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## The Franchise Mechanics: How a Canceled Show Became an Empire
The process by which *Star Trek* grew from a canceled three-season network series to one of the most commercially significant entertainment franchises in history followed a specific economic and cultural sequence that is worth tracing in some detail, because it illustrates what Ball’s 1966 decision had actually created.
The first step was syndication, as described earlier. The syndicated reruns of 1969 onwards built an audience that was both larger and more engaged than anything the original network run had generated. By the early 1970s, *Star Trek* fan conventions were attracting substantial crowds; the fan publications were numerous and read widely; the demand for merchandise was creating a commercial opportunity that Paramount was initially slow to exploit.
The studio’s response to this demand shaped the franchise’s subsequent development in important ways. Paramount’s licensing division began issuing merchandise — model kits, action figures, record albums of the show’s music, books including novelizations and reference guides — that created income streams independent of broadcast rights. The novelizations published by Bantam Books in the early 1970s introduced the characters and stories to readers who had not watched the television series.
The animated *Star Trek* series produced by Filmation and aired on NBC from 1973 to 1974 was the first sequel production. The animated series ran for 22 episodes and featured the voices of the original cast. It won the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Entertainment Series — the only Emmy that any *Star Trek* production won during the original cast’s era. D.C. Fontana was the story editor and wrote several of the most highly regarded episodes.