Misconceptions about TOS

[Avro Arrow]

Deleted, sorry.

 

[Harvey]

The World of Star Trek also has an episode guide, which is where the first pilot is identified as "The Cage."

But it doesn't have an actual entry for the pilot as a separate episode. It just has an entry for "The Menagerie" with a footnote saying that it was adapted from a pilot called "The Cage." The Compendium was the first reference work...

Ah. I see your point now.

How did the Star Trek Companion identity the episode?

I'm not aware of a book by that name. If you mean Bjo Trimble's Concordance, it had no separate listing for the pilot, only for the 2-parter "The Menagerie," and no behind-the-scenes discussion of that episode's origins.

Sorry, every time I post on this site using my phone it's an auto text nightmare. I did indeed mean Trimble's Concordance. Thanks for the info.

One last question -- does the first pilot come up in Star Trek Lives?

 

[Lance]

But the term The Original Series is on official release of the DVD sets, both the original versions and remastered versions. So its not a misconception, it is an official title, at least when it comes to the DVD release. It also just happens to be convenient to refer to it as TOS, on boards like this or in conversations.

Technically it's a 'Retronym' (ie, a subtitle added to a work after-the-fact to help define it against the works that followed, but which is not seen on-screen itself). I agree that the definition is fuzzy though, given that the DVD packaging etc has pretty much adapted to support this as an official subtitle.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Retronym

 

[Melakon]

"Star Trek Lives" has a chapter about being on set for "Turnabout Intruder" I remember, but lost my copy decades ago.

 

[Gassy Man]

While TWOK's aspirations were never as lofty as TMP, I never thought of the film as being middle of the road or nonsensical. From an emotional standpoint, it's the only mature film in the series, as Kirk and company have to face some of the very same real issues that people in the audience face, as opposed to the trumped up "fate of the galaxy" or "coming to terms with my human/vulcan/robot limitations" sorts of emotions the other films offer. It's the only film that really humanizes the characters in a way that is understandable to many.

I question the assumption that ordinariness is equivalent to maturity . . .

Several things. What you characterize here as ordinary, many, if not most, people would consider to be rites of passage in simply being a human being. That's one of the reasons they can relate better to a man who is going through a mid-life crisis and trying to reconcile his past mistakes better than to someone who flies around a spaceship for five minutes and is somehow supposed to be experiencing something as deeply meaningful. The former is immediate while the latter seems an abstraction.

That may somehow seem inferior to some people, but to others, it deeply humanizes the character. The notion of expressing themes allegorically or issues as thematic elements or whatever is exactly what turns a lot of people off to sci fi and its variants in the first place -- the stories put the ideas ahead of the people, resulting in two-dimensional characters who are subservient to the idea rather than the other way around.

In fact, of all the films, the one with the least emotional range is TMP because it seems to mostly want to intellectualize emotions rather than honestly and fully illustrate them. If we didn't already know who Kirk and crew are, we would find pretty much everything about them, with the possible exception of McCoy's crankiness, flat, as nothing more is demanded of us by the plot. Truthfully, the framework of bringing the crew back together isn't even necessary for the V'ger story, as really the only character that connects to it on anything but an instrumental level is Spock, and he could have been going through the Kolinahr on the Enterprise if they'd just modified the need to be on Vulcan. Kirk, arguably the most important character, seems to reside in just two emotions throughout the film, petulant and sentimental, because that's all the story requires of him. The rest is about the supposed awe we're supposed to feel about the big idea, which is which is what if some aliens suped up one of our robots so Captain Kirk and crew could get back together?.

I wouldn't really put Star Trek in the sci fi category anyway. It's space opera. At times, it aims higher than it has to, and some stories are quite good in this regard, but it's still mostly Flash Gordon with higher production values. Of all the films, TWOK is the only one that recognized this while asking some questions that space opera avoids. What if Flash Gordon got old? What if he made a baby we never knew about? What if he is struggling to reconcile his past? And what if a broken and half-crazed Ming the Merciless came out of the past not just to get him but to try to reclaim his own past glories? The genius of the story is that somehow it manages to ask and actually confront these questions in a story that still delivers the gee whiz action we expect. And the action actually connects to the questions it raises, once again in an emotionally resonant way. Here, Kirk at the very least must be wry, angry, bitter, regretful, depressed, cocky, humorous, self-pitying, wistful, hopeful, and triumphant.

Having said all this, I think the scope and style of TMP is very much that of a film. TWOK is a movie. They can be enjoyed for what they are, but I can understand easily why fewer people are affected emotionally by TMP than they are by TWOK.

 

[Ssosmcin]

That Vulcans have sex once every seven years.

There was this mistake in the old comic book where Joanna McCoy has a Vulcan fiancé. A racist Bones says to her she will only be touched by her husband all seven years.
When we see Spock's parents in Journey to Babel or Spock himself with the Romulan commander, we don't seen any sign of a Vulcan chastity.

To be fair, The Could Minders introduced the 7 year Vulcan itch...

DROXINE: You only take a mate once every seven years?
SPOCK: The seven-year cycle is biologically inherent in all Vulcan’s. At that time, the mating drive outweighs all other motivations.
DROXINE: And is there nothing that can disturb that cycle, Mister Spock?
SPOCK: Extreme feminine beauty is always disturbing, madam.

Since saying "having sex" was a no-no on TV at the time, this is a close as we'd get to that kind of specificity.

 

[Maurice]

How is it referred to in TMOST?

 

[johnnybear]

DROXINE: You only take a mate once every seven years?
SPOCK: The seven-year cycle is biologically inherent in all Vulcan’s. At that time, the mating drive outweighs all other motivations.
DROXINE: And is there nothing that can disturb that cycle, Mister Spock?
SPOCK: Extreme feminine beauty is always disturbing, madam.

Unfortunately the BBC cut this sequence from the episode back in the 80s and I only became aware of it watching the DVDs a few years back!
JB

 

[Melakon]

The seven year business seems to apply to the biological mating cycle though. There doesn't seem to be anything saying that Vulcans can't copulate for recreational purposes. T'Pring and Stonn might have been doing a lot more than sitting in a room staring at each other all that time.

 

[drt]

It was clearly influential, because it was the first reference work to list the episodes in production order rather than airdate order, and that became the standard practice in all reference works, syndication runs, and home video releases in subsequent years, until the DVD box sets inexplicably reverted to airdate order.

I think the syndication run order was set by Paramount as part of the package, which I'd imagine just defaulted to the production order.

I will grant you the "episode numbering" scheme in use today likely came from the Compendium. And to your other point, I sort of wonder if the DVD box sets reverted to airdate order because by the time they were released calling things "episode X" was viewed as being especially nerdy, and I could see some marketing suit at CBS being disturbed by that. (The bluray sets don't mention the episode numbers at all, they do list the "Stardate" however.)

 

[Kobayshi Maru]

I would think all those people watching in syndication in the 1970's is the turning point. Without them, there is no movie franchise to begin with. Many, many people were watching those "silly plot ideas" over and over and over again.

Agreed. There were people taking notice during the original run, but evermore people got exposed to the show on the '70s and that's where the respectability really started to take root I think.

Here's how I remember the 1970s and early 80s. A core audience of ST fans had memorized the episodes in syndication and were widely looked down upon as silly fans.

There were additional viewers who liked ST more casually: they hastened to deny being "Trekkies" but didn't trash the show.

Beyond those two groups, the general public thought Star Trek was a joke. Then when the movies got going, a shift in national opinion began and Star Trek became respectable, or nearly so, and you weren't mocked anymore as long as you weren't walking around in a Starfleet uniform or something.

The most I can say is, maybe that third group, the general public, is exaggerated in my mind and I didn't know how many people were with me. But it didn't seem like that at the time, I'm telling you.

I think the most widespread cliché is "plastic Vulcan ears".

 

[Christopher]

One last question -- does the first pilot come up in Star Trek Lives?

I don't seem to have that book anymore.

I question the assumption that ordinariness is equivalent to maturity . . .

Several things. What you characterize here as ordinary, many, if not most, people would consider to be rites of passage in simply being a human being. That's one of the reasons they can relate better to a man who is going through a mid-life crisis and trying to reconcile his past mistakes better than to someone who flies around a spaceship for five minutes and is somehow supposed to be experiencing something as deeply meaningful. The former is immediate while the latter seems an abstraction.

The point is that just because a story doesn't portray those themes or rites of passage in an overt and literal manner, that doesn't mean it isn't addressing them at all. You're overlooking the existence of allegory and symbolism. Sure, a shallow or lazy observer might look at a story about people on a starship and believe it has no relevance to their lives, but anyone with enough insight to recognize allegory can understand that most science fiction and fantasy is ultimately exploring themes that are very relevant to our real lives. As I said, a great deal of SF has been used subversively to sneak meaningful commentary past the noses of censors who couldn't see past the superficial level and thus didn't realize that the stories were tackling important themes. When Rod Serling was unable to tell TV stories condemning racism and war because the network censors wouldn't let him, he made The Twilight Zone in order to sneak his anti-war, anti-racism stories under the radar of executives who falsely assumed that the stories were irrelevant to people's lives just because they had fantasy settings. And thus, embracing SF/fantasy enabled Serling to tell stories with more mature, sophisticated human commentary than he was allowed to tell in his non-SF work.

The notion of expressing themes allegorically or issues as thematic elements or whatever is exactly what turns a lot of people off to sci fi and its variants in the first place -- the stories put the ideas ahead of the people, resulting in two-dimensional characters who are subservient to the idea rather than the other way around.

That is absolute and unadulterated BS. People who assume that don't have a damn clue what they're talking about. They obviously haven't been reading or watching the right science fiction, or else are too lazy or superficial to recognize the deeper, very human themes that are still very much a part of it.

I wouldn't really put Star Trek in the sci fi category anyway. It's space opera.

Which is a subset of science fiction. You don't even know what the genre is, which makes your attempts to denigrate it all the more ludicrous.

 

[erastus25]

It was clearly influential, because it was the first reference work to list the episodes in production order rather than airdate order, and that became the standard practice in all reference works, syndication runs, and home video releases in subsequent years, until the DVD box sets inexplicably reverted to airdate order.

I think the syndication run order was set by Paramount as part of the package, which I'd imagine just defaulted to the production order.

I will grant you the "episode numbering" scheme in use today likely came from the Compendium. And to your other point, I sort of wonder if the DVD box sets reverted to airdate order because by the time they were released calling things "episode X" was viewed as being especially nerdy, and I could see some marketing suit at CBS being disturbed by that. (The bluray sets don't mention the episode numbers at all, they do list the "Stardate" however.)

It is interesting that the syndication package switched to production order. We'll probably never get an answer, but I do wonder if that was a conscious decision by some execs, or just the way the first package was shipped out and became de facto convention until the DVD release.

 

[Vandervecken]

Mmm, that's technically true, but in fact Kirk did say "Beam us up, Scotty" twice in the animated series ("The Infinite Vulcan" and "The Lorelei Signal"), and "Scotty, beam me up!" in The Voyage Home. And in TOS he did come close on several occasions: "Prepare to beam us up, Mr. Scott" ("The Paradise Syndrome"), "Have Scotty beam us up" ("The Mark of Gideon"), "Mr. Scott, beam us up" ("The Cloud Minders"), "Scotty, beam us up fast" ("The Savage Curtain"). Note that it's almost always plural -- aside from TVH, "beam me up" only appears in "The Squire of Gothos" and "This Side of Paradise." So it's not so much that Kirk never said it to Scotty as that he never said it in the singular, except the once.

Well...6 times in the singular (not only to Scotty the 4 more times, though). Four more in The Doomsday Machine:, counting the line that begins with "Prepare"

SPOCK: Captain, transporter operational, but just barely.

[Constellation Auxiliary Control]

KIRK: Prepare to beam me aboard on my signal.
[Bridge]
SULU: One thousand miles and closing.
SPOCK: Transporter, stand by.
KYLE [OC]: Standing by, sir.
SULU: Five hundred miles and closing.
[Constellation Auxiliary Control] (The throat of the machine fills the screen when he flips the final red switch.)

KIRK: Beam me aboard.
[Bridge]
SPOCK: Energise.
[Transporter room]
KYLE: Energising. Bridge, it's shorted out again.
[Jefferies tube]
SCOTT: Och, what's wrong with it?
[Constellation Auxiliary Control]

KIRK: Gentlemen, beam me aboard.
SPOCK [OC]: We can't, Captain. Transporter is out again.
[Bridge]
SPOCK: Mister Scott, twenty seconds to detonation.
[Jefferies tube]
SPOCK [OC]: Mister Scott?
[Bridge]
SPOCK: Mister Scott
[Jefferies tube]
SPOCK [OC]: Try inverse phasing.
[Bridge]
SULU: Sixty, fifty, forty
[Constellation Auxiliary Control] SULU [OC]: Thirty.

KIRK: Gentlemen, I suggest you beam me aboard.

Edited to add: Although these may not fit the template because he uses "aboard" and not "up."

 

[Gassy Man]

One last question -- does the first pilot come up in Star Trek Lives?

I don't seem to have that book anymore.

Several things. What you characterize here as ordinary, many, if not most, people would consider to be rites of passage in simply being a human being. That's one of the reasons they can relate better to a man who is going through a mid-life crisis and trying to reconcile his past mistakes better than to someone who flies around a spaceship for five minutes and is somehow supposed to be experiencing something as deeply meaningful. The former is immediate while the latter seems an abstraction.

The point is that just because a story doesn't portray those themes or rites of passage in an overt and literal manner, that doesn't mean it isn't addressing them at all. You're overlooking the existence of allegory and symbolism. Sure, a shallow or lazy observer might look at a story about people on a starship and believe it has no relevance to their lives, but anyone with enough insight to recognize allegory can understand that most science fiction and fantasy is ultimately exploring themes that are very relevant to our real lives. As I said, a great deal of SF has been used subversively to sneak meaningful commentary past the noses of censors who couldn't see past the superficial level and thus didn't realize that the stories were tackling important themes. When Rod Serling was unable to tell TV stories condemning racism and war because the network censors wouldn't let him, he made The Twilight Zone in order to sneak his anti-war, anti-racism stories under the radar of executives who falsely assumed that the stories were irrelevant to people's lives just because they had fantasy settings. And thus, embracing SF/fantasy enabled Serling to tell stories with more mature, sophisticated human commentary than he was allowed to tell in his non-SF work.

The notion of expressing themes allegorically or issues as thematic elements or whatever is exactly what turns a lot of people off to sci fi and its variants in the first place -- the stories put the ideas ahead of the people, resulting in two-dimensional characters who are subservient to the idea rather than the other way around.

That is absolute and unadulterated BS. People who assume that don't have a damn clue what they're talking about. They obviously haven't been reading or watching the right science fiction, or else are too lazy or superficial to recognize the deeper, very human themes that are still very much a part of it.

I wouldn't really put Star Trek in the sci fi category anyway. It's space opera.

Which is a subset of science fiction. You don't even know what the genre is, which makes your attempts to denigrate it all the more ludicrous.

True, perhaps I should have said "hard sci fi" or whatever, but it's equally ludicrous for you to attack people who love TWOK simply because it reaches them emotionally in the way the turgid, listless TMP never did. You're certainly entitled to your opinions, stupid as they may seem to some people. Do tell me the names of your books so I know not to waste any time on them, please.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

Replying to the OP, that the sets and effects used were cheap.

But they really weren't. Star Trek was one of the most expensive shows on TV while it was on.

Though looking at the Cage and its fancier stuff it does look like there were some budget cuts between it and TOS proper.

 

[BK613]

Replying to the OP, that the sets and effects used were cheap.

But they really weren't. Star Trek was one of the most expensive shows on TV while it was on.

Though looking at the Cage and its fancier stuff it does look like there were some budget cuts between it and TOS proper.

The misconception is that effects were cheap (cardboard sets and ships on strings, etc)

I wouldn't really put Star Trek in the sci fi category anyway. It's space opera.

Which is a subset of science fiction.

Not everyone agrees with this; people have been making the distinction between SF and space opera for decades. And continue to do so.

 

[mb22]

How is it referred to in TMOST?

I recall that it was called "The Cage" in that book, and that there was a note that it was changed to "The Menagerie" before filming (someone correct me if I'm mistaken).

Beside The World of Star Trek, the first pilot was also called "The Cage" in the late 70s in fan and pro publications (e.g. Best of Trek) reporting on Roddenberry showing it during his lectures.

 

[Christopher]

I recall that it was called "The Cage" in that book, and that there was a note that it was changed to "The Menagerie" before filming (someone correct me if I'm mistaken).

You're mostly right. There was more than just a note about the change; the book uses "The Cage" to refer to the outline and script, and of course the pre-production memos refer to it that way, but since the pilot film itself was produced as "The Menagerie," that's the title the book uses for the actual episode. It treats "The Cage" as its working title and "The Menagerie" as its final title.

And of course, there's also James Blish's adaptation, in which he skipped the Kirk-era frame material and did a straight novelization of the pilot -- which was under the title "The Menagerie," with no mention of any other title.

 

[drt]

It is interesting that the syndication package switched to production order. We'll probably never get an answer, but I do wonder if that was a conscious decision by some execs, or just the way the first package was shipped out and became de facto convention until the DVD release.

My guess is it was just the way they were accounted in the books or had been filed internally or something. The air-date order was somewhat arbritrary, e.g. NBC usually chose more Spock-centric episodes to start a new season, even though other episodes were completed earlier. And there's really no reason for Desilu/Paramount to have kept track of that when they stored the masters. I suppose an argument could be made to have shown them in "delivered to NBC" order, since some of the effects-heavy episodes were delivered later than others after them in production order.