Harve Bennett, the man who was credited by fans as being the person that saved ‘Star Trek’ when he produced ‘Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan’ and three sequels has passed away.
The much loved television and movie producer was 84.
According to a report from ‘Star Trek’ expert Larry Nemecek, Bennett passed away on February 25 in a hospital near his home in Jackson, Oregon.
Fans of genre television and film have much to celebrate about the life of Harve Bennett.
Before he got the job to produce and bring a ‘Star Trek’ movie in on budget. Bennett worked mainly in the realm of television and produced some classic genre shows from the 1970s, which include ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’ and ‘The Bionic Woman’. He is also credited with having produced one of televisions very first mini-series with ‘Rich Man Poor Man’.
After he finished working on the ‘Star Trek’ movies in the mid 1990s Bennett returned to television and executive produced shows such as ‘Time Trax’. His last credited work as a television producer according to IMDB is ‘Invasion America’, which ran in 1998.
Nicholas Meyer, who worked alongside Bennett on ‘Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan’, told Deadline, “He was a remarkable man and he was unpretentious and self-effacing. I don’t think there would be a Star Trek franchise without him. He rescued it. He’s endangered of being lost in the shuffle, but he’s the guy who figured it out . . . He watched all 79 of those original episodes and he was the one who plucked out Khan.”
It’s quite amazing just how many television shows that Harve Bennett had a hand in producing. If you were to list everything it would pretty much look like Bennett was single-handedly producing most of the genre and none genre television of the 1970’s.
Back in the late 1990s my late mother got me a book about great television producers. It was in part a celebration of the work of the late Gene Roddenberry and was titled ‘Great Birds Of The Galaxy’, but one of the many producers listed in this book and written about was Harve Bennett. The man was truly a creative force in television and the man behind many of the television shows, which people of a certain age can often get quite nostalgic about.
Rest in peace Harve and thanks for many amusing times in the school playground where I would run in slow motion.
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