The transformation of the fan base during the syndication period — from the core group that had organized the letter-writing campaigns to save the show during its network run to the much larger community that formed around the reruns — was the foundation of everything that came after. The fan conventions of the early 1970s began drawing thousands of people. The merchandise demand — which Paramount was initially slow to satisfy — was enormous. The letters to Paramount asking for more *Star Trek* content started arriving before the decade ended.
This was the return on Desilu’s investment, arriving after the studio had ceased to exist. The deficit financing that the board had voted to cancel in early 1966, that Ball had overridden, that Solow and his team had managed through three difficult production seasons — the payoff came in syndication, and the studio that had made the investment was not there to collect it.
## Desi Arnaz’s Underappreciated Architecture
The standard telling of *Star Trek*’s corporate history centers on Lucille Ball as the decisive figure because Ball was the person who made the final call. But the structural conditions that made it possible for her to make that call — the conditions that turned Desilu from a television production company into a studio capable of funding ambitious, expensive new series — were largely Desi Arnaz’s work.
Arnaz’s contributions to the American television industry have been substantially underappreciated, in part because his subsequent personal difficulties — the alcoholism, the marital breakdown, the eventual dissolution of his professional partnership with Ball — have overshadowed the technical and business innovations that his tenure at Desilu produced.