A Musical Journey from Original TV To The Feature Films

Music is an essential component of TV and feature film.  For Star Trek, there's a group of world famous composers who scored memorable music for the original feature films starring William Shatner, Deforest Kelley & Leonard Nimoy.  The musical scores are catchy, sexy and most of all inspiring.

Gene Roddenberry's landmark show's journey from 1966 TV show to huge cult show, then onto feature film franchise and sequel shows Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, is a unique Hollywood story, indeed. In addition to all of the hyper kinetic space battles, weird extraterrestrials and the mind bending philosophy and sweeping intellectualism, there's also the incredibly memorable and moving music. From TV composer Alexander Courage, who gave us the original, soaring TV theme to Jerry Goldsmith who crafted the epic score for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Roddenberry's space opera definitely lives up to its name for such an all encompassing theatrical musical experience.

Alexander Courage - Original Star Trek TV Theme

For even those who've never watched a full episode of Trek, this music is probably at least familiar.  It's a soaring, almost operatic theme which even most non Trek fans will recognize nearly instantly. Creator Gene Roddenberry actually wrote lyrics to the song, yet the words were never used in the actual broadcast series. Later, a legal dispute between Courage and Roddenberry over the royalties for the song ensued.

Jerry Goldsmith  -  Star Trek: The Motion Picture  &  Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Jerry Goldsmith is noted for his fantastic, eerie score to sci-fi classics like Planet of The Apes or the supernatural horror movie The Omen, but his musical composition for the first of the original Star Trek movies is probably his most known and popular. Gene Roddenberry loved it so much, he used it as the theme for his syndicated spin-off show,  Star Trek: The Next Generation running from 1987 to 1994.

James Horner  -  Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan  &  Star Trek III: Search For Spock

James Horner is best known for the best selling movie soundtrack of all time - director James Cameron's mega blockbuster "Titanic". Before he composed music for that most famous of ocean sailing ships, he crafted memorable scores for a galactic spanning starship - Captain Kirk's Enterprise in both Wrath of Khan and The Search For Spock.

Leonard Rosenman  -  Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Most fans remember this popular feature film for the weird, humming space probe, the cool time traveling and the humpback whales, who are so central to the environmentally focused plot. Composer Leonard Rosenman crafted sweeping scores for such classic films as "Rebel Without A Cause" and "East Of Eden" before tackling movie science fiction.

Cliff Eidelman  -  Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

At only 26 years of age, Cliff Eidelman composed the richly dark music for director Nicholas Meyer's The Undiscovered Country feature film. Later, Eidelman went on to score for popular, family favorites like Free Willy 3 and The Lizzie McGuire Movie.

Dennis McCarthy  -  Star Trek: Generations

For the final film to use more than one original "Star Trek" character - played by the actor who originated the role on the classic TV show - in this case Captain Kirk (William Shatner), Scotty (James Doohan) and Chekov (Walter Koenig), the film producers hired composer Dennis McCarthy. He's best known for scoring TV shows like  Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and the 1985 TV revival version of creator Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone.