stuff like the new ship designs (see below). GR only responded with words of encouragement. If GR had said "no," or "stop," or "this isn't how I envisioned it," or "this conflicts with another project I'm working on," FJ would have dropped it or changed it immediately. GR never said a single negative word.

Again, in FJ's own words: "FACT: A copy of the Articles of Federation were sent to Gene Roddenberry on 22 June 1973. His reply of 28 August states: 'I thought the Articles of Federation were extremely well thought out and presented, although I have some question in my mind whether they are a bit too long to maintain fan interest.' FACT: Copies of the Fleet Ship Classifications and the Dreadnought 3-view were sent to Gene Roddenberry on 22 June 1973. At no time during the preparation of the Manual did Gene ever mention he objected to these types. In his reply of 28 August 1973, he did state: 'Your drawings jump right off the page to the reader and are very exciting.'"

Now stay with me here, 'cause this is the most Important Part of this whole interview. If you follow the FJ Timeline through 1975 and 1976, Paramount rejects script after script from GR and others, while FJ's Plans and Manual climb the bestseller lists to astronomical heights. GR's head must have been ready to explode. Then, if you read further, Paramount starts to court FJ as a consultant for the movie but FJ declines any involvement. At that point, Paramount and GR have the same problem. Because of the aborted Lincoln Enterprises deal to publish the Plans and the Tech Manual in 1973, and because Lou Mindling of Paramount allowed FJ to copyright the Manual in his own name in 1975, neither GR nor Paramount owns the rights to FJ's original work (such as the Star Fleet space station, the Dreadnought and other ship designs, the UFP "two faces and starfield" logo, etc.). [The rest of this paragraph is pure speculation, but I don't think I'm too far off the mark.] GR doesn't want to use FJ's designs because he feels he has had little control over their creation and no control over their publication, and he'll be damned if he'll pay royalties to an outsider for stuff spun off from the universe he created. Further, FJ has proven difficult to deal with in other encounters (Planet Earth) and GR doesn't want to go through that again. Paramount desperately wants FJ to be involved with the movie because FJ's work is so enormously popular, but FJ is not being a "team player" and agreeing to be a consultant or a writer on the project. If FJ is not going to be directly involved so they can exploit his name in their publicity, then Paramount doesn't want to pay him royalties, either.

After that point, everything in the movies was either designed to directly contradict FJ's work, or to modify designs or concepts first put forward by FJ to make them just different enough that FJ could not claim copyright infringement (especially the UFP logo you mention in Q12). In retrospect, knowing what a "control freak" GR was about the series and the movies (as documented in many written accounts), none of this is a surprise to me.

By the mid-1980s, GR was telling his production staff (such as Michael Okuda) that FJ was just a "fan kook" who had drawn the Blueprints and TM on his own, without GR's permission. GR was also denying he had had any contact with FJ at all. And we suddenly got things like "official" publications discussing the ships of Star Fleet and saying that a 3-nacelle design was "unstable," and that the Dreadnought had been dropped from production after one prototype because of its destructive power. Then, just last week I ran across "Roddenberry's Rules of Starship Design"; on the Internet (see http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/my_ships/design.htm), which were supposedly told to Andy Probert by Roddenberry himself. Said rules were obviously conceived after the publication of the Tech Manual to completely invalidate all of FJ's original ship designs. Rule 1, "Nacelles must be in pairs," eliminates the Dreadnoughts, Destroyers, and Scouts. Rule 2, "There must be at least 50% line of sight visibility between a pair of nacelles across the hull," eliminates Tugs/Transports hauling cargo containers. Rule 3, "Both warp nacelles must be fully visible from the front," doubly eliminates Dreadnoughts. Nice, huh?

[An aside here: Prior to the 1975 Tech Manual, nobody had even speculated as to how warp drive actually worked. You just told Scotty to give you Warp 6, and off you went. In FJ's interpretation of warp technology, the warp field goes through each nacelle from front to rear. He described it as warping all of space through the engines to get to your destination, while the body of the ship remained in a non-FTL subspace bubble, because the crossover to light speed is not necessarily conducive to the continuation of human life. Thus, a single nacelle is perfectly fine, and a two-nacelle ship could get back to base on one nacelle if the other became damaged or nonfunctional. These are the kind of redundancies that get built into modern-day commercial aircraft and military vehicles (remember FJ's former occupation here): you have an engine, and you have a spare in case something screws up. Such redundancy would be especially important in Star Trek's era, when a nonfunctional warp drive could leave a ship and crew stranded many light-years from an appropriate repair facility with no hope of rescue. It would take years (generations, even!) for a starship to limp back to base on impulse power. Now, in official Treknology as it has evolved since 1979, the warp field is described as being between the pair of nacelles -- obviously a quite different interpretation than FJ's above. No redundancy and no backup, unless you're flying a 4-nacelle ship design. To quote my favorite character, Mr. Spock, you tell me what seems more logical. And now, back to our story...]

In my opinion, GR's actions fall into the category of "rewriting history." While I completely understand GR's and Paramount's motives for wanting to protect what they perceived as their valuable Hollywood property, I also know that FJ was very hurt that GR essentially turned on him once a ST movie became a reality. I also find it sad that GR felt the need to change the face of the entire ST universe rather than give up an ounce of design credit to FJ.

Lou Mindling retired right around the time the first Star Trek movie was released, so FJ's one remaining supporter inside the Paramount organization was gone. Once the first movie was out and making a profit, the Powers That Be at Paramount were more than happy to back GR in his complete retooling of Star Trek, as long as it continued to make money for them. And the fans have just followed along, because if GR and/or Paramount says it, then it must be the Word of God. These days, Franz Joseph is not even a footnote in the official history of Star Trek. Indeed, FJ is conspicuously missing from several recent "documentary" type books about Star Trek's development.

There have been repercussions to this day. Several years ago (1995), my ex-husband, a computer games programmer, contacted Paramount, wanting to do an Interactive Tech Manual of classic Star Trek on CD-ROM, similar to Rick Sternbach's Interactive TNG Tech Manual on CD-ROM, which was out at the time and enormously popular. Of course, he wanted to use FJ's Tech Manual as the basis, and I would happily have given him the proper permissions for FJ's original material. However, he also needed permission from Paramount for the communicator, phaser, tricorder, Enterprise-style ships, bridge, transporter, etc. Paramount flat-out refused to license the product and killed the whole project. (I'm bewildered, as Paramount continues to tolerate the Tech Manual in print, and has never been known to refuse royalty payments. This was also my first inkling that, conflicts with FJ's work aside, Paramount was trying to promote its new Star Trek vehicles instead of classic Trek.)

1967:

I liked Star Trek when it was unpopular. I liked Star Trek when I was jeered at and labeled a geek and a social outcast for liking it. (Really rough when you're in junior high and high school and full of teenage angst already.) If Tiger Beat teen magazine or TV Guide had one tiny photo of Nimoy and Shatner as Kirk and Spock, it was a miracle (Starlog and whole magazines devoted to Star Trek were years away). I had to audio tape episodes (on reel-to-reel tapes!!!), and buy photos and fan-transcribed scripts, because there was no such thing as videotape. I saved my allowance money for weeks and did odd jobs for my parents to be able to afford Star Trek memorabilia from Lincoln Enterprises.

1973:

My friends and I bought commercial scripts and film clips from Lincoln Enterprises, because there still was no such thing as videotape. I was still audio-taping episodes, this time on cassette tapes. We wrote and traded voluminous mountains of fan fiction with other fans, because it was the only way to get a "fix" of new Star Trek stories. Said fan fiction was typed on stencils and mimeographed or dittoed, because cheap xerography was not available. (I guess in these days of computers and word processing, nobody knows or cares what "corflu" is any more.) We wrote long letters to fans in other states, because long-distance phone rates were too expensive, and there was no such thing as personal computers or the Internet. The guys made hand phasers out of balsa wood and communicators out of plastic pencil boxes and HO railroad track, because there were no commercially available prop replicas. (Later, there were fan-produced vacu-formed kits out of ABS plastic, but you still had to do a lot of work to get all the parts to fit together.) The girls drafted uniform patterns by drawing the seam lines on old sheets with felt pens, because you couldn't just call up a costume company and order one. We bought the rank braid and insignia patches from Lincoln Enterprises. If we were really lucky, we got leftover rank braid from the actual TV show. When that ran out, we got gold rick-rack. When we returned the rick-rack and complained, we got refund checks actually signed by Majel Barrett!

You young whippersnappers and your MTV, you have everything handed to you on a silver platter. We had to suffer for our Star Trek stuff! Did I mention I had to walk ten miles to all the Star Trek conventions I attended in L.A.? Uphill. In the snow.

Actually, the early '70s was an incredible time. There were all these little pools of fans, or single closet-type fans, each thinking they were the only ones left who liked Star Trek. And then we found clubs, and we were not alone. And then we went to conventions where 1,500 people were expected, and 10,000 showed up, and we realized we were a movement -- it was a very empowering experience. With the exception of Nimoy and Shatner (who came with bodyguards and charged Big Bucks), the cast, crew, and writers for the original show came to conventions, mingled freely with the fans, and were generally a pleasure to be around. (I spent one fun evening in a con suite just chatting with William "Trelane" Campbell and his wife about a million subjects other than Star Trek.) GR would bring the blooper reels with him to show in the film room, and we felt like privileged insiders. You could drive to Pacific Palisades get your picture taken in front of the full-size Galileo shuttlecraft, which resided in somebody's front yard. Or go to International Silks and Woolens in Beverly Hills, to get the exact Helenka Tri-knit that was used for the TV show's third season uniforms. It came in white and had to be custom-dyed to the proper colors. ISW was also the only place in Southern California to get 2-inch wide velcro, which was essential to hold your communicator and hand phaser on your utility belt. We went everywhere in uniform, from Star Trek conventions to club meetings to Disneyland. We then got thrown out of Disneyland for "showing group unity," but that's another story...

In these days of the Internet, and affordable commercially-released video, and mass-produced props/toys/costumes for even the most obscure TV series, and all the other things we didn't even dare dream about as a possibility, I don't think there will ever be something like Star Trek fandom in the '70s again. I loved being part of it, I made lifelong friends and acquired major job skills because of it, and I miss the sense of community and camaraderie. Maybe I'm jaded, but even the big fan-run conventions of today (such as Toronto Trek) pale in comparison.