As we commemorate the 30th anniversary of Star Trek: The Next Generation this week, let's look back at the Star Trek series that was almost there first.

The show was called Star Trek: Phase II, and had it gone into production (see concept art here and elsewhere peppered around this article), it would have hit the airwaves almost a decade before Star Trek: The Next Generation -- and might have changed the course of the franchise's history to this day.

It was back in 1972 that the idea of bringing back Star Trek was first mooted by executives at Paramount, the studio that owned the property. Then, seeing how well the original series' 79 episodes were doing in endless syndication reruns, and how active and large the fan base was, Paramount brass proposed a low-budget Star Trek motion picture.

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry signed a contract to produce a film with the tentative title Star Trek: The God Thing, based on his original story idea. But after numerous scripts were pitched and discarded, the project transitioned into another concept, Star Trek: Planet of the Titans, this time with well-known director Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff) on board.

But that proposed picture was killed in May 1977, just two weeks before the release of Star Wars. The Paramount suits believed that the market for sci-fi wasn't big enough to support more than one movie (not realizing that they would be proven wrong by Close Encounters of the Third Kind just a few months later), so they left the big screen to Star Wars and decided to take Trek back to television. Thus began the strange and murky saga of Star Trek: Phase II...