Star Trek Publicity Myths

[Zaminhon]

The odd thing is, if he was supposed to bring in young women viewers, why didn't they feature him more? It's like they didn't think it through.

They featured him more than Sulu or Uhura. He even got a first name, unlike them.

Chekov got a lot of screen time in the original series, despite Koenig occasionally lamenting that he didn't get much to do on "Star Trek." Although, in Koenig's defense, I do understand the actor's desire to do more and better work.

Koenig was also featured in teen magazines of the time.

Chekov got to go on more landing parties than either Sulu or Uhura. Played a sizable role in "Who Mourns for Adonias?", "The Deadly Years," "The Gamemasters for Triskillion," "The Apple," "The Spectre of the Gun" and "The Way to Eden."

And, of course, Chekov screamed a lot.

Chekov even got to do a Russian Cossack dance in "I Mudd".

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Chekov even got to do a Russian Cossack dance in "I Mudd".

If it was anything like his accent, then it wasn't a Russian Cossack dance.

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

Chekov even got to do a Russian Cossack dance in "I Mudd".

If it was anything like his accent, then it wasn't a Russian Cossack dance.

But Koenig's accent was a "Russian inwention."

 

[Marsden]

^I think Walter was the best actor of the three, but Chekov was probably the worst character of the three as well.

Just imagining Sulu in the cage with a green alien just doesn't work in my mind. I don't know if that was because of actor availability or script choices.


On another thought:
how about, "He was going to have Scotty selling drugs" or is that the wrong kind of publicity?

 

[Christopher]

Just imagining Sulu in the cage with a green alien just doesn't work in my mind. I don't know if that was because of actor availability or script choices.

If you mean "The Gamesters of Triskelion" and Tamoon, that was during the time that Takei was off filming The Green Berets.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

On another thought:
how about, "He was going to have Scotty selling drugs" or is that the wrong kind of publicity?

I remember that. That was GR using "Scotty" as a fast-and-loose shorthand for the one-time crewman trafficking drugs in Harlan Ellison's version of "The City on the Edge of Forever." Harlan gave him hell for it, very publicly.

And it was a two-front war for Harlan, because Joan Collins went around joking that on Star Trek, she'd played Hitler's girlfriend. He didn't like that either, and as I remember it, he basically called her a giant airhead.

 

[Saga]

On another thought:
how about, "He was going to have Scotty selling drugs" or is that the wrong kind of publicity?

I remember that. That was GR using "Scotty" as a fast-and-loose shorthand for the one-time crewman trafficking drugs in Harlan Ellison's version of "The City on the Edge of Forever." Harlan gave him hell for it, very publicly.

And it was a two-front war for Harlan, because Joan Collins went around joking that on Star Trek, she'd played Hitler's girlfriend. He didn't like that either, and as I remember it, he basically called her a giant airhead.

i remember seeing a clip of that on Sci Fi Buzz a long time ago.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Here's an item I think was probably mythological: the U.S. Navy was so impressed with the Enterprise bridge that they wanted to study it for possible adaption aboard an actual ship.

Sounds like science fiction to me. If I'm not mistaken, that Navy story first appeared in The Making of Star Trek.

 

[Christopher]

Here's an item I think was probably mythological: the U.S. Navy was so impressed with the Enterprise bridge that they wanted to study it for possible adaption aboard an actual ship.

Sounds like science fiction to me. If I'm not mistaken, that Navy story first appeared in The Making of Star Trek.

No, I think that's true. It's not unheard of for real organizations to imitate designs from fiction. For instance, I recall reading in Starlog that Ron Cobb's diving helmet designs for The Abyss, which provided exceptional visibility for the wearer and were actually functional underwater (since the underwater scenes in that film were done for real), attracted the interest of a real diving firm, or the Navy, or something, which wanted to buy or emulate the design.

After all, a lot of film and TV production designers have real-life experience with aviation, engineering, etc. So often they turn out designs that are genuinely practical and functional and worth emulating. It's no more unbelievable than the communicators inspiring the flip phone.

 

[inflatabledalek]

There's the story from Thunderball where the US Navy asked how long the rebreather worked for and werr told "As long as swimer can hold their breath... it's not real".

Also the Doctor Who story The Sea Devil got into trouble with the Ministry of Defence after the designer decided the avaliable pictures of submarines didn't look "right" (in the how it looks on TV sense) and made a model with a back end that looked exactly like the newest top secret nuclear sub. A lot of reassuring had to go on that this was just coincidence rather than someone stealing this hivhly valuable information and not selling it to the Russians but a cheap kids show.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

There's the story from Thunderball where the US Navy asked how long the rebreather worked for and werr told "As long as swimer can hold their breath... it's not real".

The way I heard it, it was British military that inquired about the tiny breathing device.

I recall that a guy working on TOS, probably Jim Rugg, got an inquiry about the ship's sliding doors. Someone who installed automatic doors in supermarkets wanted to know "How do you get your damn doors to open so fast?" And the answer was, we fake it. A stagehand pulls them open.

 

[FormerLurker]

On another thought:
how about, "He was going to have Scotty selling drugs" or is that the wrong kind of publicity?

I remember that. That was GR using "Scotty" as a fast-and-loose shorthand for the one-time crewman trafficking drugs in Harlan Ellison's version of "The City on the Edge of Forever." Harlan gave him hell for it, very publicly.

And it was a two-front war for Harlan, because Joan Collins went around joking that on Star Trek, she'd played Hitler's girlfriend. He didn't like that either, and as I remember it, he basically called her a giant airhead.

Having actually read the Harlan Ellison's script, I found it easy to see where GR, as a producer knowing how studio heads and network executives thought, could have been "skipping a step" and saying Ellison was maligning Scotty, while what he was actually thinking was that said studio and network types would have probably demanded that the one-time character be renamed to Scotty, and write James Doohan out of the show to cut the cast budget.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Here's an item I think was probably mythological: the U.S. Navy was so impressed with the Enterprise bridge that they wanted to study it for possible adaption aboard an actual ship.

Sounds like science fiction to me. If I'm not mistaken, that Navy story first appeared in The Making of Star Trek.

No, I think that's true. It's not unheard of for real organizations to imitate designs from fiction. For instance, I recall reading in Starlog that Ron Cobb's diving helmet designs for The Abyss, which provided exceptional visibility for the wearer and were actually functional underwater (since the underwater scenes in that film were done for real), attracted the interest of a real diving firm, or the Navy, or something, which wanted to buy or emulate the design.

After all, a lot of film and TV production designers have real-life experience with aviation, engineering, etc. So often they turn out designs that are genuinely practical and functional and worth emulating. It's no more unbelievable than the communicators inspiring the flip phone.

If the Navy wanted to learn something really useful from a fictional design, they should have studied the Jupiter 2, and how it fit so much cargo into a small interior volume.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Having actually read the Harlan Ellison's script, I found it easy to see where GR, as a producer knowing how studio heads and network executives thought, could have been "skipping a step" and saying Ellison was maligning Scotty, while what he was actually thinking was that said studio and network types would have probably demanded that the one-time character be renamed to Scotty, and write James Doohan out of the show to cut the cast budget.

Scotty isn't in Ellison's script. At all. How the heck could the network demand Scotty be written out of the script if he was never in it in the first place?

 

[Maurice]

Having actually read the Harlan Ellison's script, I found it easy to see where GR, as a producer knowing how studio heads and network executives thought, could have been "skipping a step" and saying Ellison was maligning Scotty, while what he was actually thinking was that said studio and network types would have probably demanded that the one-time character be renamed to Scotty, and write James Doohan out of the show to cut the cast budget.

[Dennis]

[/Dennis]

 

[Christopher]

Having actually read the Harlan Ellison's script, I found it easy to see where GR, as a producer knowing how studio heads and network executives thought, could have been "skipping a step" and saying Ellison was maligning Scotty, while what he was actually thinking was that said studio and network types would have probably demanded that the one-time character be renamed to Scotty, and write James Doohan out of the show to cut the cast budget.

But it wasn't something he said to network executives at the time; it was something he claimed in the press many years later. Or at least, Ellison claimed that Roddenberry claimed it, though Roddenberry denied it. Ellison's City on the Edge of Forever book cites a March '87 Video Review article in which Roddenberry makes the claim, but I can't find the original article itself to confirm. A commenter on Wikipedia's talk page for the episode claims that Roddenberry was refuting the Scotty claim as early as 1982. In any case, though, it seems to be a claim that emerged some years after the episode, not something that came up during production.

 

[Admiral James Kirk]

There's the story from Thunderball where the US Navy asked how long the rebreather worked for and werr told "As long as swimer can hold their breath... it's not real".

The way I heard it, it was British military that inquired about the tiny breathing device.

I recall that a guy working on TOS, probably Jim Rugg, got an inquiry about the ship's sliding doors. Someone who installed automatic doors in supermarkets wanted to know "How do you get your damn doors to open so fast?" And the answer was, we fake it. A stagehand pulls them open.

Weird question: In this day and age, does the technology exist to make an automatic door open that fast? I've never seen one that does but why can't it be done?

 

[Phantom]

There's the story from Thunderball where the US Navy asked how long the rebreather worked for and werr told "As long as swimer can hold their breath... it's not real".

The way I heard it, it was British military that inquired about the tiny breathing device.

I recall that a guy working on TOS, probably Jim Rugg, got an inquiry about the ship's sliding doors. Someone who installed automatic doors in supermarkets wanted to know "How do you get your damn doors to open so fast?" And the answer was, we fake it. A stagehand pulls them open.

And there were a staggering number of miscues because the guy stuck in the little cubby pulling the mechanism would doze off because it was so warm.

Weird question: In this day and age, does the technology exist to make an automatic door open that fast? I've never seen one that does but why can't it be done?

Depends on what you mean by "that fast"? If you watch closely, you'll see the opening times vary a bit from ep to ep. Some of them really fast, some much slower, and some of them comparable to a supermarket front door or faster elevator door.

 

[Timo]

Because doors interact with people? Having anything move fast next to people who both move and think slow is recipe for disaster in the general case.

There would be some wear and tear involved in a snap-open, snap-shut arrangement, but the industry does have plenty of such things. They just get used in furnaces and the like, not where people or their limbs are involved.

But it wasn't something he said to network executives at the time; it was something he claimed in the press many years later.

How would that affect the logic of what was being suggested? GR sees the script where a redshirt peddles drugs; he knows that if this had been used, the redshirt would have become Scotty (for obvious reasons of TV tradition: "always have it be about the main characters, to create emotional involvement"), and possibly Ellison should have known this would happen as well. He can then use this as a blunt instrument at any time of his liking, including on his deathbed.

That the character would become Scotty specifically in order to assassinate and then scuttle the character doesn't sound likely. But that the character, if included, would become Scotty was probably always a real prospect.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Karzak]

Harvey's been doing a good job at busting a lot of these myths using actual production memos and various script drafts from the UCLA Roddenberry archive. See this thread: http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=215992

Or check out his blog "Star Trek Fact Check": http://startrekfactcheck.blogspot.com/

+1 Superbly written, and well-researched. Highly recommended.