NBC used a few vehicles to promote Star Trek. It produced some commercials, included the show in its NBC Week kickoff for the 1996 TV season, and distributed an “Advance Information” booklet to boost awareness among advertisers and broadcast affiliates. That featured the second pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before, and is an interesting look at the business of mid-sixties television.

A few photos stand out. The first is the cover shot, partly because it features Andrea Dromm’s character Yeoman Smith, who we would never see again and who didn’t have much to do in the episode. The thinking behind the cover photo probably began and ended with “Dromm is an attractive woman.” The write-up she received suggests her role was intended to be recurring. She was instead replaced by Grace Lee Whitney’s Janice Rand in The Corbomite Maneuver, the next episode produced.

The photo is also notable because Smith seems to be holding a dish cloth while our Captain clutches some…maybe kitchen canisters. I am not sure.

A lot of the publicity photos, especially the early ones, followed the creative approach of “grab whatever is handy,” like the flashlight photos of Spock, Rand and Kirk. 

The second standouts are the infamous Spock airbrush pictures. NBC execs were apparently worried about the Vulcan’s “satanic” appearance, so they rounded the pointed ears and curved eyebrows. That was obviously the wrong move; Spock quickly became the most popular character and his distinctive look was a big contributor. But it’s an odd decision specifically because Where No Man… had already been filmed, so viewers would see Spock in all his alien glory whatever NBC did on these pages. 

But my favourite bit of this booklet is that Sulu, as the ship’s astrophysicist, gets to decide if the captain is allowed to head planetside: “Frequently, it is [Sulu’s] assessment of the conditions on unexplored planets that finally determines when and how they will be explored, or if they can be explored at all.”

Imagine this scene: Kirk rises from the captain’s chair and snaps out commands ordering a landing party to the transporter room—but then the turbolift whooshes open and Sulu strides in saying “Belay that order, Captain! My astrophysical assessment says no to visiting this planet.” 

George Takei would have enjoyed playing that. 

It is also funny to see that one of Captain Kirk’s main responsibilities as the commander of this awesome vessel of exploration is the “enforcement of laws regulating commerce with Earth colonies.” This brings to mind Gene Roddenberry’s first draft of the opening narration, in which Kirk would have said “the giant starship visits Earth colonies, regulates commerce, and explores strange new worlds and civilizations.”

A five-year mission to ensure that credits keep flowing to shareholders would have been far less interesting to viewers although, to be fair, commerce is essentially the driving force behind The Devil in the Dark. Kirk needs to stop the killings but those humans are only in danger at all because “Janus Six could supply the mineral needs of a thousand planets.”

Other fun bits from the NBC promo:

– The Enterprise serves instant coffee. 

– Sexism was popular back then: Dromm’s Yeoman Smith is a “welcome change of scenery.” See also Herb Solow calling Nichelle Nichols a “shapely broad” in the January 1967 issue of Ebony.  

– NBC’s promotion department repeated the untrue story that Gene Roddenberry was the “head writer” for Have Gun—Will Travel. There was no such position on that show, and I believe it was Roddenberry who liked to spread that exaggeration. 

– Nimoy did not appear in the movie Seconds. It seems he shot a scene but it was cut from the movie.

It is interesting to wonder what would have happened had the network put more support behind this interstellar vehicle. This promotional piece was a good start.