The science fiction multimedia franchise of Star Trek since its original debut in 1966 has been one of the most successful television series in science fiction television history and has been considered by many to have had a large influence in popular culture as a result. The original series, which aired in the late 1960s, has since spawned nine successor series and thirteen movies , merchandise, and a multibillion-dollar industry collectively known as the Star Trek franchise. The franchise is owned by CBS Studios, which currently owns television properties previously held by Paramount Pictures, the studio that produced Star Trek for many decades. Paramount Global continues to hold DVD rights to the television series, and the rights to produce feature films. Two films, Galaxy Quest (1999) and Free Enterprise (1999), and a television series, The Orville, have been inspired by the cultural influence of Star Trek. Star Trek: The Original Series Gene Roddenberry sold Star Trek in 1964 to NBC as a classic adventure drama, calling it a "Wagon Train to the Stars". But Roddenberry wanted to tell more sophisticated stories, using futuristic situations as analogies for current problems on Earth and showing how they could be rectified through humanism and optimism. The series' writers frequently addressed moral and social issues such as slavery, warfare, and discrimination. The opening line "to boldly go where no man has gone before" is almost verbatim from a US White House booklet on space produced after the Sputnik flight in October 1957. A major inspiration for Star Trek was the science fiction film Forbidden Planet (1956), whose influence is especially apparent in the pilot episode "The Cage". Previous sophisticated science fiction television series included anthology series such as The Twilight Zone and the British Quatermass serials, but Star Trek was the first American science fiction series with a continuing cast that was aimed at adults, telling modern morality tales with complex narratives. Earlier British science fiction series with marionettes and soap operas had interracial casting, but this was the first American live-action series to do this. At a time when there were few non-white or foreign roles in American television dramas, Roddenberry created a multi-ethnic crew for the Enterprise, including an African woman (Uhura), a Scotsman (Montgomery Scott), an Asian man (Hikaru Sulu), and—most notably—an alien, the half-Vulcan Spock. In the second season, reflecting the contemporaneous Cold War, Roddenberry added a Russian crew member,