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I'll watch that for many reasons.

 

Understandably so. Referring to something as Star Trek III when the previous project was titled Star Trek: The Motion Picture instead of Star Trek II is needlessly confusing.

 

The cancelled TV program was Star Trek II so it makes sense that GR might consider this ST3. It wasn’t a title for release, so it’s no needlessly confusing to people at the studio.

 

I watched

I watched the Red Dwarf episode at the time and I think it was in the context of the world view at the time that Kennedy was revealed as a womaniser having affairs with movie stars and not as noble as he is made out. I think in the 2020s we just don't care as much about those things. I didn't think that Kennedy was treated too badly. In the episode he saw that some of his decisions had caused terrible things to happen and it didn't take much convincing from the Red Dwarf crew to convince Kennedy that for the better good of the planet and Kennedy's legend. Showing Kennedy to be a good but not perfect man. Really it was j"inspired" by COTEOF without the romance.
However I cringe as much as the rest of you as the thought of Kirk or Spock being involved in Kennedy's assassination as Star Trek isn't comedy like Red Dwarf and a movie isn't going to be filled with irony and laughs.

 

That has nothing to do with my issues with the story.

 

So, getting back on topic...

And this is a big part of the problem with what passed for pop culture "history": accepting something is true without question then grasping for something to confirm it, and, sans any real evidence, latching onto any possibility and passing it on as fact.

In this instance, heck, if you look at pix of Goldsmith from the 60s the guy falsely I.D.ed doesn't even have the right nose.

We did a LOT checking to make sure we had Cindy Robbins correctly pegged as the runner-up for Yeoman Colt, despite trusting that @alchemist and his co-writer had correctly I.D.ed her, because that's what you do even with reliable sources: you do your own research to verify it.

 

Have you done any research on the true story of why the character of Number One was removed from the show and Majel Barret was recast as Chapel?

We've all heard Roddenberry's story that he was told he could keep either the ailen or the woman, so he kept Spock and married Majel, because he couldn't do it the other way around. There's also the story about test audiences not liking a woman in a position of authority.

My understanding of what really happened is that the executives wouldn't let Roddenberry hire his mistress in a lead role, and he opted to eliminate the character rather than recast.

But is there any actual evidence/proof/documentation of what the true story is?

 

I have no solid proof, but my gut tells me this is the most likely scenario. I bet Roddenberry then made up the stories of test audiences and network execs disliking a woman second in command.

 

There is no known primary source documentation for any of this. Three decades on Herb Solow stated that NBC didn't like the cast, and were only okay with Hunter and Nimoy returning; if true that would explain the almost total cast turnover.

@Harvey is finishing a Fact Trek piece of how Trek and other shows were audience tested, and one detail he ran across was that although the full results of the tests only went to the network, show producers could sit in on small groups from much larger test audiences who were brought into a room to discuss the program, and it's possible such a group is the origin of Roddenberry's "who does she think she is?" anecdote. Having sat in on numerous focus groups, I can tell you once one person airs a complaint suddenly other people express the same opinion.

 

Speaking of Herb Solow, his book with Bob Justman (Inside Star Trek) only states that NBC objected to Barrett's talents to carry the show as a co-star. (pg.60)

And that NBC favored a strong woman as a series star just not Barrett, and that "they resented having her forced upon them of the first pilot." (pg.157)

 

I'm aware. I still think it's a dumb way to refer to the project when the Star Trek II series didn't come to pass.

And when Barrett popped up again in her blonde wig as Nurse Chapel, the same execs said, "Well, look who's back."

 

Or so Solow says. Anecdotal, not fact.

 

Yes, but not every single thing during the production of TOS ended up in a memo or studio records.

 

My point that it was written 30 years after the fact from faulty human memory so caveat emptor.

 

I saw that episode. Even more interesting is the fact that the actor, who portrayed JFK in that episode, was none other than Andrew Robinson, aka Garak. I recall he laid it on thick with the JFK accent.

 

And would possibly be considered hearsay in a court of law.

 

I may have mentioned earlier that I found him totally unconvincing as JFK, which kept the story from working for me as well as it might have. Of course his name was nowhere near as familiar to me then, but I think I'd seen him around various shows, usually typecast as a villain, and that seemed more natural for him. He struck me as too creepy for JFK.

 

Yep. It's what Solow said 30 years after the fact, which may or may not be exactly what happened. So we just need to qualify it as "According to Solow in 1996" not "this is what happened."

 

In 2011 Stephen King wrote a time travel book set in contemporary times entitled "11/22/63" and yep, it's another JFK must die story.

Aside from being about JFK, what I found intriguing in this story was King's time travel premiss. The way he had it, the protagonist would go through a time portal that just existed, no time machine. This portal was permanently fixed in time; that is no matter when you go through, it's always to the same date in 1958.

So if you go through the portal to 1958 and change history, return to the future and don't like the change, all you have to do is go through the portal again to the same date in 1958 and everything is reset and what you did before is undone.

So when the hero decides to save Kennedy, it means he has to wait five years from 1958 to 1963 to save him, making a life for himself in the Dallas area while he waited.

After finally saving Kennedy, the hero returns to his own time to find things are much worse. But all he has to do is go back to 1958 again and everything he did in those five years is erased and his contemporary world is back to normal again.

Robert