Therin of Andor said:
ChuckPR said:
It's really a shame there wasn't a really good, well fleshed out set of scripts early during the Phase II project.
IIRC, "Phase II" was well ahead of TOS at its same point. TOS was desperately running out of camera-ready script material, and thus "The Menagerie" two-parter was conceived to stave off problems for two more weeks. Gene had a lot of SF novelists pitching TOS scripts and many had never written for series TV before, and this meant they had a lot of rewriting to fit a TV budget.
But a full year ahead of starting work on "In Thy Image", the "Phase II" writers had about 13 hours of stories in hand, most of them way beyond first drafts.
The cast of extras, walk-ons and two-liners were told that a series of telemovies or one-hour episodes would likely start rolling as soon as TMP was in cinemas, and many of them fully expected they'd soon be called back.
I have no doubt they had at some point worked out a set of filmable scripts.
I also don't doubt you're assessment of how far farther along they got(though it's also a matter of how quickly they got there) then during TOS production.
But we have to realize this was a different world. The expectations after three seasons of mostly well-written TOS episodes(no denying there was some filler, even in my old favorite) plus the animated series...
plus Star Wars...
I think had to have changed their expectations.
Idea after idea was proposed for the movie and rejected by Paramount.
I may be wrong, but I have the feeling that if they had produced a set of scripts that had been really good quickly for the Phase II series there would have been little reason for Paramount to waffle.
Perhaps the Phase II scripts are very good, I haven't read them so I can't say.
Even if they are good, there's still the question as to how long they all took to get to the condition they were in when they were sold through places like Star Tech and Lincoln Enterprises. I don't know how much can be known as to how good they were during which frame of time during series development.
Something delayed Paramount. Maybe it was the DOA network. Though I doubt it would have stopped them from selling the show profitably to someone like NBC or CBS.
It just seems weird to me that in all the time Roddenberry had to ponder Trek, for TMP they ended up using a borrowed storyline thrown together so quickly at the last minute.
Perhaps it's just as well that Trek came out as a movie first. A half season or so of filmable scripts aside, Roddenberry seems to have been running on empty at that time for whatever reason.
Even with the last minute decisions, TMP was still a decent "reunion" movie.
I wish Paramount had shown the same willingness to review and reject a few scripts on the last couple of movies that they did on the first.
Hopefully we'll get a better product with XI.
On the Phase II test footage issue, are there any creative participants in TMP, or people currently involved in Trek, who we could contact to get a more definitive answer?
It would indeed be fun to see more footage/stills if they are out there.
