Paramount Home Video began selling Star Trek episodes on video tapes and laserdiscs in the mid-1980s and the company wanted The Cage to be part of that package. There was a lot of interest in this lost voyage of the Enterprise. 

But there was a problem: no complete colour version existed. The film from the episode, shot in 1964, had been literally cut up in 1966 so that some scenes could be used in Gene Roddenberry’s envelope episode, The Menagerie. The rest of the footage had been lost. Roddenberry did have a copy of the complete episode but it was a black-and-white workprint, with a rough soundtrack.

So Paramount took the only option available: it released a hybrid, using the workprint and then cutting in the colour segments that had appeared in The Menagerie. That version was released in 1986 and I bought the VHS immediately. I watched that tape over and over, because the story is great but also because the alternating colour and monochrome scenes give real insight into how The Menagerie was constructed.

Here is a clip that shows these transitions. And while this hybrid version is also available on later DVDs and the Blu-ray set, the videos in this article are all pulled from that original 1986 VHS tape. The quality is not as good but it is fun to experience the episode as home audiences did back then.

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Interestingly, the transitions are not always accurate, as some scenes that are in black-and-white were present in The Menagerie, and so should be in colour. Here is an example, first from The Cage and then The Menagerie. Look at Captain Pike interacting with Tango.

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Another great reason to watch The Cage is the inclusion of a line that was really risqué for 1964, and which is not in The Menagerie. Here is the original scene and then its reuse in 1966.

“I have to wear something — don’t I?” Excellent.

That line does not appear in the October 6, 1964 revised script but is present in the draft of November 20, 1964 — in a slightly different form. And here, the captain’s name is James Winter, although an inserted page states that is to be changed to Christopher Pike.

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And we got to hear from the Great Bird

That 1986 production also gave us an intro and outro from Gene Roddenberry, and it is great to see Star Trek’s creator talking about his first voyage. Again, it’s available in slightly higher quality on optical disks.

Roddenberry talked often about the freedom science fiction gave him to address issues that were not permitted under the TV norms of the 1960s. Roddenberry says here that he realised The Cage:

…was a chance to do the kind of drama I’d always dreamed of doing… Perhaps I could use this as an excuse to…talk about love, war, nature, God, sex, all those things that go to make up the excitement of the human condition, and maybe the TV censors would let it pass because it all seemed so make-believe.

That is vintage Roddenberry. His first episode would, of course, be about a man offered the ultimate sexual fantasy. Vina tells Pike “I can become anything, any woman you’ve ever imagined. You can have anything you want in the whole universe. Let me please you.”

The Roddenberry segment and the hybrid episode are important additions to any collection, and I am glad I kept my VHS tape, even though I own the same content on DVD and Blu-ray.

Postscript

A full colour version of The Cage was broadcast in 1988 and later released on home video after the missing film pieces were found by archivist Bob Furmanek. He wrote on a message board in 2008:

In 1987, I found the original 35mm color negative trims from The Cage in a rusty, un-marked can in a Hollywood film lab. It was in a vault of old, unclaimed material that was supposed to be destroyed. I approached Roddenberry’s office at Paramount and arranged for him to acquire the material.