or "tronquility" instead of tranquility in The Omega Glory...
a cut price Season 4
- Thread starter Khan 2.0
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or "tronquility" instead of tranquility in The Omega Glory...
Might be worth remembering that Shatner was born in Montreal. He must've grown up among French speakers. I can see that influencing his pronunciation of "tranquility." Although that doesn't explain his pronunciation of "sabotage," considering that the standard English pronunciation is nearly the same as the French. Maybe it's a local Montreal dialect or something.
ha! I've never noticed that one before. Almost enough to convince me to go rewatch Omega Glory. Almost...
There would have been more bottle shows. Probably more back lot shooting, with scripts incorporating whatever sets were around for other shows at the time. More episodes involving aliens taking over human bodies or similar plots that would not require a lot of SFX or makeup. Time travel to the 1960s.
An interesting development could have been more shows featuring Starfleet ships and settings, as uniforms were already around to provide costuming, and the sets could easily be redressed to represent Starbases or other ships. In a way, I would have liked to have seen that, as until the SFX were redone a few years ago, Star Trek was curiously devoid of much about other ships and Starfleet operations.
At the same time, the cinematography would likely have been less "film-like" -- look at how gorgeous the early Mission: Impossible! episodes are, with the technicolor and lighting, compared to the washed out look they had by the early 70s. The episodes probably would have been more talky, too -- dialogue in a room's cheap.
An interesting development could have been more shows featuring Starfleet ships and settings, as uniforms were already around to provide costuming, and the sets could easily be redressed to represent Starbases or other ships. In a way, I would have liked to have seen that, as until the SFX were redone a few years ago, Star Trek was curiously devoid of much about other ships and Starfleet operations.
At the same time, the cinematography would likely have been less "film-like" -- look at how gorgeous the early Mission: Impossible! episodes are, with the technicolor and lighting, compared to the washed out look they had by the early 70s. The episodes probably would have been more talky, too -- dialogue in a room's cheap.
I would have loved to have seen a season or two of ST as an anthology that jumped from ship to ship every week. Like you say, it'd be relatively easy to redress/reuse sets and costumes for this and it really would have added to the depth of the universe. My ultimate fantasy ST show would actually be a serialized anthology, always told from the UFP PoV, but with recurring antagonists. It'd be tricky to write, and some would balk at the idea of having the only regular cast members be villains and non-PoV, but I think it could work. A truly skillful writer could also have one episode a season from the recurring antagonist PoV which flipped the conflict on its head and made the audience sympathize with the characters they had been cheering against for 20+ episodes. It'd be a truly humanistic vision if done properly.
Was it you or someone else who called out the Genesis device as ludicrous "god tech" as a reason to dislike Wrath of Khan? Transporters and replicators used for medicine would be even more disruptive, I think, so I'm glad they avoided it.
Timing matters. If you do a spinoff while the parent show is still on, that's one thing. If you let the actors go and replace it with another cast or an anthology with or without changing the name of the show, you are basically pulling the rug out from under the fan-base. It's like another band coming on-stage after the main act has walked off. It inevitably feels like a let-down no matter how valiantly the followup act tries.
The examples that come to mind are where some of the cast leave and they don't get replaced. Shirley leaving Laverne & Shirley and Blake leaving Blake's 7 are big examples. In other cases, replacing a key character works. For my money, Harry Morgan is much more watchable than McLean Stevenson on MASH.
Actually anthologies were highly popular in 1950s-60s television, and there have been a number of more-or-less successful anthologies since, like the revivals of The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and The Outer Limits, or Spielberg's Amazing Stories or The Ray Bradbury Theater.
Plus there were plenty of shows in the era that were designed to be effectively anthologies even though they had continuing characters. There were many shows in the vein of The Fugitive or The Incredible Hulk, where a single lead character wandered into a different set of guest stars' stories each week, and the story was more about the guest stars than the regular lead. Even Quantum Leap in the '80s was essentially a disguised anthology, with the lead actor literally playing a different protagonist every week, after a fashion, and dealing not only with different characters and problems but different settings and eras.
Those are opposite problems. Genesis doesn't make sense, among other reasons, because it's absurdly powerful compared to the other Federation technology of the era -- a problem only compounded by the absence of any Federation technology on a comparable level in later shows set decades later. Its existence is inconsistent with the context, and what it can do is implausible. But transporters are an established technology in the franchise, so it's inconsistent and implausible that they aren't used to their full extent.
Agree on there being more bottle shows. But gaining access to swing sets temporarily used by other shows might have been more difficult, and those other shows would have had priority in airing those sets first. Using standing sets from other shows, like Jim Phelps' apartment in Mission: Impossible, probably wouldn't have been allowed. In the old studio system days of the 1930s-1950s, it was common for "B" movies and shorts (like the Three Stooges) to use sets from high budget "A" pictures that were still standing. But they couldn't run those in theaters until the "A" films had been released.
Backlot shooting was expensive though, even on the home studio lot, because you have to move everybody and equipment outdoors, and maybe provide lunch. A fourth season on reduced budget probably wouldn't have been able to do outdoor shooting at all. I think "The Paradise Syndrome" is the only outdoor show in Season 3. Oh, there is a brief outdoor scene in "All Our Yesterdays" with Kirk defending the prostitute from guards.
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Probably, but Star Trek was produced at Desilu and Paramount, which had a fairly extensive production facility. One can see the sharing of props and sound effects from Star Trek on Mission: Impossible!, for instance. But even assuming this wasn't the case or that costs would be too high, it would have been possible for the show to film on the cheap. Imagine a script where Kirk or another character, for instance, were suddenly whisked away from the Enterprise and put on a strange world (perhaps a back lot) by himself while the crew back aboard the Enterprise searched for him. Sure, this is essentially The Tholian Web, The Paradise Syndrome, Wink of an Eye, The Mark of Gideon, and so forth, but they could have mined that basic premise many times.
They could have done some whodunnits, where, say, a murder was committed aboard the Enterprise or other mundane bottle plots. With a limited budget, they might have even been forced to be even more creative. Imagine a Star Trek episode more or less like "The Cold Equations," where McCoy is trapped aboard a shuttlecraft with a stowaway and must make the agonizing decision to jettison him or her. By the fourth season, they would simply have been looking to increase the number of episodes to make syndication even more attractive to local stations rather than necessarily producing top ideas.
They could have done some whodunnits, where, say, a murder was committed aboard the Enterprise or other mundane bottle plots. With a limited budget, they might have even been forced to be even more creative. Imagine a Star Trek episode more or less like "The Cold Equations," where McCoy is trapped aboard a shuttlecraft with a stowaway and must make the agonizing decision to jettison him or her. By the fourth season, they would simply have been looking to increase the number of episodes to make syndication even more attractive to local stations rather than necessarily producing top ideas.
Obviously "Tales of the Unexpected" shows have drawing power, you're right, but I don't know of any successful anthology show that didn't have the all-important creep factor. They also tend to rely on the big twist ending, which I don't think should be a regular story device in Trek.
You forgot Lassie! Unlike GM's suggestion, these do all have a consistent central character.
Actually it was allowed and it was done. There's a well-known example of a Mission: Impossible episode that was shot on a redress of the Brady Bunch home set: http://www.invisiblethemepark.com/2013/12/when-mission-impossible-invaded-the-brady-bunch-house/
And then there was the second-season M:I episode "Trial by Fury," which was shot on the part of the Culver City backlot used as Stalag 13 in Hogan's Heroes. And of course there were Kirk and Edith walking down a Mayberry street and passing Floyd's Barber Shop in "City on the Edge of Forever." And I think I remember reading once about a Get Smart episode using Gilligan's Island's lagoon backlot. If shows could use each other's regular backlot sets, there's no reason they couldn't use each other's soundstage sets as well. It's just a matter of scheduling.
There are also instances where one show is able to use sets that were made for another production that's recently ended. There was a Sliders episode that made use of the standing sets from the short-lived Timecop series. And the interiors of the battlestar Pegasus from the Galactica reboot were redresses of the sets for the failed The Robinsons: Lost in Space pilot. And when Stargate SG-1 did episodes featuring William Devane as the US president, they were reusing the White House sets built for X2: X-Men United. It happens all the time.
Yes, obviously, but the point is that they were still trying to approximate anthology-style storytelling despite having a consistent lead. The advantage of having a regular star was that it brought that star's fans back from week to week, and it was probably cheaper to have a regular under contract then to hire a new cast each week. But at the time, the preferred approach to storytelling was the anthology model. In the '50s, the classiest TV shows had been the anthologies, the "playhouse" series that adapted a different pre-existing or original play each week, and so that was the model that other shows aspired to creatively, even when they embraced the logistical and production benefits of a continuing lead. That's why we've had so many shows where the lead was dealing with different guest characters' problems every week, or where the lead was adopting a different identity every week. Following a continuing lead like Richard Kimble or David Banner or Sam Beckett was just an excuse to meet a different set of characters with a different set of problems in each new episode. It was one step above an anthology series having a regular host like Rod Serling or Alfred Hitchcock. There was a radio anthology in the '40s called The Whistler where the title character was nominally involved in the situations he encountered each week, but in practice was little more than a spectator and narrator for stories that were about the other characters, with the Whistler himself remaining a cipher. Since characters like Kimble and Beckett were trying to subsume themselves within their adopted identities, the stories weren't really about them most of the time. They were about the people they encountered, a different drama with a different cast every week. The dramatic benefits of an anthology combined with the production benefits of a continuing lead.
Christopher, did you mention the 50s series The Millionaire when discussing disguised anthology shows centered around a single main character? I watched that frequently as a kid. It always opened with Marvin Miller (voice of Robby the Robot) addressing the audience with
"My name is Michael Anthony, and until his death just a few years ago, I was the executive secretary to the late John Beresford Tipton, Jr. John Beresford Tipton, a fabulously wealthy and fascinating man, whose many hobbies included his habit of giving away one million dollars, tax free, each week — to persons he had never even met."
He'd then deliver a check to the guest star in a scene, and that would be his only appearance in the story.
^Never heard of The Millionaire.
Yeah, late '50s is significantly before my time. If something wasn't rerun on TV in the '70s or later, I probably don't know much about it.
Although Galactica was bad, very bad, at least we got to see the colonials actually reach earth rather than let their story never be ended! But yes it was bad, very bad,Sev!
JB
