Trek guest actors in maybe surprising roles

And boy did Benson piss Superman off. At one point Superman wanted to paste him one.

 

Shouldn't that be Richard Tatro, Forbin?
JB

 

D'OH!
Well, it starts with an R...

 

That was annoying. It was one thing when Rollin or Paris tried to fool Westerners into thinking they were Asian. But "Butterfly" asked us to believe that actual Japanese people, including a character noted for his racial purism, would believe that a guy who looked like Leonard Nimoy with fake epicanthic folds was an actual Japanese person.

Although it's to the episode's credit that nearly all the real Japanese characters were played by Asian actors, with the exception of Kenneth "Khigh Dhiegh" Dickerson, who was Anglo-Egyptian but made a career out of pretending to be East Asian. This was the one and only time the original M:I did an episode set in Asia, and they could certainly have done worse. (The '88 revival filmed in Australia used Asian or Pacific settings frequently, and was often very racist in ways the original series usually avoided.)

"Butterfly" has one other Trek guest, sort of -- James Shigeta, who played Admiral Nogura in the famous never-completed fan film Yorktown II: A Time to Heal with George Takei, which was covered in a Starlog article back in the '80s. (At least, never completed at the time. I gather someone's been working on completing it recently.)

 

M:I's credibility suffered when it started using the same core cast for every mission. The original idea was that there'd be a handful of rotating semi-regulars alongside guest agents of the week recruited for their mission-appropriate skills (e.g. Wally Cox as a safe-cracker, Albert Paulson as a photographic memory guy, Mary Ann Mobley or Eartha Kitt as an acrobat), but by the time Nimoy came on board, they'd pretty much settled into having the same team every week (except for the lack of a regular female lead in season 4). Instead of trying to pass off the same disguise artist as everyone, it would've been more plausible if they'd kept the disguise artist as a rotating or special-guest slot. For instance, in "Butterfly," it would've made more sense to recruit a Japanese team member to play the kabuki actor.

Heck, given how the IMF was supposed to work, they should've recruited an actual kabuki actor to play the kabuki actor. That was the whole original idea, that these weren't professional agents but talented amateurs (to coin a phrase) recruited off the books to give the government deniability, and to provide whatever specialized skills a mission needed. But that unfortunately got kind of lost along the way.

 

KIRK: My friend is obviously Chinese.

 

It's very telling about that era's prejudices when you realize how many of TOS's aliens were based on Orientalist tropes. Spock had yellow-green skin and black hair and was presumed to have an Asian-like appearance, and by extension the same would go for all Vulcans and Romulans (though Romulans were largely based on Ancient Rome, of course). Klingons were intended to be space Mongols (and the James Blish adaptations explicitly describe them as "originally of Oriental stock"). Orions and Argelians were both portrayed using stock Middle-Eastern tropes like belly dancers. Asian actresses were cast to play the Argelians Kara and Sybo and the Elasian Dohlman Elaan. The original story premise for "Mirror, Mirror" featured an enemy power called the Tharn who were described in the outline as having an "Oriental quality about them." Capellans were sort of a mix of Arab and Native American tribal tropes. The Children of Vaal were based on Pacific Islander tropes, guileless primitives and cargo-cult worshippers. And of course it got particularly blatant and outright racist with the Kohms of Omega IV, whom Kirk literally called "the yellow civilization."

For all its faults, at least the third season mostly avoided this kind of thing, Elaan aside.

 

I thought it was the eyebrows.

Why "Elaan aside"? The Elasians are shown to be multiracial with their queen (Dohlman) as an asian. Unless you're talking about their racial hatred of their enemies, the green-skinned Troyians which is part of the plot? The story is more about palace intrigue with a spoiled, bratty queen who doesn't want to go through with an arranged marriage as part of a peace treaty between two warring planets, and forces within the palace who want to scuttle the treaty. Arranged marriages between kingdoms were a common method in most-European times for peace treaties.

 

I think calling them "multiracial" is missing the point -- looking at it through modern expectations rather than the way audiences and producers in the '60s would've seen it. It was more like having one token real Asian alongside a bunch of white actors playing faux-Asians, a common practice in '60s TV. As the M:I example above shows, real Asians and yellowface actors were seen as interchangeable. Even if the featured guest star were cast authentically, they'd still often be surrounded by secondary players in yellowface.

The point is that the only times Asian actors were cast as aliens in TOS is when they were meant to be members of cultures coded with Orientalist tropes -- in the case of Elaan, an exotic and desirable barbarian queen whose savage and deadly nature had to be tamed by the white male hero. The racial cliches came first, the casting second. Note that they cast a white actor (painted azure) as the more "civilized" Troyian ambassador. That kind of trope wouldn't be featured in a story based purely on European marriage alliances -- the Elasians were barbarians, alluring but uncivilized, exactly as Eastern cultures were routinely stereotyped in Western fiction for generations. Yes, obviously the story is inspired by Helen of Troy and also owes much to The Taming of the Shrew, but there's some gender-swapped The King and I in there too.

And it was only the women, since Asian women were fetishized as exotically alluring -- which was why Shatner kissing France Nuyen (or "Wolf in the Fold" presenting Tania Lemani as a potential sex partner for James Doohan and Pilar Seurat as the wife of Charles Macaulay) was not as controversial as Shatner kissing Nichelle Nichols.

 

The BBC used to show Mission Impossible in a haphazard ordering as I recall! Episodes with Martin Landau & Barbara Bain interspersed with Leonard Nimoy ones the following week and that way you get a changing team every other show although the reboot in 88 & 89 actually had a member die and be replaced plus some of the original cast did return on occasion too!
JB

 

Most likely, the producers/writers (and in-universe, the IMF staff) felt that Paris wouldn't be that well-known to be uncovered that much, so he could be a Japanese man and also a Japanese man in Kabuki makeup. But yeah, they should've done what you said.

 

Vic Tayback in Tower Beyond Tragedy, an episode of The Streets of San Francisco!
JB

 

Catching up on our classics, we watched Rebel Without a Cause for our Saturday night movie. Ian Wolfe showed up running the show at Griffith Observatory. 14 years before Mr Atoz and he still looked 100 years old (he was actually only 59 when he was in the movie).

 

William Bramley in My Friend, Mr.Nobody, an episode of Lost in Space!
JB

 

Good episode, good and rare showcase for Angela Cartwright, plus an enduring John Williams score that I still play to this day.

 

Not a 'guest actor', more of a 'guest sound' in a surprising role.
Thanks to the 50% off Criterion Collection at Barnes and Noble, I picked up a copy of George Pal's 'War of the Worlds'.
In the 'Special Features' extras there's a featurette on the movies' Special Effects.
In it, the restoration team talk about how the the sound of the Martian war machine firing its lasers from the tips of its wings was created by striking a large coiled metal spring with a sledgehammer, recording it, slowing it down, adding reveb and other effects.
That sound was later used as the sound of the Enterprise firing its photon torpedoes

 

Mayyyybe. There's a noticeable difference between the two sounds. The Trek torpedo sound has a sharper attack (beginning) and is more resonant. The Martian plasma bolt effect sounds more muffled to me. I suppose it's possible that they're the same recording processed in two different ways, or maybe two different takes from the same recording session, but they're not exactly identical. (Ben Burtt later used much the same process, striking a taut metal cable, to create blaster sounds for Star Wars.)

However, the whistling sound of the Martian War Machines' levitation beams is the same sound effect as the phasers, but slowed down to a lower pitch. And I'm pretty sure I recall the "zee-zee-zeew" sound of the Martian heat ray showing up in ST:TAS. It was definitely used often in Filmation shows.