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Trek guest actors in maybe surprising roles

Speaking of James Gregory.
I caught "Where is Everybody" this morning's episode of The Twilight Zone, and I'd forgotten he'd appeared at the end as the military officer.
Right after that was The Many Loves of Dobbie Gillis and William Schallart as a teacher.
 
pseudo-anthology format focusing on guest stars Wagon Train

But Wagon Train was a very successful show that ran for eight seasons and 284 episodes, and that had a guest star-driven format. So there's a high probability that any actor in 1960s Hollywood who'd been active prior to 1965 would have guest-starred on Wagon Train at least once. You could no doubt find multiple WT veterans in the casts of dozens of later shows.
And, of course, there were pure anthology series, such as Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. The casts were all guest stars.
 
And, of course, there were pure anthology series, such as Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. The casts were all guest stars.

Exactly. Pure anthologies were not only common, but were the classiest dramas, and a better fit for the nature of early TV when there was no guarantee you'd get to see every episode or see them rerun, so it was better for each episode to be a complete experience. It was the reverse of the modern attitude, in that serialization was seen as lowbrow (the stuff of soap operas and children's adventure stories) and episodic storytelling as sophisticated and mature. Thus, even the shows that had continuing casts -- Star Trek among them -- aspired to be as anthology-like as possible. Which is why you had so many shows about protagonists wandering from town to town, or adopting a different fake identity every week, or helping a client of the week, or exploring a strange new world every week.
 
William Smithers, Michael Strong in The Emerald, an episode of Mission impossible.
Captain Merrick and Doctor Roger Kirby, who would have guessed? Anyways Smithers survived but Strong was killed while dozing in a Martin Landau mask!!! 😄
JB
 
I just stumbled into the 1959 film "Li'l Abner" which features both Leslie Parrish (who appeared in Who Mourns for Adonais?) and Julie Newmar (who appeared in Friday's Child). I thought some of you might be interested in seeing clips with them, and maybe sharing clips you've run across of other guest actors who appeared in something you found unexpected or unusual.

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Goddamn, never noticed that Itchy McRabbit was Jerry Lewis. :guffaw:
 
As I mentioned in the FACT TREK thread, I recently watched the pilot of William Shatner's short-lived 1965 courtroom drama series For the People. Shatner's character's wife was played by Jessica Walter, who was a runner-up for the role of Miranda Jones a few years later. (It doesn't surprise me that she and Diana Muldaur got considered for the same role, as they resembled each other in voice and personality.) And a reporter in an early scene was played by a young George Coe (TNG: "First Contact"), though I didn't recognize him.

Looking over the IMDb cast list, I see that episode 11 (which is one of the 8 episodes available on YouTube) features Muldaur and Logan Ramsey ("Bread and Circuses"). Lou Antonio and Nehemiah Persoff also appear in the series, but their episodes are not on YouTube.
 
Doing another run thru Hogan's Heroes for breakfast. (Again, as I probably noted here the first time), Stewart Moss (Joe Tormolen in "The Naked Time") shows up in S2's "Col Klink's Secret Weapon" as a POW.
 
Not a guest actor, but Shatner was on a recent episode of Murdoch Mysteries as Mark Twain
STILLshatner.jpg

I just saw this episode today. His performance was surprisingly good, despite the makeup being essentially just William Shatner with a mustache. He didn't phone in his performance at all.

A neat piece of trivia is that his friend, Christopher Plummer, spoke at the real-life Empire Club of Canada in 2011.
 
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