I apologize if this has been posted before. I just can't believe I missed this, when it originally aired! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-WBKah3uwg [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-WBKah3uwg[/yt]
Nice find. Of course, you could also throw in the Saturday Night Live sketch with John Belushi as Kirk. There's actually a story in the Bantam anthology Star Trek: The New Voyages 2, "The Procrustean Petard" by Sondra Marshak & Myrna Culbreath, where the crew gets gender-swapped -- except for Spock, who gets a double-Y chromosome and become extra-aggressive or something. It's pretty bizarre. Interesting set there. Some parts of it were completely authentic, like the overhead screens and the railings, while others were completely different.
^I looked it up online, and the Burnett sketch is apparently from her 1991 series. Andrea Martin played Spock and Richard Kind played Koloth. "Procrustean Petard" was published in 1978.
There have been fictional "other Kirks" as well. In Philip K. Dick's early-1970s novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, TV variety-show host Jason Taverner and the possibly insane young woman who's just forged replacement IDs for him (and also works for the police, as it turns out) discuss the possibility of going to a "captain kirk"; Jason recalls having had "Jeff Pomeroy, who played the captain kirk in the picture, on his show" and didn't think much of him.
Good grief, did Carol Burnett ever age in the 20th century? She was in her late fifties in that sketch..! That was great. Re: the set, the whole thing was built with wood and rented greeblies from the props warehouse. So the walls and upper displays would have been easy to build with standard shapes and backlit pictures, while the actual controls and stuff would have been impossible to replicate on a variety show budget. So they just used whatever they could to approximate starship buttons and panels and stuff. Also, look at the Captain's chair! A few years later we'd see it on the bridge of another starship, at about 1:40 here: http://youtu.be/RDzvp2dD-YA Mark
Carol Burnett is amazing. I laughed so hard at that clip I scared everyone around me. I love a good send-up of a favorite thing.