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Replacing Jeffrey Hunter after The Cage

Stevie Trek

Ensign
Newbie
Hi. I've been away from Star Trek for a while but recently started watching again on Blu-ray and I was reminded of something that I've wondered about for years. I can think of a few examples of shows where an actor does not continue in a role after the pilot but is replaced by another actor playing the same character. Does anyone know whether Star Trek's production team considered re-casting Captain Pike, and if so, why they decided to have a new captain?
Of course, had they re-cast Pike, it would have been very difficult to use parts of The Cage in another episode, but I don't think that was a consideration when they were looking for a new actor to play the captain and it was later, when they were struggling for scripts, that they thought of The Menagerie. Any ideas? Thanks.
 
Just speculating, but remember that NBC rejected "The Cage," so that the second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," was essentially a do-over. Since the whole idea was to rework "Star Trek" in a second attempt to sell it to skeptical execs, it makes sense that they would want change things. We should probably be thankful that they didn't feel obliged to change the name of the ship as well. :)

This wasn't a case where the network loved "Captain Pike," but then the actor became unavailable. This was the network specifically asking for something different from "The Cage"--including, I guess, a new-and-improved captain!
 
As I recall it, Hunter's wife advised him not to get stuck in a TV series, so he opted to decline to return.
 
Hunter (or Hunter's wife) felt he was more of a movie star and didn't think a TV show would be a good career move. It was really a stroke of luck that they changed the captains name when Shatner took over in the second pilot or the original footage would have been useless for the series instead of being used for "The Menagerie"
 
I wonder if Mr. Hunter had stayed on as the Captain that maybe he wouldn't have been in that accident from the movie Viva America which may have led to his death?
 
Essentially they did just recast Captain Pike. If you look at how Kirk is written in the early episodes, before Shatner's personality began influencing the role, he was pretty much the exact same brooding, solemn, lonely character that Pike was, with only the name changed (and McCoy was exactly the same character as Boyce and Piper). I think the only reason Roddenberry changed the captain's name at all is because he had a hard time settling on a character name in the first place; "Captain April" was changed to "Captain Pike" only days before the pilot filmed, and when he got a chance to reboot for the second pilot, he considered a long list of other names before belatedly penciling in "Kirk."

Really, he could've easily just continued to call Shatner's character Pike and Kelley's character Boyce if he'd wanted; many shows have recast lead characters between the pilot and the series (or even later -- Cagney on Cagney & Lacey was played by Loretta Swit in the pilot, Meg Foster in the brief first season, and Sharon Gless thereafter). Perhaps he changed the names because he was already considering the prospect of amortizing the cost of the pilot by using it as a flashback episode in the series proper.

But then, it wasn't unprecedented for '60s TV writers to give different names to characters who were otherwise written as interchangeable. Maverick alternated between two or more different Maverick brothers for production reasons, so that they could shoot two episodes at once with different lead actors and thus avoid falling behind schedule; but the lead character was always written the same way and the scripts were assigned randomly to the different actors, with only their personalities and line readings differentiating the characters. And Mission: Impossible's leads tended to be ciphers anyway, so they could replace Dan Briggs with Jim Phelps or Rollin Hand with Paris without needing to change the writing at all.
 
The recasting of the captain was one of the best things that ever happened to Star Trek. Shatner brought an excitement (sometimes overexcitement) and vitality to the role. Hunter, conversely, was 'Uncle Grumpy.' And Nimoy said he couldn't find a way to play his character off of Hunter's; there was no level of comfort between the two.

So, mathematically:

Hunter + Nimoy = Blah
Shatner + Nimoy = Magic
 
The recasting of the captain was one of the best things that ever happened to Star Trek. Shatner brought an excitement (sometimes overexcitement) and vitality to the role. Hunter, conversely, was 'Uncle Grumpy.' And Nimoy said he couldn't find a way to play his character off of Hunter's; there was no level of comfort between the two.

So, mathematically:

Hunter + Nimoy = Blah
Shatner + Nimoy = Magic

But then, "Smiling Spock" was a different character in The Cage than he became in the production series, once Number One's personality was grafted onto him. I personally liked Pike a *lot*; I do wonder what a Hunter-centric series would have been like.

Pike was obviously less of a womanizer (he was given his choice of three women, after all, and chose none of them. Compare to Kirk and his girlfriend-of-the-week.)
 
Pike was obviously less of a womanizer (he was given his choice of three women, after all, and chose none of them. Compare to Kirk and his girlfriend-of-the-week.)

But look at early Kirk -- he was just like Pike. In "Mudd's Women," he was the only man other than Spock who wasn't gaga over the title trio. He had his work to do and couldn't be bothered with the distraction of the fair sex. In "The Corbomite Maneuver," he complained about being assigned a female yeoman in the same way that Pike lamented about women on the bridge. In "The Enemy Within," it was his unleashed dark side that came after Janice in a way he never would have normally, and in "The Naked Time" it took an inhibition-releasing virus to get him to admit his yearning for a hand to hold. In "The Man Trap," when Salt-Vampire Nancy first appeared, Kirk saw her as a mature, ordinary woman and it was the younger crewman who saw her as a sexy siren. In "Charlie X," he was uncomfortable about being placed in the position of the father figure having to explain about women to Charlie.

It wasn't until "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" that we saw the beginnings of the familiar "Kirk makes out with spacebabe" meme, but his seduction of Andrea was a calculated tactic to exploit the androids' weaknesses. Then came "Dagger of the Mind," where he was embarrassed about having simply danced and flirted with Helen Noel at the past Christmas party; what a lot of people misremember is that the flashbacks of the two of them getting hot and heavy were a fantasy created by Helen, implanted in Kirk's mind by the neural neutralizer. The whole point of it is that it was something that never would've happened in real life, so that they could confirm the machine was capable of putting false ideas in people's heads. Then we had "Miri," where both Miri and Janice were trying to get Kirk's attention but he was too busy with the crisis to respond as they wanted. Then "The Conscience of the King," the second time Kirk was shown actually romancing a guest star, but again it was a ploy, a tactic to investigate Leighton's death and his charges against Anton Karidian.

Finally, in "Court-martial," we met an old flame of Kirk's, the first indication of any actual, successful romance in Kirk's life that didn't involve deliberate deception or mind manipulation -- and even that was many years in the past. Then after that, in "The Menagerie," we had a brief bit of a starbase crewwoman alluding to Kirk's reputation with women -- the first hint that Kirk was a womanizer, and it was halfway through the first season. Right after that came another old flame, Ruth in "Shore Leave," but she was portrayed more as someone he'd genuinely loved and longed for rather than a casual fling.

After which came a string of ten episodes in which Kirk had no romances of any kind (unless you count a slight flirtation with Mea 3 in "A Taste of Armageddon"), a streak that was only broken by "City on the Edge of Forever," in which he fell deeply and sincerely in love with Edith Keeler over the course of a weeks-long romance. Again, hardly the behavior of a girl-in-every-port womanizer.

The "different girl every week" Kirk of popular mythology didn't emerge until the second season, and even then, it was far from every week -- Sylvia in "Catspaw," maybe some Argelian girls offstage in "Wolf in the Fold," Marlena in "Mirror, Mirror," Drusilla in "Bread and Circuses," Nona in "A Private Little War," Shahna in "The Gamesters of Triskelion," Kalinda in "By Any Other Name" (though his seduction attempt didn't achieve his desired goal and she ended up preferring Rojan to him), technically Thalassa in "Return to Tomorrow" (though that was Sargon in Kirk's body), and that's about it, less than a third of the season. Season 3 wasn't too much different.

The thing to remember, of course, is that pretty much every 1960s male adventure lead was expected to be a womanizer and a brawler. Look at Jim West on The Wild Wild West or Napoleon Solo on The Man from UNCLE and you'll see a lot more womanizing than Kirk ever engaged in -- certainly far more than first-season Kirk. Kirk started out being the same character as Pike, but over time, mainly in the second and third seasons, he came to be written more and more as a conventional '60s action lead, because that was what network and advertiser pressure and the habits of freelance scriptwriters probably influenced him to become.

So if Hunter had stayed in the role, it seems likely to me that his character would've developed in the exact same direction. Hunter's personality wouldn't have lent itself to that change as easily as Shatner's did, but it was pretty much inevitable for a '60s action lead.
 
But look at early Kirk -- he was just like Pike. In "Mudd's Women," he was the only man other than Spock who wasn't gaga over the title trio. He had his work to do and couldn't be bothered with the distraction of the fair sex. In "The Corbomite Maneuver," he complained about being assigned a female yeoman in the same way that Pike lamented about women on the bridge. In "The Enemy Within," it was his unleashed dark side that came after Janice in a way he never would have normally, and in "The Naked Time" it took an inhibition-releasing virus to get him to admit his yearning for a hand to hold. In "The Man Trap," when Salt-Vampire Nancy first appeared, Kirk saw her as a mature, ordinary woman and it was the younger crewman who saw her as a sexy siren. In "Charlie X," he was uncomfortable about being placed in the position of the father figure having to explain about women to Charlie.

It wasn't until "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" that we saw the beginnings of the familiar "Kirk makes out with spacebabe" meme, but his seduction of Andrea was a calculated tactic to exploit the androids' weaknesses. Then came "Dagger of the Mind," where he was embarrassed about having simply danced and flirted with Helen Noel at the past Christmas party; what a lot of people misremember is that the flashbacks of the two of them getting hot and heavy were a fantasy created by Helen, implanted in Kirk's mind by the neural neutralizer. The whole point of it is that it was something that never would've happened in real life, so that they could confirm the machine was capable of putting false ideas in people's heads. Then we had "Miri," where both Miri and Janice were trying to get Kirk's attention but he was too busy with the crisis to respond as they wanted. Then "The Conscience of the King," the second time Kirk was shown actually romancing a guest star, but again it was a ploy, a tactic to investigate Leighton's death and his charges against Anton Karidian.

Finally, in "Court-martial," we met an old flame of Kirk's, the first indication of any actual, successful romance in Kirk's life that didn't involve deliberate deception or mind manipulation -- and even that was many years in the past. Then after that, in "The Menagerie," we had a brief bit of a starbase crewwoman alluding to Kirk's reputation with women -- the first hint that Kirk was a womanizer, and it was halfway through the first season. Right after that came another old flame, Ruth in "Shore Leave," but she was portrayed more as someone he'd genuinely loved and longed for rather than a casual fling.

After which came a string of ten episodes in which Kirk had no romances of any kind (unless you count a slight flirtation with Mea 3 in "A Taste of Armageddon"), a streak that was only broken by "City on the Edge of Forever," in which he fell deeply and sincerely in love with Edith Keeler over the course of a weeks-long romance. Again, hardly the behavior of a girl-in-every-port womanizer.

The "different girl every week" Kirk of popular mythology didn't emerge until the second season, and even then, it was far from every week -- Sylvia in "Catspaw," maybe some Argelian girls offstage in "Wolf in the Fold," Marlena in "Mirror, Mirror," Drusilla in "Bread and Circuses," Nona in "A Private Little War," Shahna in "The Gamesters of Triskelion," Kalinda in "By Any Other Name" (though his seduction attempt didn't achieve his desired goal and she ended up preferring Rojan to him), technically Thalassa in "Return to Tomorrow" (though that was Sargon in Kirk's body), and that's about it, less than a third of the season. Season 3 wasn't too much different.

The thing to remember, of course, is that pretty much every 1960s male adventure lead was expected to be a womanizer and a brawler. Look at Jim West on The Wild Wild West or Napoleon Solo on The Man from UNCLE and you'll see a lot more womanizing than Kirk ever engaged in -- certainly far more than first-season Kirk. Kirk started out being the same character as Pike, but over time, mainly in the second and third seasons, he came to be written more and more as a conventional '60s action lead, because that was what network and advertiser pressure and the habits of freelance scriptwriters probably influenced him to become.

So if Hunter had stayed in the role, it seems likely to me that his character would've developed in the exact same direction. Hunter's personality wouldn't have lent itself to that change as easily as Shatner's did, but it was pretty much inevitable for a '60s action lead.

Good post, Christopher. I dislike when a popular notion replaces the truth, but try to dislodge said notion and you're treated like a liar.
 
Had Hunter been permanently cast, there might've been a STAR TREK cartoon after the series' original run, with Pike voiced by someone else. Since Jeffrey Hunter would've died in 1969, anyway, I suspect STAR TREK: Phase II most definitely would've come to fruition, first, before any thought was given to making a STAR TREK movie. And if PHASE II had bombed ... wow! That would've killed the franchise, surely. Wow ... no TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT. Hard to imagine. And in 2009, J.J. Abrams would've been handed the project to reboot this old, failed series into a money maker. And I'm sure, had he taken the exact same approach as he eventually did, there would've been a lot more fan love directred his way ...
 
I'm not sure Pike -- the hero who doesn't want to be the hero -- would have worked. Then again, maybe he would have developed into a more Kirk-like character over time.
 
Right. "The Cage" was showing Pike at a particular low ebb, just after he'd lost several crew including his yeoman and wasn't sure if he wanted to go on. The events of the pilot made him realize his doubts were just idle fantasies and he emerged recommitted to his purpose. So any further adventures would've shown him on more of an even keel.

Structurally, it's very similar to DS9's pilot "Emissary": A protagonist who's lost hope following a tragedy is put through an illusory ordeal that lets him confront and resolve his crisis of faith.
 
Right. "The Cage" was showing Pike at a particular low ebb, just after he'd lost several crew including his yeoman and wasn't sure if he wanted to go on. The events of the pilot made him realize his doubts were just idle fantasies and he emerged recommitted to his purpose. So any further adventures would've shown him on more of an even keel.

Structurally, it's very similar to DS9's pilot "Emissary": A protagonist who's lost hope following a tragedy is put through an illusory ordeal that lets him confront and resolve his crisis of faith.

True, but there is another big difference that I have to wonder if it was another reason the NBC Execs didn't like the tone of the pilot:

For DS9's 'Emissary' most of the audience had the backstory (IE had seen TNG, and seen 'Best of Both Worlds' or had it available to refer to if DS9 was their intro to Star Trek, and they wanted more backstory.)

In 1965 you had a producer who spent the near equivalent of a small movie budget on a pilot for a new science fiction series whose premise was an Earth ship exploring the Galaxy.

So, what do you do for your introductory episode? You have the Captain (and main character of the show) already burnt out on exploring the Galaxy, and seriously considering quitting the service, etc.
^^^
In my mind, if I'm an interested viewer, seeing that wouldn't give me much faith it the show's premise of longevity. The first episode, and the Captain is already burnt out about his career?

Now, I'm not saying what was done was badly written or executed; but it shouldn't be the LEAD into a new (and expensive) series. <-- Mid Season or late Season sure, but THIS is the lead off. So yeah, I have to wonder if maybe the Execs thought some viewers would tune in the following week expecting Pike to bemoan another aspect of his job?

I do think GR and Co. recovered well, as the next two episodes (the second pilot "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and the first actual series episode filmed and produced - although it was aired weeks later in the first Season due to all the post production needed to complete it - "The Corbomite Maneuver" <--- IMO still one of the best Star Trek episodes ever produced as for me, it does a really good job of encapsulating the main themes of the series in a nice 52 minute package) really did a better job of positively reflecting the main characters we would come to know and like.
 
Christopher is right in a general and factual sense, but the charisma gap between Hunter and Shatner is like the Grand Canyon. Star Trek dodged a bullet when Hunter bowed out.
 
In 1965 you had a producer who spent the near equivalent of a small movie budget on a pilot for a new science fiction series whose premise was an Earth ship exploring the Galaxy.

So, what do you do for your introductory episode? You have the Captain (and main character of the show) already burnt out on exploring the Galaxy, and seriously considering quitting the service, etc.


That's a good point. I wonder if Hunter's pilot should have been about "the fight on Rigel VII" mission that occurred right before "The Cage." It would have been a straightforward action adventure and probably sold the series right there. But NBC would still have asked for the supporting roles to be recast, and Hunter would still have declined to return.
 
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