This is fascinating. I always wish they had kept the Kelso character on as at least a recurring.
Fact-Checking Inside Star Trek: The Real Story
- Thread starter Harvey
- Start date
This is fascinating. I always wish they had kept the Kelso character on as at least a recurring.
Unbelievable. Great find!
Suspect you're on the right track theorising it was just Roddenberry just telling people what he thinks they want to hear. Again.
Will have a look through my library this weekend.
Re: Carabatsos: Looks like he was active until 1987, Star Trek was early in his career.
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0135830/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0135830/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
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TOS had some really good "bridge officers of the week." Kinda makes me sad the other series did away with the convention.
It also added to the feel that the crew compliment of the ship was a lot larger. They didn't need to be starring roles, but they were certainly valuable roles that were also cost manageable for the studio.
He did most of his work in the first season; five episodes as Seaman Clark (promoted in his last episode) and once in the second season as Benson, where he got killed at the end. One final appearance as Clark in the third season via stock footage in an episode primarily made up of stock. Irwin Allen never made a clip show, be he did make a few episodes out of like 60% new footage and 40% stock from other episodes and movies.
Lost in Space had a clip-augmented show where the cast was put on trial for Space Crimes. I looked it up: "The Prisoners of Space." But it wasn't a full-blown "Remember when... and how about the time..." thing. It had its own substantial content.
That still qualifies as a clip show to me. I mean...60/40 is pretty substantially clips as well.
A "clip show" is traditionally a flashback episode. Characters sit around and talk about the past and only think about things we've already seen. Or, worse, they get Lucille Ball to come on and talk about the show for an hour, illustrating it with clips.
What Voyage and LiS did was to take those clips and form a story around them. Yes, Zap, Prisoners of Space was a clip show, but - again agreed - they made those clips integral to the plot and they didn't take up the majority of the episode. Voyage did it differently, presenting the stock footage as if it were new and building a story around it. The actual new footage surrounding the old stuff was usually painstakingly matched to make the transition pretty seamless. I don't agree that these are "clip" shows. They are cheap, yes. Even lazy. But I enjoy them and prefer the attempty to make a new story out of the clips than the usual contrived reasons for characters to remember the past.
What Voyage and LiS did was to take those clips and form a story around them. Yes, Zap, Prisoners of Space was a clip show, but - again agreed - they made those clips integral to the plot and they didn't take up the majority of the episode. Voyage did it differently, presenting the stock footage as if it were new and building a story around it. The actual new footage surrounding the old stuff was usually painstakingly matched to make the transition pretty seamless. I don't agree that these are "clip" shows. They are cheap, yes. Even lazy. But I enjoy them and prefer the attempty to make a new story out of the clips than the usual contrived reasons for characters to remember the past.
Another deja vu inducing budget-saver was when shows would re-film an old script. The series to do this the most had to be Bewitched. There were some scripts they shot three times during their eight-year run. The Bionic Woman shot at least one Six Million Dollar Man script: "Survival of the Fittest" became "Fly Jaime."
When "And the Children Shall Lead" was in production, Fred Freiberger supposedly said "This show is going to be what 'Miri' should have been!" But it wasn't the same story at all. The quote is shocking because "Miri" was pretty good and "Children" was pretty appalling.
At worst, Star Trek can be cited for re-visiting some basic ideas without saving a dime:
- "Where No Man has Gone Before" and "Charlie X."
- "The Squire of Gothos" and "Who Mourns for Adonais?"
- "The Return of the Archons" and "The Apple."
- "Patterns of Force" and "Bread and Circuses."
When "And the Children Shall Lead" was in production, Fred Freiberger supposedly said "This show is going to be what 'Miri' should have been!" But it wasn't the same story at all. The quote is shocking because "Miri" was pretty good and "Children" was pretty appalling.
At worst, Star Trek can be cited for re-visiting some basic ideas without saving a dime:
- "Where No Man has Gone Before" and "Charlie X."
- "The Squire of Gothos" and "Who Mourns for Adonais?"
- "The Return of the Archons" and "The Apple."
- "Patterns of Force" and "Bread and Circuses."
It's weird to think about what you could get away with before home video...
And we'll agree to disagree on Miri as "pretty good"...
Clip shows are a waste of time and TNG did one at the end of it's second season! Lost in Space's clip show was very clever and was integral to the plot and those of us that hadn't seen the earlier episodes in question! These days they just employ the actors for like seven minutes of new material and then bulk up the rest with flashbacks! Terrible television!
JB
JB
That might be the laziest way to do it, but other ways of doing it are still clip shows. After all, Shades of Gray didn't have the plot you describe and that was clearly a clip show.
It's weird to think about what you could get away with before home video...
And we'll agree to disagree on Miri as "pretty good"...
Relatively speaking, "Miri" is "Balance of Terror" good when compared to "And the Children Shall Lead".
As Alidar said, that's still a clip show, just not the most formulaic type. The term refers to the fact that the episode is built around stock footage, regardless of how that footage is integrated. It's a production term more than a story term. There are many different ways of doing clip shows; the "sitting around and reminiscing" approach you describe is only the most cliched.
One of the most imaginative clip shows ever was Andromeda's "The Unconquerable Man." It was set in an alternate timeline where the events of the pilot episode had gone differently -- the series lead Dylan Hunt died and his betrayer Rhade succeeded in taking his place -- and followed Rhade through the events of the early episodes of the series, showing how history unfolded differently as a result. So it incorporated stock footage showing the same events happening to other characters, but the context and impact of those events became totally different.
And there are many clip shows that find ways to tell interesting and important stories driven by the reminiscences. One of my favorites was an episode of the '88 syndicated Superboy series which involved a machine that reconstructed holographic simulations of past events from eyewitness accounts. Lana Lang used the machine to reconstruct Superboy sightings in order to determine who was always present for the danger but then disappeared just before Superboy showed up, and the machine showed that it was Clark Kent. So Lana was convinced Clark was Superboy. But Clark countered that the simulations were based on her accounts of the events, and "For you, when Superboy shows up, I'm not around." It was a pretty effective relationship moment.
I think they're both pretty appalling.
Ideas get reused all the time. There's no such thing as a completely original concept, just an original way of putting pre-existing concepts together.
Also, a lot of those idea categories were about saving money. TOS did a lot of stories about telekinetic characters because it's an inexpensive, "invisible" special effect -- it doesn't require any extra expense to have one actor wave his hand and another actor pantomime being affected by it. And it did stories about aliens fascinated by Earth culture or parallel worlds that duplicated Earth culture because it was cheaper to reuse existing props, costumes, and set pieces from historical shows and films than it was to design and build alien stuff.
By Any Other Name and Wink of an Eye, I'm always getting those two mixed up.
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