Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry led a pretty extraordinary life. Before creating the science fiction franchise that would span 50 years (next year!), he was a cop and a decorated WWII pilot. He was also a pilot for Pan Am in the late 1940s, and it is from his time in this job in his mid-twenties that the story of The Oatmeal’s latest comic comes.
The Oatmeal’s Matthew Inman created this web comic detailing how Roddenberry, at age twenty-five, helped save twenty-two survivors of a plane crash in the Syrian desert in 1947, and it was this event that steered him away from being a pilot and toward television. This was the third plane crash he had experienced (the other two were during the war), and he’d even spent some time as a plane crash investigator, but after this incident he wanted to do something different with his life, and he went on to create a science fiction show that celebrated the best in humanity.
Inman does a beautiful job of telling this story in web comic form, so you should definitely go check out the whole thing over at The Oatmeal. Then, go watch some original series Star Trek on Netflix.
(via Nerdist)
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