theLogBook.com is a chronicle of how we used to imagine the future – an ever-expanding logbook of what our entertainment, our culture, and even our brightest minds thought would happen. It’s nostalgia – and some real history – that gives factual context to the fiction, cultural context to the factual, and always looks to the future.
The ongoing remodel of the site, the ongoing video series, and more are powered by your support! Join our Patreon, get access to our Discord, and help the site grow!
Welcome to Gene-ology, a podcast by Roddenberry Entertainment that dives deep into the early TV writing works of Gene Roddenberry. To fans, they were the Great Bird of the Galaxy and the First Lady of Star Trek. To their friends and co-workers, Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett Roddenberry were, perhaps, slightly less mythic figures with their own very human quirks, but still beloved and admired. In this panel from the TrekTalks 5 telethon in support of the Hollywood Food Coalition, Gene and Majel are remembered by those who knew them. Podcast hosted by Earl Green & Ashley Thomas TrekTalks panel hosted by John Champion Panel guests: Fred Bronson, Denise Crosby, Ernie Over, Rod Roddenberry About Gene-ology Gene-ology explores Gene Roddenberry's early television scripts, including his lesser-known works before Star Trek using the Mission Log format popularized by Roddenberry Podcasts. We analyze the themes, writing style, and cultural impact of his scripts, and we even unearth stories from the Roddenberry archives that were never produced. Join us as we trace the roots of Gene's creative genius. In This Episode Memories of Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett Roddenberry from those who knew and worked with them Join the Conversation What did you think of this episode? Share your thoughts, theories, and favorite moments in the comments or reach out to us on social media or email us at missionlog@roddenberry.com Did you know Roddenberry Podcasts is on YouTube? Find the video versions of your favorite shows like Mission Log: Prodigy, Mission Log: The Orville, as well as exclusive content only available on YouTube. Subscribe now! https://www.youtube.com/@RoddenberryEntertainment?sub_confirmation=1 Follow us on Social Media: INSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/roddenberrypodcasts BLUESKY https://bsky.app/profile/roddenberrypod.bsky.social THREADS https://www.threads.net/@roddenberrypodcasts FACEBOOK https://www.facebook.com/MissionLogPod Our shows are part of the Roddenberry Entertainment family. For more great shows and to learn how we live the legacy of Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, follow us here: RODDENBERRY PODCASTS https://www.instagram.com/RoddenberryPodcasts RODDENBERRY ENTERTAINMENT https://www.instagram.com/RoddenberryOfficial RODDENBERRY FOUNDATION https://www.instagram.com/TheRoddenberryFoundation Support the Show For as little as $1 a month, you can gain access to our Mission Log Discord Community! There, we continue the discussion with dedicated channels and a weekly video chat with the hosts. Become a member of our Patreon today! https://www.Patreon.com/MissionLog Subscribe and Stay Tuned Be sure to subscribe to Gene-ology for more deep dives into Gene Roddenberry's early works. New episodes are released regularly as we uncover more of Gene's television legacy. – Gene-ology is produced by Roddenberry Entertainment. Executive producer Eugene "Rod" Roddenberry. Visit https://Podcasts.Roddenberry.com for more great content. Edited by Earl Green.
The 841st episode of Doctor Who airs on BBC1 (the 142nd episode since the series’ revival), starring Peter Capaldi, Pearl Mackie, and Matt Lucas. Michelle Gomez and John Simm guest star in part two of the season ten finale.
BSX Records releases a CD, Star Trek: Music From The Video Games, containing newly-arranged and performed music from many Star Trek video games and computer games from the 1990s onward.
The 724th episode of Doctor Who (the 26th since the series’ revival) airs on BBC1. Tracy-Ann Oberman and Freema Agyeman guest star. This is the first part of the two-part season finale, and introduces the modern-day Torchwood Institute.
After a journey of seven years, gravity-assist slingshots past Earth, Venus and Jupiter, a plunge through Saturn’s ring-plane, and an engine burn of over an hour just to slow it down, the NASA/ESA space probe Cassini becomes the first man-made object to orbit Saturn. The trip has already paid off: Cassini has spotted never-before-seen features in Saturn’s immense rings, and succeeds in piercing Titan’s atmosphere with infrared imaging to provide one of the first-ever glimpses of the huge moon’s cloud-covered surface. Titan will also receive a visit from Cassini’s Huygens probe in 2005.
Pocket Books releases the original Star Trek: Voyager novel, The Farther Shore by Christie Golden, the second in a series of novels picking up from the end of the series.
The 16th episode of Witchblade airs on cable channel TNT, based on the Top Cow comic book of the same name, starring Yancy Butler, David Chokachi and John Hensley. Tamara Gorski (Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Poltergeist: The Legacy) guest stars.
For the first and only time in the history of the American space program, a previously aborted mission is flown with the same vehicle, cargo and crew. Space Shuttle Columbia returns to orbit with Spacelab in its cargo bay for an attempt to fully carry out the aborted STS-83 mission, which was recalled to Earth in April. This time, the mission is successful, with nearly 16 days of microgravity experiments carried out by the crew. Flying Columbia – again – are Commander James Halsell, Pilot Susan Still, Payload Commander Janice Voss, mission specialists Donald Thomas and Michael Gernhardt, and payload specialists Roger Crouch and Greg Linteris.
Dell Books releases the Babylon 5 novel “To Dream In The City Of Sorrows“, written by Kathryn M. Drennan (also writer of the first season B5 episode By Any Means Necessary). The book chronicles the life of Commander Sinclair following his departure from Babylon 5, his arrival on Minbar, and his eventual rise to the position of Entil’Zha – leader of the Rangers. The novel fills in many gaps left in Sinclair’s story on television, and is considered an official part of the show’s storyline.
The 14th episode of the sci-fi crime series TekWar, based on William Shatner’s novel series, airs as part of the Universal Action Pack syndication package. Greg Evigan, William Shatner, and Maria del Mar (Mercy Point) star. With ratings low compared to the other Universal Action Pack offerings, the series is cancelled, with the remaining episodes scheduled to be “burned off” early the following year.
Forge Books posthumously publishes astronaut Deke Slayton’s non-fictional memoir of his time in NASA, Deke! U.S. Manned Space From Mercury to the Shuttle, co-written with Michael Cassutt. The book details Slayton’s selection to the Mercury ground and his subsequent medical grounding, his time in charge of NASA’s astronaut office, and his eventual flight aboard the international Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission.
Soyuz TM-19 lifts off from Kazakhstan, on a mission to the Russian space station Mir with cosmonauts Yuri Malenchenko and Talgat Musabayev aboard. Over the course of their 125-day stay, the crew joins Dr. Valery Polyakov aboard Mir, in the middle of his record-shattering 437-day stay in space. Malenchenko and Musabayev conduct 11 hours worth of spacewalks to repair Mir’s exterior insulation and other minor maintenance, and returns home in November 1994 with German astronaut Ulf Merbold.
The Russian spacecraft Soyuz TM-17 lifts off from Kazakhstan, bound for space station Mir. Cosmonauts Vasili Tsibliyev, Aleksandr Serebrov replace the incumbent station crew, staying aboard Mir for 196 days, while Jean-Pierre Haigneré returns to Earth with the previous Mir crew aboard Soyuz TM-16 after a three-week stay. When the crew leaves Mir in January 1994, their departure is anything but routine, as Tsibliyev is unable to prevent a collision between Mir and the departing Soyuz.
ABC airs the fifth episode of the cop show spoof Police Squad, in color, starring Leslie Nielsen and created by the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker team behind the hit movie Airplane! Florence Henderson (The Brady Bunch) guest stars.
Activision releases a trio of cartridges for the Atari VCS home video game system, including Larry Kaplan’s Kaboom! (featuring graphics by David Crane). Kaboom! proves to be the most popular of the three games released on this date.
Chicago-based pinball manufacturer Stern makes one of its earliest forays into the booming video game industry with an altered version of the hit game Space Invaders, retitled Astro Invader. The game proves successful enough for Stern to invest in development of original games.
Casblanca Records releases the Meco album Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk, a disco interpretation of the soundtrack of Star Wars on one side, with original compositions on the second side. The single extracted from the Star Wars medley will reach the top of the charts.
The 169th episode of Doctor Who airs on the BBC. This is the second Doctor’s second and final encounter with the Daleks, though it is the last Dalek story (and, barring a brief glimpse on a viewscreen in 1969’s The War Games, the last Dalek appearance) for the remainder of the 1960s. Dalek creator Terry Nation withdraws the BBC’s rights to use the Daleks in Doctor Who, intending to launch the Doctor’s enemies in their own series, possibly in America. The prospective Doctor-less Dalek series never comes to pass, and the Cybermen reign as the second Doctor’s most enduring recurring enemies as a result. The Daleks do not headline a Doctor Who story again for five years. This concludes the fourth season of Doctor Who, the show’s first post-regeneration season, and marks the end of producer Innes Lloyd’s tenure as showrunner. This episode is now missing from the BBC’s archives.
The 36th episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone airs on CBS. Keenan Wynn stars in an episode written by Richard Matheson, closing the series’ first season.
Proposed and designed by Cornell University, and funded by the Adavanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the Arecibo Ionospheric Research Center – a thousand-foot radar and radio telescope dish – begins construction in a natural limestone bowl south of Barrio Esparanza, Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Construction will take over three years, at a cost of nearly $10,000,000, with a steel feed receiver structure supported in mid-air over the parabolic dish by some five miles of steel cables. Facilities are constructed for scientists visiting the eventual facility, and additional facilities are constructed to shape aluminum into the mesh structure of the telescope dish on-site, a more economical approach than having those parts of the telescope shipped in from outside. Though conceived and pitched as a means of studying the ionosphere, with possible defense applications such as missile detection, the Arecibo facility will makes its best known contributions to astronomy after it opens.
Absolutely no generative AI was used in the creation of the content on this website. It’s mostly just some guy named Earl.
theLogBook.com releases the 26th episode of the Retrogram podcast, hosted by Earl Green, covering the following shows from the weeks of June 20th, 1977:
The 841st episode of Doctor Who airs on BBC1 (the 142nd episode since the series’ revival), starring Peter Capaldi, Pearl Mackie, and Matt Lucas. Michelle Gomez and John Simm guest star in part two of the season ten finale.
Not Lame Media publishes Craig Dorfman’s non-fiction book Brighter Day: A Jellyfish Story, a biography of the power pop band’s collective career and its individual members. 
Indie Japan Records releases the first volume of soundtrack music from the anime series Gatchaman CROWDS, with music by Taku Iwasaki (Soul Edge). 
BSX Records releases a CD, Star Trek: Music From The Video Games, containing newly-arranged and performed music from many Star Trek video games and computer games from the 1990s onward. 
BBC Radio 4 broadcasts a made-for-radio Torchwood audio play, starring John Barrowman, Eve Myles, Gareth David-Lloyd, and Tom Price. 
The 724th episode of Doctor Who (the 26th since the series’ revival) airs on BBC1. Tracy-Ann Oberman and Freema Agyeman guest star. This is the first part of the two-part season finale, and introduces the modern-day Torchwood Institute. 
After a journey of seven years, gravity-assist slingshots past Earth, Venus and Jupiter, a plunge through Saturn’s ring-plane, and an engine burn of over an hour just to slow it down, the NASA/ESA space probe Cassini becomes the first man-made object to orbit Saturn. The trip has already paid off: Cassini has spotted never-before-seen features in Saturn’s immense rings, and succeeds in piercing Titan’s atmosphere with infrared imaging to provide one of the first-ever glimpses of the huge moon’s cloud-covered surface. Titan will also receive a visit from Cassini’s Huygens probe in 2005.
Pocket Books releases the original Star Trek: Voyager novel, The Farther Shore by Christie Golden, the second in a series of novels picking up from the end of the series. 
Fat Wreck Chords releases Me First and the Gimme Gimmes‘ fourth album, Take A Break. 
The 16th episode of Witchblade airs on cable channel TNT, based on the Top Cow comic book of the same name, starring Yancy Butler, David Chokachi and John Hensley. Tamara Gorski (Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Poltergeist: The Legacy) guest stars. 
For the first and only time in the history of the American space program, a previously aborted mission is flown with the same vehicle, cargo and crew. Space Shuttle Columbia returns to orbit with Spacelab in its cargo bay for an attempt to fully carry out the aborted STS-83 mission, which was recalled to Earth in April. This time, the mission is successful, with nearly 16 days of microgravity experiments carried out by the crew. Flying Columbia – again – are Commander James Halsell, Pilot Susan Still, Payload Commander Janice Voss, mission specialists Donald Thomas and Michael Gernhardt, and payload specialists Roger Crouch and Greg Linteris.
Sony Records releases an album of songs from the movie Men In Black (the score from the movie will be available on a later separate release). 
Dell Books releases the Babylon 5 novel “To Dream In The City Of Sorrows“, written by Kathryn M. Drennan (also writer of the first season B5 episode By Any Means Necessary). The book chronicles the life of Commander Sinclair following his departure from Babylon 5, his arrival on Minbar, and his eventual rise to the position of Entil’Zha – leader of the Rangers. The novel fills in many gaps left in Sinclair’s story on television, and is considered an official part of the show’s storyline. 
The 14th episode of the sci-fi crime series TekWar, based on William Shatner’s novel series, airs as part of the Universal Action Pack syndication package. Greg Evigan, William Shatner, and Maria del Mar (Mercy Point) star. With ratings low compared to the other Universal Action Pack offerings, the series is cancelled, with the remaining episodes scheduled to be “burned off” early the following year.
Forge Books posthumously publishes astronaut Deke Slayton’s non-fictional memoir of his time in NASA, Deke! U.S. Manned Space From Mercury to the Shuttle, co-written with Michael Cassutt. The book details Slayton’s selection to the Mercury ground and his subsequent medical grounding, his time in charge of NASA’s astronaut office, and his eventual flight aboard the international Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission. 
Soyuz TM-19 lifts off from Kazakhstan, on a mission to the Russian space station Mir with cosmonauts Yuri Malenchenko and Talgat Musabayev aboard. Over the course of their 125-day stay, the crew joins Dr. Valery Polyakov aboard Mir, in the middle of his record-shattering 437-day stay in space. Malenchenko and Musabayev conduct 11 hours worth of spacewalks to repair Mir’s exterior insulation and other minor maintenance, and returns home in November 1994 with German astronaut Ulf Merbold.
The Russian spacecraft Soyuz TM-17 lifts off from Kazakhstan, bound for space station Mir. Cosmonauts Vasili Tsibliyev, Aleksandr Serebrov replace the incumbent station crew, staying aboard Mir for 196 days, while Jean-Pierre Haigneré returns to Earth with the previous Mir crew aboard Soyuz TM-16 after a three-week stay. When the crew leaves Mir in January 1994, their departure is anything but routine, as Tsibliyev is unable to prevent a collision between Mir and the departing Soyuz.
Atlantic Records releases the debut (and only) self-titled album from Y Kant Tori Read, a band centered around future solo artist Tori Amos. 
Nintendo releases the Donkey Kong 3 cartridge for the Nintendo Entertainment System, based on the company’s own 1983 arcade game. 
ABC airs the fifth episode of the cop show spoof Police Squad, in color, starring Leslie Nielsen and created by the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker team behind the hit movie Airplane! Florence Henderson (The Brady Bunch) guest stars. 
Activision releases a trio of cartridges for the Atari VCS home video game system, including David Crane’s Tennis. 
Activision releases a trio of cartridges for the Atari VCS home video game system, including Alan Miller’s Tennis. 
Activision releases a trio of cartridges for the Atari VCS home video game system, including Larry Kaplan’s Kaboom! (featuring graphics by David Crane). Kaboom! proves to be the most popular of the three games released on this date. 
Chicago-based pinball manufacturer Stern makes one of its earliest forays into the booming video game industry with an altered version of the hit game Space Invaders, retitled Astro Invader. The game proves successful enough for Stern to invest in development of original games. 
Casblanca Records releases the Meco album Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk, a disco interpretation of the soundtrack of Star Wars on one side, with original compositions on the second side. The single extracted from the Star Wars medley will reach the top of the charts. 
The 169th episode of Doctor Who airs on the BBC. This is the second Doctor’s second and final encounter with the Daleks, though it is the last Dalek story (and, barring a brief glimpse on a viewscreen in 1969’s The War Games, the last Dalek appearance) for the remainder of the 1960s. Dalek creator Terry Nation withdraws the BBC’s rights to use the Daleks in Doctor Who, intending to launch the Doctor’s enemies in their own series, possibly in America. The prospective Doctor-less Dalek series never comes to pass, and the Cybermen reign as the second Doctor’s most enduring recurring enemies as a result. The Daleks do not headline a Doctor Who story again for five years. This concludes the fourth season of Doctor Who, the show’s first post-regeneration season, and marks the end of producer Innes Lloyd’s tenure as showrunner. This episode is now missing from the BBC’s archives. 
The 36th episode of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone airs on CBS. Keenan Wynn stars in an episode written by Richard Matheson, closing the series’ first season.
Proposed and designed by Cornell University, and funded by the Adavanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), the Arecibo Ionospheric Research Center – a thousand-foot radar and radio telescope dish – begins construction in a natural limestone bowl south of Barrio Esparanza, Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Construction will take over three years, at a cost of nearly $10,000,000, with a steel feed receiver structure supported in mid-air over the parabolic dish by some five miles of steel cables. Facilities are constructed for scientists visiting the eventual facility, and additional facilities are constructed to shape aluminum into the mesh structure of the telescope dish on-site, a more economical approach than having those parts of the telescope shipped in from outside. Though conceived and pitched as a means of studying the ionosphere, with possible defense applications such as missile detection, the Arecibo facility will makes its best known contributions to astronomy after it opens.