Accompanied by an opening fanfare, the main theme begins, punctuated at several points by the Enterprise flying toward and past the camera with a "whoosh" sound for dramatic effect, created vocally by Courage.
"[3] The unaired pilot, "The Cage", used a wordless rendition of the melody line, sung by soprano Loulie Jean Norman with flute and organ, over an orchestral arrangement.
Producer Herbert Solow recalled that Norman had been hired under a Screen Actors Guild agreement and that she would receive rerun fees for her part in the theme.
[5] The head of programming at NBC, Mort Werner, enjoyed the first pilot, but because he believed the series' potential had not been fully realized by the story's plot, he convinced the network to finance a second effort, an action that Roddenberry said, "shattered all television precedent.
For 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, scored by Jerry Goldsmith, Alexander Courage provided additional cues featuring his theme, where it softly accompanies the "captain's log" scenes.
Most of the subsequent Star Trek motion pictures' main title themes started with the fanfare before segueing into music composed specially for the given film.
A prequel, spin-off series, Star Trek: Discovery (2017–2024), set 10 years before the original, twice featured a new recording of the theme: first during the closing credits of the Season 1 finale episode, "Will You Take My Hand?"