I have a stupid question. Is there a Star Trek novel or comic depicting Jeffrey Hunter's Pike with a mustache, or did I hallucinate it? I thought it was "The Rift" but it isn't.
Pike's mustache
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
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Thank you! I thought I was going mad.
I think they added the mustache in that DC annual because there were some issues with Jeffrey Hunter's likeness rights, but I could just be remembering a rumor.
No, that was exactly it. I heard it from Mike Friedman himself at a long-ago Shore Leave. DC didn't have Hunter's likeness rights, but no one told Gordon Purcell that, so Pike was inked to have a rocking 'stache.
No reason he couldn't. Maybe
he's inspired by Sam Kirk to grow one.
Yeah, there are a couple "Cage" actors where likeness rights weren't available. Hunter was sorted by the time of Early Voyages (which makes sense, you'd want your captain to look right) but a couple characters in that series didn't really look like their actors-- Boyce and Tyler IIRC.
Yes, I believe they weren't able to get in contact with anyone related to the actor that played Boyce so they had no way to get likeness rights. Wondered if that might be why we also haven't seen him on SNW.
I'm still sore that the Early Voyages comic ended when it did. I was looking forward to what they were cooking up for future issues. Conflict with Robert April, Pike's grandfather involved in the disastrous first contact with the Klingons etc.
Only when you talk about the size of those Enterprise windows...
Why? Paramount owns the rights to the character, and whoever would have been (re)cast in SNW as Boyce wasn't going to be a clone of John Hoyt. Did they need anyone's permission to recast the TOS cast in the Kelvin films or the streaming shows?
Likeness rights, naturally, are for actors, not characters, so they'd have zero bearing on casting. The reasons they didn't use Boyce are probably a) that he was another white guy and they wanted more diversity, and perhaps b) that he was just McCoy with a different name anyway.
Boyce and McCoy are certainly closer to each other than either one is to Mark Piper. Although maybe McCoy is slightly less inclined to play bartender.
And to momentarily digress about doctors, I still have yet to see anything etched in stone about SNW M'Benga and TOS M'Benga being the same person (as opposed to simply being relatives: it's hardly unusual for medicine to be a "family business"; I have a friend, a retired gynecologist, whose uncle had been a general surgeon).
"Word of God" notwithstanding: after all, pre-Datalore, "Word of God" (my understanding was that it was in the writers' guide) was that Data had been created by unknown advanced entities as an atonement for accidentally destroying the colony where he'd been found. Every detail of which lasted a dozen episodes.
And to momentarily digress about doctors, I still have yet to see anything etched in stone about SNW M'Benga and TOS M'Benga being the same person (as opposed to simply being relatives: it's hardly unusual for medicine to be a "family business"; I have a friend, a retired gynecologist, whose uncle had been a general surgeon).
"Word of God" notwithstanding: after all, pre-Datalore, "Word of God" (my understanding was that it was in the writers' guide) was that Data had been created by unknown advanced entities as an atonement for accidentally destroying the colony where he'd been found. Every detail of which lasted a dozen episodes.
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Only because Piper had no personality. He was just there to deliver exposition.
Basically, Roddenberry wanted DeForest Kelley to play the doctor from the start, but the schedules wouldn't work out, so he settled for other actors. He changed the names of the pilot characters when they were recast, but they were written exactly the same regardless, with only the actors' interpretations making them distinct. (Compare Boyce in Pike's quarters in "The Cage" to McCoy in Kirk's quarters in "Balance of Terror." They're basically the same scene.) But the doctor had so little to do in "Where No Man" that Paul Fix didn't have anything to work with and left no real impression.
Tell that to Evil Kirk. "I said brandy!"
Joseph M'Benga's personnel file was glimpsed in a screen graphic in "Under the Cloak of War." It mentions his parents Wangera and Gichinga M'Benga, his brother Nicolas M'Benga, and his sisters Nyawira Ochambo and Sikudhani M'Benga. (No mention of Rukiya, but I guess she's presumed dead.) It's possible that the TOS character could be Nicolas if he's a younger brother, but since he's listed first among the siblings, that implies he's the eldest.
I don't know if that counts as "Word of God." I take that as meaning something the creators reveal to the general audience about their intentions. A series bible is an internal production document, a tentative guide meant only to suggest possibilities to freelance writers without restricting their creativity. It's not meant as a "public-facing" document, even though Lincoln Enterprises sold the series bibles to interested fans and collectors.
Who knows? Piper was very little to do in WNMHGB and had no opportunity to show any really distinct personality. Even more than Boyce, he is unlikely to be seen in SNW.
EDIT: Christopher, you beat me to it.
I wonder how that episode would have played out if Kelley's McCoy had been there, and how much involvement he would have had in the story, if they wrote it with McCoy's personality and portrayal in specific mind.
It would have to have been written after a few episodes were filmed. Kelley took what was originally just another Boyce figure and made the character his own.
Exactly. On paper, Boyce, Piper, and McCoy were the exact same character with the name changed, same as Pike and Kirk, same as Yeomen Colt, Smith, and Rand. Not to mention that Pike was Robert April until shortly before filming, and Kirk was Winter until shortly before filming. Only the name changed, not the personality -- not until the writers had time to see how an actor interpreted the part and start adjusting the character to their performance.
It wasn't uncommon to do that in '60s TV, to write characters interchangeably and just alter the names. A notable example was Maverick; to keep from falling behind its production schedule, the show gave its main character a brother and alternated episodes between the two leads, with two entire crews filming their respective episodes in parallel. But the scriptwriters didn't know which brother they were writing for, since that wasn't decided until late in the process. So on paper, they were the same, and it was only the two actors' personalities that distinguished them. There's also Mission: Impossible; Leonard Nimoy's Paris was exactly the same character as Martin Landau's Rollin Hand, except in how the actors interpreted the role.
Pike was called Winter until shortly before filming - I was unaware that Kirk was as well.
Maybe it wasn't Winter, but it was something other than Kirk.
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