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Inside Star Trek issue 1: selling IDIC and dumpster diving for set pieces
Inside Star Trek was a semi-official newsletter, launched in 1968 under the guidance of Gene Roddenberry. The staff had access to the actors, production crew and sets.
I own the complete run:
Issues 1 to 12: Inside Star Trek, edited by Ruth Berman
Issues 13 to 24: renamed Star Trektennial News, edited by Susan Sackett
Issues 25 to 31: again called Inside Star Trek, edited by Virginia Yable
Here are highlights from issue 1, published July 1968.
Day one set visit
The inaugural issue opens with a description guaranteed to make any fan jealous: “First week of filming on the third season of Star Trek: dust covers are pulled off the bridge…between ‘takes’ mammoth electric fans fight the early summer heat…the warning bell sounds, the fans are shut off, and powerful arc lights shine down on the sets.”
Editor Ruth Berman was on set for the filming of The Last Gunfight, later renamed Spectre of the Gun. Surprisingly, after a few paragraphs describing the shooting stage and the many technicians present, Burman ends the article without giving us more from the set.
Selling IDIC
Gene Roddenberry created the Vulcan pendant Spock wore in Is There in Truth No Beauty? because he wanted to sell it to fans. It was a commercial, rather than a creative, decision. Leonard Nimoy wrote in I am Spock:
The term (IDIC) stands for Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations…and I was all in favor of the philosophy…but not the fact that Gene wanted me to wear the medallion because he wanted to sell them through his mail-order business Lincoln Enterprises.
Nimoy and William Shatner even staged a short walk-out protest during filming, but eventually Roddenberry got his way.
Berman and Roddenberry then printed a made-up story in the fanzine to push medallion sales. “When Gene Roddenberry…wants to give a friend a special present, it sometimes turns out to be a hand-crafted piece of jewelery. In the case of Leonard Nimoy, Roddenberry decided that a pendant with a special Vulcan design would be the right gift.” To drive home the pitch, the newsletter asks “Would you like an idic of your own? If enough interest is shown, replicas of Leonard Nimoy’s idic will be added to our catalog.” News of that “special present” would have been a complete surprise to Nimoy.
Roddenberry first tried to get the pendant into Spock’s Brain. From a Roddenberry memo to producer Fred Freiberger:
Dear Freddie:
Suggest that the Vulcan medallion can be handled in the epilogue of “SPOCK’S BRAIN” in the following manner:
Epilogue opens with Uhura (and possible appropriate others) making a presentation to Spock of a boxed item from the junior officers of the vessel, which they have had made up to show their delight that Spock has been brought back to life.
Chekov is proud that his research on it was correct and Spock admits it is perfectly executed… Prompted by the fact that Chekov’s clever research has already revealed much about it, Spock begins to explain some of the symbology. Spock, genuinely moved by the gift and by certain relationships of it to the story we have just seen, becomes more and more articulate and is finally chattering away like a human.
We can have some humor here as Kirk, McCoy and Scotty try to break in with ship’s business, and for the first time in our series, Spock won’t let anyone get a word in edgewise. This leads to your suggested final line of McCoy’s wishing he had not connected Spock’s mouth.
Spock’s long exposition was meant to entice buyers, but the memo was sent July 10, 1968, mid-way through filming, and it was too late to add this scene. This explains why the IDIC appeared in Is There in Truth No Beauty? as it filmed directly after Spock’s Brain.
On Kirk’s bed with the set decorator
DC Fontana, from TrekCore D.C. Fontana interviewed set decorator John Dwyer while the two were “seated comfortably on Captains Kirk’s bed on stage 9,” but despite the cozy setting the article is fairly dry. This is surprising considering Fontana is a writer and Dwyer must have had a hundred great stories. The piece’s best bit is about scavenging in the garbage for set pieces:
We do a lot of our wall decorations from the trash bins around the lot. We look in every one as we go by, and in maybe every fifth one we find something appealing that is being thrown away. So we take it, repaint it or add things to it, and use it… We can’t go out and have things built, because the cost factor is just prohibitive.
Pitch to journalists: be fair
On June 22, 1968, Gene Roddenberry addressed a lunch crowd of entertainment journalists. He was joined by the entire main cast plus Majel Barrett, third-season producer Fred Freiberger, co-producer Bob Justman and costume designer Bill Theiss. Roddenberry’s extolled the virtues of his show, saying:
We are proud that this is the only television program today saying to a worried world that there is a tomorrow. More, we are saying that tomorrow need not be computerized and de-humanized. It is within our ability to make tomorrow a more richly rewarding existence than yesterday ever was.
He also asks the audience to treat the show fairly:
Like us or not, give us rave reviews or rip us apart — do us the favor of accepting that we work just as you do. Within our own limitations, and within the limitations of our medium, when we put our name on the final product it is the best we have been able to do at that time. Bad or good, and it will most probably be both, you may be certain that we make our show with pride.
Shatner has always been busy
From
SHAKESPEARE ARCHERYBerman asked William Shatner what he does outside of Star Trek. His list was extensive: hunting with a bow, getting a pilot’s licence, filming the movies The White Comanche and The Revolution of Antonio de Leon, recording The Transformed Man for Decca Records, appearing on game shows including You Don’t Say, and starring in the play The Hyphen. The strangest quote was about that game show: “I tried to be as funny as possible, because I knew I was a deadhead. Still, it was amusing, it was fun to play.”
Inside Star Trek is an invaluable source of early Star Trek voices. I’ll cover each issue.
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A View-Master surprise, with Star Trek’s worst episode
Ever find $20 in a jacket you haven’t worn for a while? That just happened to me, except it was Star Trek View-Master reels in a storage box.
I was looking for a specific collectible and found instead the Star Trek and The Motion Picture View-Master sets. And then I got another surprise: the second sleeve also contained the three Wrath of Khan discs. So I own three of the four original-series titles. The company also produced one set drawn from the animated series.
I have no recollection of buying these, so it was a fun moment. The only downside is that View-Master’s first Star Trek project was The Omega Glory, which I consider the nadir of TOS.
From TrekCore Gene Roddenberry wrote The Omega Glory. It was one of three scripts considered in 1965 for the second Trek pilot, but no one really liked it. Writing of that time, production exec Herb Solow said in Inside Star Trek, “Gene Roddenberry’s script, The Omega Glory, wasn’t very good. It was unnecessary to point it out to him; he was the first to recognize the fact. It later became a less-than-mediocre series episode.”
Roddenberry revised the script and the episode was filmed in December of 1967. Perhaps recognizing some weakness in it, he wanted extra promo money spent, according to Marc Cushman’s These are the Voyages, Season Two. He requested a full-page ad in the trade papers, suggested it could launch the third season, asked for some on-air promos, and tried to convince a Hollywood Reporter writer to cover it. All these were rejected.
Finally, Cushman writes, “Roddenberry struck a deal with GAF Corporation to release The Omega Glory as a View-Master 3-D disc set.” That would shine at least a small spotlight on the script. Other sources say that Omega just happened to be the episode filming when the GAF photographer showed up, but Cushman’s claim makes sense in the context.
The episode has its defenders. Dorothy Fontana said “I didn’t think it was our best episode. However, I always did like the speech that Kirk says about the ‘words’… ‘We the People’ was really a great speech and Bill delivered it well.”
Sure. And Cushman writes that its strong points include the performances from William Shatner and Morgan Woodward, the fight sequences and the production values. But even he has to acknowledge:
…one can’t help but squirm a bit when the tattered flag of the United States is paraded across our television screens to the accompaniment of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” For many, it all seemed rather self-glorifying for this U.S. made show.
The script employs Roddenberry’s parallel-worlds concept, which posits that other planets could experience a history similar to Earth’s. I wrote about the origins of that here. It’s a dubious idea but it saved money by allowing the use of standing sets and existing costumes in stories like Miri and Bread and Circuses. But in Omega, the premise is stretched to breaking. Another Gouverneur Morris writing those words in the Constitution, for another United States, word for word, in the same order, with “We the People…” at the top in the same larger calligraphy. It’s ridiculous.
From TrekCore Spock understates it when he says “The parallel is almost too close, Captain.”
Done in Miri to save money, we can accept a world and a city that looks similar to Earth. Done here, with the same document, country and flag, it comes across as jingoistic, and the value statement it makes about American culture is not consistent with the equality message in Arena, The Devil in the Dark and The Corbomite Maneuver.
I also dislike The Omega Glory because it shows a starship captain committing mass murder, and seemingly planning genocide if he can only get enough weapons. I want to believe in the people of the Federation; I have the same issue with historian John Gill in Patterns of Force.
But Spock’s Brain…
When people discuss the weakest TOS episodes, they fault The Alternative Factor or Spock’s Brain, but those are simply bad episodes. That’s inevitable in any series. Consider another unpopular episode: Plato’s Stepchildren. Yes, there is the cringe-inducing scene of Spock dancing near his captain’s head and Kirk neighing like a horse, but the philosophy of that episode is spot-on. Kirk tells Alexander: “…where I come from, size, shape, or color makes no difference…” That is a Star Trek message, but in The Omega Glory, it is the philosophy that’s wrong, and that makes it the worst of the series.
But there are two Omega bright spots. First, it was at the end of this episode that NBC announced the series would return for another season. Second, when Gene Coon was handed Roddenberry’s original 1965 script to rework, he was so unenthused by it that he instead wrote two original pieces: Errand of Mercy and The Devil in the Dark. So, in a backhanded way, The Omega Glory is responsible for two of the strongest episodes.
Back to View-Master
A fun story about the cover photo of the TOS envelope: the ship in the foreground is the original three-foot Enterprise model, and the Exeter in the background is an AMT model. The model worked in The Doomsday Machine and it works here.
After finding these discs, I bought an old View-Master viewer. Seeing these scenes in 3D is magical. One shot from Omega of Uhura and Sulu at her station makes you feel like you could walk right onto the bridge with them. And if you look closely, Nichelle Nichols appears to be studying a script open on her lap.
I also found these kids’ records, still sealed in plastic, two books from 1978 and 1977, and a lot of other stuff. So look through your storage boxes. You may have some forgotten Star Trek treasures.
PostscriptStar Trek: Insurrection is a retelling of The Omega Glory, but almost no one ever notices that.
Update: collection completed. Just after I wrote this, I acquired Mr. Spock’s Time Trek, which recounts the animated episode Yesteryear. I now have all four of the TOS sets; there is a TNG set but I only collect TOS.
Arena, Bread and Circuses, Enterprise, Errand of Mercy, Exeter, Gene Coon, Gene Roddenberry, Herb Solow, Insurrection, Marc Cushman, Miri, Nichelle Nichols, Spock’s Brain, Star Trek, Sulu, The Corbomite Maneuver, The Devil in the Dark, The Motion Picture, The Omega Glory, The Wrath of Khan, Uhura, View-Master, Yesteryear -
You don’t need to read Mission to Horatius
Mission to Horatius was the first original TOS novel published, which makes it an important piece of Star Trek memorabilia. But important isn’t the same as good. In fact, it’s really bad. Only completists need to own one.
The Enterprise is traveling to a distant star system to determine which of three inhabited planets sent out a distress call. That’s a fine story idea, but the plot, characterizations and dialogue are terrible. For example, the Enterprise has been in space a long time and the crew is suffering from a disorder called “space cafard” which can be deadly and can (somehow) cause the crew to mutiny. Also, the book paints a very bleak picture of serving on our beloved 1701.
Oh, and Kirk commits genocide and no one notices or comments.
Spoilers
Plot spoilers follow, but that’s not a problem because, again, you should not read Mission to Horatius.
Space cafard is ridiculous. Cafard is striking some crew members. Spock helpfully defines the malady: “The instinctive fear of deep space. A mania that is evidently highly contagious. It is said in the early days of space travel, cafard could sweep through a ship in a matter of hours, until all on board were raging maniacs.”
Raging maniacs. Right. McCoy then informs the captain that only last year, the Space Scout Westmoreland was found drifting with the whole crew dead. “They had killed each other, Captain. Evidently in their madness.”
“They tore each other apart with their bare hands…” Spock adds. People get stressed at work, even burned out, but suggesting the majority of Enterprise’s crew would kill each other because they’re tired is simply silly.
Sulu keeps a rat in his shirt. While on bridge duty. “Sulu cleared his throat again and reached a hand up under his uniform tunic. He brought forth a small brown animal. He set it down on the console before him and said apologetically, ‘Mickey, sir.’”
Captain Kirk stared. “Where did that come from, and what is it doing on my bridge?”
Excellent questions. But there is one good bit here. Kirk berates Sulu with “I thought you were clear on the orders against pets aboard the Enterprise since our troubles with the tribbles.” The show rarely referenced previous events, and it’s welcome here.
Serving on the Enterprise sucks. I would jump at the chance to beam aboard the Enterprise. So would you. But don’t do it, because apparently it’s terrible there.
Chekov snorted. “You don’t kill time on the Enterprise these days. It dies a slow death from boredom.”
Ensign Freeman looked distastefully about the wardroom. “You know…I sometimes get the feeling I’ve spent my whole life on this confounded ship. And to think I used to believe I liked the Starfleet service.”
They shoot people. Spock says General Order One “restrains us from using our sophisticated weapons against advanced life forms…” Two minutes later, Kirk orders Chekov to fire on an inhabitant of the planet Neolithia who is fleeing from the crew on a “horselike quadruped.” There is no reason for this, and sending a person falling unconscious from a running animal is a dangerous assault.
Mythra should not be stoned. Mythra, the second planet the Enterprise visits, was settled by “religious dissidents” who want to worship in peace, but the priest class uses daily doses of LSD to control the citizens. The landing party is handed drugged drinks but no one is dumb enough to partake — except Chekov, who then spends some hours happily stoned. The scene is reminiscent of Darnell taking a bite of the borgia plant in The Man Trap, except Darnell didn’t do that because Enterprise officers aren’t dumb.
Kirk orders the settlement’s water supply laced with an antidote, removing the control of the priest class. The Enterprise then warps away, without waiting to see what ignoring the Prime Directive will create. Granted, that is exactly what Kirk does in The Apple, so I may have to give the book a pass here.
Then Kirk commits genocide. The third planet, called Bavarya, was settled by “political malcontents” who claim to be descendants of “the elite of Teutonic peoples.” (Bavarya. Bavaria. Get it?) And then some Nazi references kick in. For example: “We are the Herr-Elite of the Horatian system, and it is our destiny to help these backward worlds.”
We learn that the Herr-Elite are real people, while the vast majority of the population — five million people — are clones who operate as servants, workers and soldiers.
McCoy says clones have no soul, because the “spark” within a person cannot be duplicated, and that clones are built on a “matrix — a mold or impression. Wipe clean the matrix and the duplicate simply [reverts] to the molecules of which it was composed.”
It is never explained how one can remotely erase the mold or why this causes people to disintegrate, but they soon find a machine that will “wipe clean the matrix.” Kirk orders Scotty to throw the switch — and all the duplicates are killed. Five million of them. Sure, they are copies, but they are clearly sentient, so Kirk just committed genocide. But no one seems concerned.
“Your orders are to get that rat!” Planetary crises all solved, 40 crewmembers are now in stasis because of cafard, and McCoy says half the crew are showing signs. “One cafard-crazed crewman running berserk through the ship and the mental contagion will spread like a forest fire, Jim. The whole ship could fall apart within the hour.” Again, it is not explained how bored and tired people infect others with madness.
Remember the rat? It escaped and has been spotted “dancing” in the hallway, which Sulu says means it is infected with plague. Fear of the Black Death grips the Enterprise but a search fails to locate the rat, so the entire crew dons spacesuits and the ship is flooded with chlorine gas.
But don’t worry: McCoy taught the rat to dance to make everyone think they would die of the plague. It was a diversion. The book ends with the Enterprise approaching a starbase for some cafard-curing shore leave.
Mission to Horatius was published by the company that also produced the Gold Key Star Trek comics, and it shows the same lack of believability and almost total unfamiliarity with the source characters, setting or spirit. Early Star Trek novels, such as James Blish’s uneven Spock Must Die!, can be forgiven for not getting characters and dialogue quite right. After all, Spock grins in Where No Man Has Gone Before. But Mission to Horatius is not even close. And yes, it was marketed as a youth novel, but that fact makes its genocide and casual violence more egregious, not less.
Collectors of early TOS memorabilia should probably own this novel, because of its place in history, but no one should actually read it.
Mission to Horatius was written by Mack Reynolds, illustrations by Sparky Moore, and published by Whitman Publishing. First edition: 1968.
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William Shatner was always nice to me
I have 13 William Shatner autographs. Eight of those I got in person. Three of those are special. This is the story of those three.
From Cuoco’s Instagram William Shatner seems to create strong impressions on people, which is a nice way of saying that some really like him and others do not. Actress Kaley Cuoco, for example, seems to have a genuine affection for him, and in the episode of Shatner’s Raw Nerve with Leonard Nimoy it is obvious the two are very close. Of course, sadly, there was a falling out between them before Nimoy died.
James Doohan was not a fan, writing in his book Beam Me Up, Scotty, “I have to admit, I just don’t like the man.” And, as has been well-documented elsewhere, he often did not generate good feelings. Nichelle Nichols, at the end of their interview for Star Trek Memories, said to Shatner “I’m not finished yet. I have to tell you why I despise you.” She told Shatner that he was “very difficult to work with, and really inconsiderate of other actors.” Shatner, to his credit, includes the story in his book, and added “I must admit that Nichelle’s criticism is probably valid.”
I do not know Shatner at all, but I was a print journalist for a while and that meant I got to interact with him outside of a convention setting, and he was always nice to me.
In 1995, I was a junior reporter going through press releases and I came across the announcement that Shatner would be appearing at the launch of C.O.R.E. Digital, an animation and special-effects studio in Toronto. He was an investor. I took the press release to my editor and said “I need you to send me to this.” She agreed. At the time, I was too “professional” to step out of my assigned role so, other than a handshake and a reporter-type question, I didn’t have any real contact with him.
A number of years later, Shatner was hired by Epson to help launch a new product: a TV with a built-in photo printer. (It was a silly product and soon disappeared.) I was an editor by then and didn’t feel as restricted by my role, so I brought with me a Star Trek V DVD and a 1970s Kirk Mego action figure, still in its package. After the event, I approached Shatner and asked him to sign the DVD. That signature wasn’t too clear, so I pulled out the Mego figure and he signed that too. Both are currently sitting on a shelf in my Star Trek room.
After he signed the Mego figure, one of the other journalists said to me “Why do you have a Kirk action figure” and I replied “Why don’t you have a Kirk action figure?” I turned to leave the room and Shatner called out, joking, “I don’t want that to show up on eBay.” I laughed and walked out, but I returned a minute later. He was talking to a PR rep. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” I said. “I just want to tell you that this will not be sold on eBay. I have been a fan forever, and this is important to me.” He shook my hand and thanked me for telling him that.
In 2007, Shatner was hired by Canadian telecom company Rogers to promote its then-impressive video phones. (Think FaceTime, but years before Apple did it.) You can see some of the press conference here; it’s a little cheesy. After the announcement, he did a series of TV interviews and then the print media got one-on-ones. By the time I sat down with him, it had been a long day and our talk was fairly brief. After we were done, I said “Would it be untoward of me to ask for an autograph?” He smiled and said “No, that would be quite toward. What have you got?” I pulled out the TOS season 1 DVD set and he signed it. It’s on my shelf beside Star Trek V and the Mego figure.
In those encounters, Shatner was gracious and accommodating to a journalist who was mixing a little fanboy time into his work day. And back to that Epson event: a PR person I know told me Shatner could not have been nicer to them on the day of the event and the evening before, when they took him out for dinner.
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Download the most important Star Trek document
Gene Roddenberry’s 1964 pitch for his new show is arguably the most important Star Trek document ever. The pitch, usually referred to as Star Trek is…, was designed to sell the show to network executives and it’s an interesting look at Roddenberry’s earliest creative ideas.
The series is a great idea, Roddenberry said, because the universe contains so many story possibilities. He writes:
STAR TREK offers an almost infinite number of exciting Science Fiction stories, thoroughly practical for television. How? Astronomers express it this way:
Ff2 (MgE) – C1 Ri1 ・M = L/So
Roddenberry is referencing the Drake Equation, and states that the math proves there are “something like three million worlds with a chance of intelligent life and social evolution similar to our own.”
The Drake Equation is a real thing, but Roddenberry didn’t have the actual text handy, so he just made up the string above. It’s nonsensical; for example, C to the power of 1 is just C. No mathematician would write that.
Roddenberry’s take on the Drake Equation makes a brief appearance in Balance of Terror, although it is not named. Kirk, doubting his command acumen, asks McCoy “I look around that bridge, and I see the men waiting for me to make the next move. And Bones, what if I’m wrong?” The doctor replies,
In this galaxy, there’s a mathematical probability of three million Earth-type planets. And in all of the universe, three million million galaxies like this. And in all of that, and perhaps more, only one of each of us. Don’t destroy the one named Kirk.
Star Trek is… is also the first documented use of the “wagon-train” to the stars concept Roddenberry employed to sell the idea to execs familiar with westerns. According to Harlan Ellison, the wagon-train idea originated with Sam Peeples, who wrote the pilot that sold the show, Where No Man Has Gone Before. Roddenberry would use the phrase for many years.
The pitch also outlines the Parallel World’s concept, which posits that other planets would experience cultural and historical evolution similar to Earth’s. In practice, this meant Star Trek could cut costs by using existing sets and costumes from Roman, Grecian, Nazi and gangster productions, among others, as can be seen in Bread and Circuses, Who Mourns for Adonais? and Plato’s Stepchildren, Patterns for Force, and A Piece of the Action.
Also of note, the captain is Robert April, the ship is the SS Yorktown, and it is a Cruiser Class, rather than the Constitution Class the Enterprise became. (Although, of course, the Enterprise is actually a Starship Class ship, but that’s an argument for another post.) Oh, and the Yorktown can land on a planet, a feature denied the Enterprise.
Roddenberry also included many story ideas, and you can see the seeds of The Cage, Charlie X, A Piece of the Action, Mudd’s Women, Shore Leave, and The Man Trap.
Some ideas would resurface in TNG episodes. The Stranger, in which “an alien intelligence has made its way aboard with the aim of taking over the minds of key crew members — purpose, to use our Cruiser to attack a rival civilization,” sees life in both Power Play and Conundrum. Infection, in which a female crew member is surprised to discover she’s pregnant, is basically TNG’s The Child and, before then, was to be used for a Star Trek Phase II story in which Ilia becomes pregnant after the Enterprise passes near a nebula.
It’s perhaps good that two other ideas never saw the light of a soundstage. In The Coming, the crew meets a “disturbingly familiar man…condemned to crucifixion” in a story that would have upset the network censors and a portion of the viewing audience. And A Question of Cannibalism has the Enterprise discover a planet on which sentient “cow-like creatures” are raised for food. It’s a solid concept (recently used on Discovery) but that era’s special effects and the show’s budget would have given us intelligent cattle that looked silly.
If you’ve never read Star Trek is… or it’s just been a while, click the link to download a copy. It is a foundation document that helped sell Star Trek and create all that followed.
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A fun fake: Flight Deck Officer certificate
I bought a Flight Deck Officer certificate many years ago, when I was quite young, for a few dollars. I got it at a really great little sci-fi shop near Yonge and Bloor in Toronto. That store lasted only a couple of years, but that guy had some great items.
The certificate was produced by Lincoln Enterprises, according to this article on StarTrek.com.
Flight Deck Certificate – This 8 x 11” certificate came ‘signed’ by Captain Kirk and Gene Roddenberry and granted the bearer honorary membership to the USS Enterprise. Available in a standard blue version for $.50, or a deluxe version printed on parchment paper with insignia sticker and two-color ribbon for only $1.00.
I am pleased to say I have the deluxe version.
I think I knew, even back then, that the Gene Roddenberry signature was a fake, but I held out some hope. A number of years ago, Susan Sackett, Roddenberry’s assistant during the TNG years and the author of Inside Trek: My Secret Life with Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry, was kind enough to review a scan of my certificate and inform me that it is neither Roddenberry’s signature nor her own. It would have been cool if Sackett had been the one to sign my official welcome to “Star Trek duty.”
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Rodan, John Wayne and what George Takei got wrong
George Takei was an architecture major at UCLA as a young man, but his heart was never in it. He wanted to act. His father surprised him one day by pointing out an ad in the Rafu Shimpo, the local Japanese newspaper. King Brothers Productions was looking for Japanese-American actors to dub the movie Rodan. Takei landed the three-day gig, his first paid acting job.
The four actors hired for the work each played eight or nine characters, watching the movie on a screen and reading their English lines in time with the characters’ moving lips. “With earphones over my head and intensely focused on the silent images, I stuttered, cried, pontificated, and shrieked,” Takei wrote in his autobiography To the Stars.
I first met George Takei at a convention in Buffalo, and then a couple more times at cons in Toronto. So I already had a few signed Star Trek 8x10s when I heard he was coming back for a Toronto Trek convention. I needed a new idea.
I remembered the story from his book, so I bought a reproduction 11×14 Rodan lobby card on eBay. Placing it on his autograph table at the convention elicited that big trademark smile from Takei. “This was my first paid acting job.”
“I know,” I said. “I read about it in your book.” The autograph line wasn’t too big, and he and I had a nice chat about his early days as an actor. He was, as always, charming and friendly with his fans.
Years later, in 2013, Takei was again coming to Toronto, to Fan Expo. And I remembered another story: over the course of TOS season 1, he had advocated for a bigger role, with more for Sulu to do. “My ship may have been moving steady at warp three, but I wanted to do more than merely announce that fact,” Takei wrote in To the Stars. “I peppered Gene Roddenberry with character-defining ideas, personal histories, plot possibilities, anything that might give Sulu more prominence. Gene was receptive and said he would devote more attention to developing my character.”
And then a big offer arrived just as production on season one was closing: John Wayne wanted Takei to play a Vietnamese captain in The Green Berets. It was a huge break for a young actor, but Takei was conflicted; he opposed the war, while Wayne was a vocal proponent. Then Takei did something amazing: he risked losing the part by telling Wayne his opinion. Wayne listened, nodded and said he wanted Takei on the movie anyway.
Just before leaving for the movie set, Gene Roddenberry handed Takei some welcome news: a batch of season two scripts that featured Sulu. Included in that set were The Trouble with Tribbles, The Gamesters of Triskelion and Bread and Circuses.
Remember Sulu in those classic episodes? Nope, because days of rain delayed shooting on the outdoor Green Berets set, and Takei missed the start of season two. “I returned to Los Angeles heartsick and resentful. The scripts I had taken with me…had all been filmed, save for Mirror Mirror. The lines I had so anxiously committed to memory had already been spoken by someone else; the spirited lobbying I had mounted to enhance Sulu’s role had all been for naught. I had gained nothing but a new competitor…an actor name Walter Koenig.”
At Fan Expo, Takei told me he is proud of his Green Berets performance and doesn’t regret doing the movie, but that it still hurts that heavy rain meant great lines went to Chekov instead of Sulu.
Well, except…
It’s a great story, but Takei got the details wrong. Take a look at a production-order episode list (at either Wikipedia or in Marc Cushman’s These Are The Voyages, Season Two) and you’ll see Mirror, Mirror filmed before Tribbles, Gamesters and Circuses, so the statement that he missed filming those episodes but returned in time for Mirror can’t be correct. Also, Cushman states Takei’s leave from the set began the day before Tribbles started production, so it was not the delayed return that robbed him of those lines in Tribbles, it was his own request to go shoot a movie. The Green Berets shoot did go over time and Takei was gone for longer than anticipated, but the story common in fandom that Sulu was supposed to be featured in Tribbles — a story that was common because Takei told it at conventions and wrote about it in his book — simply isn’t correct.
David Gerrold also confirms that Sulu was never planned for the episode. In his book on the making of The Trouble with Tribbles, Gerrold writes that his first-draft script included a new character named Doggerty; Bob Justman suggested changing that to Chekov, writing in a memo: “Let’s re-write so that Ensign Chekov has the Doggerty part. I feel that as long as the prices are equal, we should take advantage of our regulars as much as we can.” So it was Justman and not John Wayne who put Chekov in Tribbles.
I intend no criticism of George Takei here. To the Stars was published more than 25 years after the events in his Tribbles tale; details become fuzzy. But now I can watch that episode without thinking that rain kept Sulu from shopping with Uhura on K-7.
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Leonard Nimoy sued Paramount — and won
Leonard Nimoy often saw Spock’s face on cereal cartons and posters and lunch boxes, and he never gave it much thought. That changed over dinner with Henry Fonda in 1975.
Fonda and Nimoy met in 1972 on the set of The Alpha Caper. Three years later, Nimoy and his wife Sandra Zober joined Fonda and his wife Shirlee Mae Adams for dinner in London after seeing Fonda perform in the play Darrow.
Fonda asked Nimoy what he thought of the Spock billboards all over the city. “What billboards, Henry?” Nimoy asked. Fonda replied, “Do you mean to tell me you don’t know about all those Heineken billboards?” Nimoy did not, but he now understood why a bartender had earlier suggested Nimoy might like to order a Heineken.
Nimoy found the Heineken poster’s sexual innuendo to be in bad taste. Once back home, he discovered the beer company had not been granted permission for the billboard campaign. Worse, he also found out Paramount had stopped paying him years earlier for the licencing of his image. So he sued Paramount for recompense. Paramount balked and the lawsuit dragged on, only to finally be resolved because Nimoy refused to even read the script for Star Trek: The Motion Picture until the studio settled.
A payment arrived and Nimoy signed on to play Spock.
In 2009, Nimoy was set to appear at Fan Expo in Toronto, and I needed something interesting for him to sign. I remembered the Heineken story, which Nimoy told in his 1995 book I Am Spock, and found high-quality reprints of the billboard on eBay. All set.
But would Nimoy sign the poster? After all, it had prompted a lawsuit. So I also brought the LP Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space to the convention as a backup.
When I got near the front of the autograph line, I unrolled the poster and showed it to his assistant, who smiled and said “Oh, I think Leonard will be fine with this.” There were not many people in line and, when he finished chatting with the person ahead of me, Nimoy turned to me, looked at the poster for a few seconds, and then looked back up at me.
“I’m not sure you want to sign this,” I said.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Well, because of what you had to go through because of it.”
“Do you know the story?”
I nodded, and Leonard Nimoy nodded back and made a “go ahead” gesture with his hand, so I told him the story as he wrote it in I Am Spock. “That’s right,” he said. “You do know the story. That was a bad time, but I had to do it.”
We talked a little about Toronto and I thanked him for coming to the city, and of course I also got him to sign Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space. It was great to spend even a few minutes with him; often the big lines at conventions mean you don’t get even a hello.
The story behind the poster makes it one of my favourite items, and my concern that he might refuse to sign it was justified. Years later I spoke with a collector who had the same idea, and lined up at a convention also in 2009, only to have Nimoy politely refuse to sign the Heineken poster. I don’t know why he signed mine. Perhaps because I knew the story.
Postscript
Many Web sites state the Heineken story appears in the earlier book I Am Not Spock, and that Nimoy sued Heineken. Both of these are incorrect.
An advertising guy named Mike Everett claims Heineken tried to get in touch with Nimoy to arrange a photo shoot for the ad and, when that proved difficult, just went with an illustration. The ad won the D&AD Silver award for the best poster of 1975, so it seems this whole thing didn’t really hurt Heineken.
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Leonard Nimoy to Trek fans: Don’t smoke. Live long and prosper
Leonard Nimoy was set to appear at the 2006 Fan Expo in Toronto, along with William Shatner. I needed something unique to get signed; I already had a couple 8x10s and the cast-signed photo from The Score Board. eBay to the rescue. I found an American Cancer Society poster, featuring Leonard Nimoy as Spock. At the time, it was just a unique and interesting item for an autograph; no one knew that Nimoy would announce in 2014 that he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He would die within a year, even though he had quit smoking 30 years earlier.
At Fan Expo, Nimoy and Shatner sat together at a long autograph table. The fans lined up, bought small tickets — one colour for Leonard, a different colour for Bill — and then passed an item and a ticket to an assistant. My poster and my ticket were duly handed over, Nimoy signed and pushed the poster down the table and, hardly looking up, Shatner signed it as well.
I was horrified. Spock was on the poster, Kirk was not. And then, five seconds later, I saw the humour of the situation. And I got a free autograph.
I would like to say that Nimoy looked up from the item, met my gaze, and took the time to tell me that this campaign was meaningful to him, that after struggling to quit smoking he was proud to encourage others to do the same. But that didn’t happen. He signed, slid the poster over and took an 8×10 from the assistant beside him. He had a big line to get through, and we both moved on.
Years later, when he died, I went down to my Star Trek room and looked at the poster. I hope it did encourage some people to quit, and that he was proud of that. It’s one of my favourite collectibles.
Signed 2003, SFX Toronto -
Franklin Mint’s 25th anniversary Enterprise
The Franklin Mint 25th anniversary Enterprise is not the most accurate model. That would be the big Polar Lights studio-scale model. But the Franklin Mint ship is mostly correct and it’s certainly beautiful.
It is a metal model, and quite heavy. It’s missing some black accents, like on the nacelles, and overall it’s too light in colour, more white than the light grey-blue of the real model. But the proportions and shapes are all correct, the nacelles are nicely in line with the ship (even more than 25 years after it was manufactured), and the shuttlecraft stored at the back of the secondary hull is nicely detailed but obviously too large. My favourite bit is that the top of the bridge comes off, revealing the tiny consoles and chairs within.
I own many Enterprises but this was one of my first high-end collectibles and it holds a special place for me.
Collecting Trek
A TOS collection 40 years in the making
Collecting Trek 