From Wagon Train to Star Trek - Generating Story Ideas

Let's have some fun with generating story ideas for our novels (or short stories).
Many of the writers for Star Trek: The Original Series came from the short story science fiction pool of Amazing Stories and Weird Tales and such. They brought their ideas from short stories to the TV screen.

But the show itself borrows an idea from the very popular Wagon Train that ran from 1957 to 1965. This was a show about Major Seth Adams and his scout Flint McCullough going on a string of adventures as they navigated the wild west in a wagon train. In other words, they were boldly going where no wagon train had gone before.

You can almost see Gene Roddenberry and others sitting around an office thinking up new show ideas, seeing the light bulb go off and exclaiming "We'll do Wagon Train... in space!"

With that in mind, here's a fun exercise for you or your next gathering of writers over coffee. Come up with story ideas based on old stories, films or TV shows, and then changing the settings, twisting the characters, and tweaking them until they're different.

Example:
TV Show: Gilligan's Island
Setting: In Space!
Twisting the Characters: When a group of space tourists plan to see the forbidden planet Delta X, little did they know that the bumbling captain and his sidekick lover McGillicutty would see their ship taken over by an evil professor bound and determined to find the mystery of the spheres, long thought to originate on Delta X. Throw in a couple of love interests and a wacky CEO, and you've got a good mix of characters.

Okay, I just made that up for kicks and giggles, but you can see that once you start twisting things around, you can arrive at a new story based on an old idea.

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