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How influential was THE OUTER LIMITS on TOS?

david g

Commodore
Commodore
Both such great shows...

But seeing TOL again, I am struck by how much an episode like "Nightmare" seems to precede TOS--landing on a planet, a kind of galactic federation, an ambiguous alien, heavy allegorical/moral didacticism...

thoughts and information appreciated.
 
I think Twilight Zone possibly had some influence - there is a TZ episode very reminiscent of Return Of The Archons, for example.
 
But seeing TOL again, I am struck by how much an episode like "Nightmare" seems to precede TOS--landing on a planet, a kind of galactic federation, an ambiguous alien, heavy allegorical/moral didacticism...

It's more likely that both shows were influenced by the science fiction literature that preceded them. What makes these shows and The Twilight Zone notable in SF history is not that they invented any SF concepts, but rather that they took concepts and storytelling approaches from decades of preceding SF literature and distilled and disseminated them to the general public. Prose SF was full of all those elements you mention long before the 1960s. And multiple episodes of all three series were written by experienced prose-SF authors, or were adapted directly from pre-existing SF stories (though "Arena" was kind of an indirect adaptation of Fredric Brown's story, since Gene Coon didn't even recognize that he was influenced by the story until after he'd written the script).

For instance, track down some of the SF of Lloyd Biggle. He wrote a series of stories about a Federation-like organization with a noninterference policy that presages the Prime Directive -- except their version is "Meddle to bring our kind of enlightenment to the backwards aliens, but do it secretly so they think they changed on their own."
 
I think any influence either Outer Limits or Twilight Zone had was more along the lines of showing that there was an audience for adult science fiction and Star Trek had the potential to bring those viewers over to NBC (TZ was a CBS show and, I think OL was ABC).
 
In style I think both of the Trek pilots were somewhat influenced by The Outer Limits and in fact, I believe they used a couple of creatures built for that series (by Wah Chang?) in "The Cage."
 
^And of course, the Horta from "The Devil in the Dark" was a reworking of a costume from an OL episode, worn there as well by leading monster performer Janos Prohaska. The story is that he crawled into Gene Coon's office in the costume (which was some sort of amoeba monster in OL), and Coon took one look at it and decided to write an episode around it.
 
Don't forget Robert Justman worked on both shows as well...

Byron Haskin, who directed several OL episodes almost directed The Cage.

Janos Prohaska played a badass monkey in the OL episode The Sixth Finger...and he played the Mugatu in A Private Little War.

Anyway, lots of OL connections with TOS...and later Joseph Stefano (OL Co-Creator) wrote Skin of Evil -- one of my fave episodes of TNG Year One.
 
The guy who directed NIGHTMARE directed THE EMPATH, so I mean that is a pretty clear indication somebody remembered the show, they are both done in the so-theatrical style. Of course, I saw part of an Elvis movie this morning that had a western dream scene with 'incomplete' sets, and now I'm wondering if THAT inspired SPECTRE OF THE GUN.)
 
For instance, track down some of the SF of Lloyd Biggle. He wrote a series of stories about a Federation-like organization with a noninterference policy that presages the Prime Directive -- except their version is "Meddle to bring our kind of enlightenment to the backwards aliens, but do it secretly so they think they changed on their own."

Do you remember the Chad Oliver stuff? Anthropological scifi? Change all these APPLE-like planets into infantry to fight your wars. I remember a line in one of his stories where the hero comes back to a place he helped set-up, pretending to be a god ... they look around and realize they did a good job, the planet is wrecked.
 
Of course, I saw part of an Elvis movie this morning that had a western dream scene with 'incomplete' sets, and now I'm wondering if THAT inspired SPECTRE OF THE GUN.)

I think the third season's severely slashed budget inspired the look of "Spectre" more than anything else. (Not a criticism; they brilliantly turned a limitation into an advantage with the surreal, fragmentary "Tombstone" of the episode.)
 
Per Wikipedia
A few of the monsters reappeared in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek series of the late 1960s. A feathered creature was modified to appear as a zoo animal in the background of the first pilot of Star Trek; a prop head from "Fun and Games" was used to make a Talosian appear as a vicious creature. The moving carpet beast in "The Probe" later was used as the "Horta", and operated by the same actor (Janos Prohaska). The process used to make pointed ears for David McCallum in "The Sixth Finger" was reused in Star Trek as well. The "ion storm" seen in "The Mutant" (a projector beam shining through a container containing glitter in liquid suspension) became the transporter effect in Trek.
Actors who would later appear in Star Trek included Leonard Nimoy who appeared in two episodes, "Production and Decay of Strange Particles" and "I, Robot" and William Shatner appeared in the episode "Cold Hands, Warm Heart" as an astronaut working on a Project Vulcan. Other actors who subsequently appeared in Star Trek were James Doohan in a supporting role as a policeman in "Expanding Human", and Grace Lee Whitney in the episode "Controlled Experiment".

Gene Roddenberry paid a lot of attention to what The Outer Limits team was doing at the time, and he was often present in their studios. He hired several Outer Limits alumni, among them Robert Justman and Wah Chang for the production of Star Trek.[3]

They even shared a story..
http://hopkinscinemaddicts.typepad....games-a-further-look-at-the-outer-limits.html
 
Wikipedia said:
The process used to make pointed ears for David McCallum in "The Sixth Finger" was reused in Star Trek as well.

Ohh, that's really, really stretching. It's only the same process in the sense that they're both prosthetic makeup. But look at it:

http://sherrychandler.com/wp-content/uploads/Olthesixthfinger.jpg

It's obvious that those pointed ears aren't even attached to McCallum's ears, but are part of a whole headpiece. A Talosian or Ferengi makeup would be a better analogy. The process involved in Spock's ears was quite different -- they were tips delicately attached and blended into his own ears, no doubt made of thinner, more flexible material.

The two shows did have the same makeup artist, Fred Phillips, however.
 
Point of clarification: The transporter effect was NOT done with the particles-suspended-in-liquid method described above. Rather, they used plain old Alka-Seltzer in warm water.

Being Transported into the World of Star Trek

The article's claims are questionable. Van der Veer Photo Effects did no work on Star Trek until the second season; therefore they cannot have created the transporter effect. If this account is true, it refers to an alternate, later method used by that particular company, and does not invalidate the account of how the Howard A. Anderson Company originally created the effect. In Anderson's own words from "Out-of-This-World Special Effects for 'Star Trek'" in American Cinematographer, October 1967:
To obtain the glitter effect, we used aluminum dust falling through a beam of high intensity light.



And wasn't "I, Robot" a Twilight Zone episode?

It was a prose story by Eando Binder (Ernest and Otto Binder), adapted into an episode of The Outer Limits featuring Leonard Nimoy in a supporting role as a reporter. It was later remade as an episode of the Showtime Outer Limits, this time with Nimoy in the lead role of the scientist who created the title robot.

It had no connection to Isaac Asimov's anthology of the same name; in fact, Asimov disagreed with Doubleday's choice to use that title for his anthology because he knew it was already the name of someone else's story.
 
And wasn't "I, Robot" a Twilight Zone episode?
It was a prose story by Eando Binder (Ernest and Otto Binder), adapted into an episode of The Outer Limits featuring Leonard Nimoy in a supporting role as a reporter. It was later remade as an episode of the Showtime Outer Limits, this time with Nimoy in the lead role of the scientist who created the title robot.

No, in the remake, Nimoy played the lawyer defending the robot.
 
...wasn't "I, Robot" a Twilight Zone episode?

It was a prose story by Eando Binder (Ernest and Otto Binder), adapted into an episode of The Outer Limits featuring Leonard Nimoy in a supporting role as a reporter. It was later remade as an episode of the Showtime Outer Limits, this time with Nimoy in the lead role of the scientist who created the title robot.
...

It also had John Hoyt (Dr. Boyce) in it.
 
I think any influence either Outer Limits or Twilight Zone had was more along the lines of showing that there was an audience for adult science fiction and Star Trek had the potential to bring those viewers over to NBC (TZ was a CBS show and, I think OL was ABC).

I agree. There's no overt link between ST and OL, but quite a few people working in television during that era worked on both series.

In addition to those already mentioned, let's not forget Harlan Ellison, who wrote two OL episodes ("Soldier" and "Demon with a Glass Hand") and the best ST episode ("City on the Edge of Forever").

Also, Arlene Martel starred in both "Demon" and ST's "Amok Time."

Doug
 
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