Fact-Checking Inside Star Trek: The Real Story

Fascinating, thanks for sharing it. Robert Butler strikes me as someone who just doesn't posess the gift to entertain on-screen but off-screen as well and is (still) sharp as a razor blade.

“We like it, we believe it, we don’t understand it, do it again.”

Graphic and concise.

Bob

 

Many thanks again, Harvey. Very engaging, even just reading the transcript.

Justin

 

Thanks! I finally had some time to sit down and read through it

 

Slowly working on something new here, and seeing if someone here can lend me a hand.

I'm wondering if anybody has an original copy of Mr. Spock's Music From Outer Space from 1967 (I'm interested in both the full album and the single version). Specifically, I'm wondering who the album lists as the composer for each track (specifically the Trek theme, but I'm interested in the others as well). There are some low-resolution pictures online, but they're not good enough to read the fine print, and it's unclear if there was an insert or what was printed on the actual record.

High-res pics would be handy, but not essential. Thanks in advance.

EDIT: This page has a good picture of the disc's first side, although the back cover is still too difficult to read, and I'm curious about Side 2. http://www.maidenwine.com/lps.html

 

^You'd need to add the B side label for the composer credits, since they aren't on the jacket.

 

Matches the tracklisting given here:
http://www.discogs.com/Leonard-Nimoy-Presents-Mr-Spocks-Music-From-Outer-Space/release/727189

 

That's perfect. Thanks!

 

Not sure which TOS budget thread this should be in, but here goes. I know the percentage of the budget for TOS in terms of VFX to overall cost was much higher than TNG (early TNG eps were budgeted for something like 75-80 grand for VFX out of 1.2 mil!), but based on something I saw in an old CFQ interview with John Dwyer, it sounds like it was MUCH higher on average than even I thought. Was wondering if HARVEY or anybody else has good numbers that support or don't support Dwyer's claims.

In the 30th anniversary issue of that mag, Dwyer says 40 grand of each show went to opticals. (he also says 30%, which is plainly crazy, hence my query as to the veracity.) Now this number DOES support the notion that THOLIAN WEB had a ninety grand optical bill as Minor reports in ENTERPRISE INCIDENTS, whereas a lot of folks have since thought Minor meant THOLIAN cost NINETEEN grand more than pattern.

Dwyer does report the decorating budget on TOS as $500 per show, which fits with what I've seen elsewhere.

Anyway, just curious to see how legit these numbers are, relative to what has surfaced in the intervening years.

 

PM me an email address and I will send you what I have.

 

I've been working a new job the past few weeks, which has turned out to be great, and for the first time in three years have offers from a terrific PhD program (actually, three). Somehow, in between all the soul-searching of trying to choose between the two, I managed to write a little something:

http://startrekfactcheck.blogspot.com/2014/03/finding-composer-for-star-treks-first.html

(Basically, it's an anotated memo detailing all the composers that were considered for Star Trek's first pilot)

 

Intriguing that Jerry Goldsmith was the first name on the list. I wonder if his selection for TMP was because Roddenberry had always wanted him, or if it just worked out that way.

Harry Sukman would go on to score Roddenberry's pilots Genesis II and Planet Earth. Dominic Frontieri also scored the early-70s series Search, which Bob Justman produced (and which has just come out on DVD).

It's quite a list. I've heard of almost all of them, except Cy Coleman, who apparently was more of a songwriter than a score guy, making him an odd choice. Oh, and I'm not too familiar with Johnny Green, although it looks like he had a long association with Desilu, and conducted the score to The Brothers Karamazov, William Shatner's first feature film.

Jack Elliott's an interesting choice. He went on to do Barney Miller and Night Court, and the Charlie's Angels theme.

I wonder if "The Man from Iphania" could be a really distorted rendering of "The Girl from Ipanema" (which is sometimes covered by female artists as "The Boy From Ipanema"), in which case the composer would be Antônio Carlos Jobim. That's a long shot, but Jobim was one of the developers of the bossa nova style, which was an influence on the Trek theme. So it's conceivable.

 

And he was hired to score a couple of second season episodes of the original series. More about that in the future, perhaps.

That's a good guess, but if it's true, what a typo!

 

Hmm... You said the memo was typed up from notes? I assume those were handwritten notes? I'm wondering if there's any way that "The Man from UNCLE," which had premiered a few months earlier, could be handwritten in a weird enough way that it could be misread as "The Man from Iphania." The main composer for TMFU's 1964-5 debut season, Jerry Goldsmith, is already on the list, but if it were somehow a huge typo for that show, it could be in reference to either Morton Stevens (Goldsmith's protege, known for Hawaii Five-O) or Walter Scharf (best known for the National Geographic Specials theme). (I'm not counting Lalo Schifrin, since his only first-season contribution was in an episode that aired in January '65.)

Although I'm very skeptical of this guess, since I doubt the memo would say "the composer of" if it were in reference to one of several composers.

 

Impossible to know. What you see on the blog is all that exists at UCLA.

I thought about The Man From U.N.C.L.E. but it seems pretty far fetched, as you point out.

 

Another record-related research question:

Has anyone here heard of this album? It's a single with the Star Trek theme on one side and "Peter and the Wolf" on the other, from December of 1966.

I've found a couple of images online, but no high resolution images of the Star Trek side.

There may have been a second pressing in 1967, although I don't know that for sure.

 

That guy specialized in easy listening knockoffs of soundtrack music. He scored BIG when his version of "Quentin's Theme" from Dark Shadows became a monster hit. His Star Trek theme appears on this album, from 1972.

ETA: The Star Trek theme was re-released in 1975.

 

Still working on the aforementioned music piece, along with a few other things that are currently in the fire, but I was able to re-post one of Sir Rhosis' unused story reviews (this one, on "The V.I.Ps," co-written by actor Malachi Throne) today.

http://startrekfactcheck.blogspot.com/2014/04/unseen-trek-vips-by-gene-lesser-malachi.html