Trek guest actors in maybe surprising roles

Discussion in 'Star Trek - The Original & Animated Series' started by Maurice, Mar 12, 2013.

  1. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Michael Ansara was 6'3". Didn't pose a problem.
     
  2. Praetor Baldric

    Praetor Baldric Lieutenant Commander

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    Dig this:

    Vincent Price as:
    1) Claudius Marcus
    2) A Vian
    3) Mr. Atoz
    4) Lincoln
    5) Col. Green
    6) Lincoln and Col. Green (cool duality there)
    7) Garth
    8) Plasus
    9) Flint
    10) Korob
     
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  3. Forbin

    Forbin Admiral Admiral

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    In one of those little cosmic coincidences, I was reading that new Trek book "These Are the Voyages" this afternoon, the chapter about "What Are Little Girls Made of?"

    Then tonight we picked a random episode of "Naked City" to watch, and Michael Strong was the featured crook!
     
  4. Greg Cox

    Greg Cox Admiral Premium Member

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    On the other hand, Price did play tormented, possibly murderous thespians in both Madhouse and Theater of Blood.

    And, you know, he would have been perfect for "Catspaw."
     
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  5. Melakon

    Melakon Admiral In Memoriam

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    Vincent Price as Richard Daystrom. Price could have brought as much theatricality to it as William Marshall.
     
  6. Maurice

    Maurice Snagglepussed Admiral

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    In addition to his talent, Marshall had a physical bearing that really sold the character that Price didn't possess.
     
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  7. The Old Mixer

    The Old Mixer Mih ssim, mih ssim, nam, daed si Xim. Moderator

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    William Campbell spent some time handcuffed in the backseat of Adam-12 today.
     
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  8. Melakon

    Melakon Admiral In Memoriam

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    Agreed, no complaints about Marshall's work. I still wish they could have gotten Leslie Nielsen back then for something, he was all over the place in the 60s as villains.
     
  9. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Captain Captain

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    A fun MANNIX conicidence regarding TREK actors:

    In season one, Mannix is hired by a potential gubernatorial candidate to dig up dirt on himself in an effort to see if his political rivals could do the same. Charles Drake ("Commodore Stocker") plays the politician in "Skid Marks On A Dry Run."

    [​IMG]

    In season six, Mannix is hired by a potential gubernatorial candidate to dig up dirt on himself in an effort to see if his political rivals could do the same. William Shatner ("Captain Kirk") plays the politician in "Search For A Whisper.

    [​IMG]

    Sound the same? You bet. The season six offering was a re-do of the same John Meredyth Lucas script. It was possibly done again because of a potential Writers Guild strike in 1973.

    Oh - and for more Trek actors, you'll find Vic Perrin inhabiting the season one episode, and Yvonne Craig and Phillip Pine in the season six version.

    Harry
     
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  10. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Wow, they really figured TV was a disposable medium back then, didn't they? I've heard of shows remaking scripts from other shows, and there's a Bionic Woman episode that's a remake of a Six Million Dollar Man episode -- but the same show doing the same script twice, five years apart? I've never seen that before.
     
  11. Mysterion

    Mysterion Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I've recently noticed Arlene "T'Pring" Martel in two episodes of The Monkees. In one, she is a blonde russian spy. In the other, a dark-haired assistant to a vampire. Pretty and funny in both.
     
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  12. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Captain Captain

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    It happened on MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE too - while the show was still on CBS. They also recycled some scripts for the later ABC incarnation of the series - that was also due to a writers strike.

    Harry
     
  13. Praetor Baldric

    Praetor Baldric Lieutenant Commander

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    ^I am guessing this was possible because there were no reruns then?
     
  14. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    I don't recall any such instances. Sure, the sixth-season "Invasion" was pretty similar to the first-season "Operation Rogosh," but they weren't identical and they had different writing credits.


    I didn't count that because it wasn't the same contiguous series, but a revival/sequel series fifteen years later. The only reason M:I was revived at all was because of the '88 writers' strike -- the networks feared they'd have no new content, so they revived the show as a way to reuse old scripts, intending to have new actors play the original characters. But the strike ended soon enough that they instead decided to bring back Peter Graves as Jim Phelps, rename the other characters so it'd be a sequel rather than a remake, rewrite the four reused scripts just a bit to modernize them, and do original scripts for the rest of the series.

    You have to admit that the same continuing show remaking one of its own scripts after only five years is a rather different situation. I've seen a number of shows with unbroken runs longer than five years, but I can't think of any other instance of the same show shooting the same script twice.
     
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  15. Melakon

    Melakon Admiral In Memoriam

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    Obviously you've never seen any Three Stooges shorts. ;)
     
  16. M'Sharak

    M'Sharak Definitely Herbert. Maybe. Moderator

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    Nope - there were reruns then. A show's year typically went something like:
    Fall season (13 new eps)
    Reruns
    Spring season (13 new eps)
    Reruns
    Summer (more reruns)​

    Shows no longer in production might be shown as reruns in a regular afternoon or weekend slot - I remember watching The Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, One Step Beyond, The Rifleman, Branded, The Real McCoys and other shows in those timeslots. Summer would be mostly reruns until the early 1970s when the idea began to catch on of introducing a new show as a summer replacement series.
     
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  17. Melakon

    Melakon Admiral In Memoriam

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    Also during the summers of the 1960s, networks would sometimes create a show title but just run unsold tv pilots, as if they were an anthology series. I think that mostly stopped due to complaints from the unions regarding residual benefits.
     
  18. Forbin

    Forbin Admiral Admiral

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    There was a Charlie's Angels where one of them gets accidentally grazed in the head by a kid playing with a real gun and gets amnesia. It was a direct reuse of a script from a Mod Squad ep (Julie was hit in that).

    Then there was that TNG ep where Riker is accused of murdering an alien scientist to get his wife, and they reenct the crime on a holodeck. The same script was recycled on Voyager with Tom Paris in the hot seat. Can't recall either ep title at the moment.

    And if you wanna see a complete theft, watch the closing scenes of Babylon 5's "Mind War", then watch the closing scenes of Voyager's "The Gift." Complete. Rip. off.
     
  19. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Captain Captain

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    Okay, I'll concede that one. My statement came from an interpretation of a paragraph in THE COMPLETE MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE DOSSIER by Patrick J. White, wherein Mr White writes in the notes for the seventh season episode, "Two Thousand" (emphasis mine):

    After reading that, you can understand why I thought it was a direct remake of the same script, yet the writers credits are different. So my apologies for my incorrect assumptions.

    I also have a feeling - and no proof - that there may have been episodes of BEWITCHED with recycled scripts and different Darrens. A BEWITCHED expert could probably confirm or deny that.

    As for the MANNIX recycle, the producers probably figured that the show was different enough - in season one, Mannix worked for Intertect and in all other seasons he was out on his own - that only diehard fans would remember the script.

    One of the reasons MANNIX was finally canceled after eight seasons was that Paramount wanted to sell it into syndication so that ABC could run it in late-nights. In those days, syndications didn't start until the series was finished its prime time network run - a situation that would soon change.

    So, the thought process was probably that no-one would recall that earlier version of the same script. And season one was never offered in syndication.

    Harry
     
  20. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Oh, the networks were doing "showcases" like that well into the '80s. In the '60s, though, they often did actual summer-replacement series, often variety shows and such. Reruns existed, but were far less common than they later became. In fact, I've seen it asserted that it was the success of Star Trek in rerun syndication -- with far fewer episodes, and thus more repetition, than a standard syndication package would have -- that convinced TV programmers that audiences would tolerate more reruns, and led to the ongoing reduction in the number of new episodes per year that we've had ever since.


    Those were not the same story. In TNG's "A Matter of Perspective" by Ed Zuckerman, which was a riff on Rashomon, the holodeck was used to reconstruct the crime from various perspectives. In VGR's "Ex Post Facto" by Evan Carlos Somers and Michael Piller, Tom Paris was forced to relive the victim's memories of the crime over and over, and Tuvok used a mind meld to experience Paris's own memories; no holodeck was involved.

    It's true that there were some stories that were very similar in concept, like DS9's "Shadowplay" and ENT's "Oasis" or DS9's "Children of Time" and ENT's "E^2." But they were still different scripts by different writers. Using similar concepts is not the same as actually remaking the same script, which is what we're talking about here. The two Mannix episodes under discussion had different titles and character names, but they were both credited to John Meredyth Lucas.


    Oh, come on. Different stories have similarities to each other all the time. That's not deliberate theft, it's just because there are only so many ways to put story elements together. And we're not talking about perceived similarities between different stories, we're talking about the exact same script being refilmed. That's a completely different subject.


    Quoting from my own blog review of "Two Thousand":
    Though of course neither was literally a remake; all three scripts had different credits.



    Well, that makes sense. Sort of like how The Naked Gun reused a lot of jokes from Police Squad! because that show had been cancelled after 6 episodes and they didn't expect anyone would ever see it again. But really, what surprises me is not so much that Mannix did it, but that I can't recall any other show from the era doing it.
     
    Last edited: Aug 17, 2013
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