Takei wanted Sulu to be Captain in Trek V
- Thread starter Khan 2.0
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I'm convinced the whole Shatner/Takei feud is just a sham for publicity. Ditto all the "cast hates Shatner!" stuff from the 90's. Made them money doing interviews and such between films. Now it gets clicks.
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Does he mean the comical bit involving fooling Sybok given to Chekov? While the assault team try and fail to sneak in, grab the hostages and get out? Swap Sulu from piloting the shuttle to staying behind on the Enterprise with Scotty?
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Maybe.
But that doesn’t fit Shatner‘s quote.
In universe Chekov overtook Sulu a long time ago when he became XO on the Reliant and got command experience.
Why that is? No idea.
I can understand any misgivings of keeping Sulu as the perpetual helmsman.
Think its about the eventual Excelsior VI Captaincy, Takei wanted it in V - and it goes all the way back to the deleted shuttle scene in Trek II.
I see some comments in the tweet about how Shatner was right as Takei was barely in VI ..but you can't blame Takei for wanting to be captain over the occasional usual 'aye captain' at helm (unlike Chekov who had the expanded first officer role in II and fun standout scenes in IV and even the 'captain' Chekov scene in V) - Sulu as Captain of Excelsior was quite a big deal in VI, it opened the movie, was an important factor in the climax, and led to the anniversary Voyager ep (and almost a series)
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Takei had more involvement in STVI than Nichols did in STIII. I don’t think the amount of screen time matters as much as showcasing the character. I'm sure Takei was keen to showcase Sulu, and himself, as soon as possible. Who knows, if he'd been given a chance to do so sooner, we might have got a spin off sooner.
Definitely. The whole thing developed as Doohan and Takei's convention schtick, it doesn't bear much relation to anything that actually happened during the production of the show in the sixties.
Takei was never going to be given a show, he simply didn’t have the acting chops to be the lead. He wasn’t the star of Star Trek and needs to get over it.
I wouldn't say 'never' but Shatner is a pretty special performer. You can't do a direct comparison.
I think Takei's performances in other shows and plays demonstrate that he has a much greater range than we ever saw in Trek. I don’t think he could carry a show like Shatner or Stewart but I don't look at Bakula and think he's on a different tier to Takei.
I don't think that a "Captain Sulu" series was ever close to actually happening. It was just wishful thinking on the part of Takei and a small but vocal group of fans. But the reality is that they couldn't even get a Captain Sulu book series off the ground.
Takei seems to have tunnel vision on the whole "Sulu as Captain" thing, as this story from my friend Glenn Greenberg illustrates.
Yeah I would have loved to see a couple of TV movies but I can't visualise a full on series. That said, I think it's easy to give Takei a hard time over lobbying so obsessively for onscreen captaincy but we should also remember one reason for including a Japanese character in the first place was the legacy of internment during WWII.
Fighting to show a well known Asian character being successful on screen would carry more weight than showing a random guest character. The white dude who is ten years younger got promoted to first officer but Sulu's promotion got delayed for 4 movies? You have to wonder...
Hell, Sulu could have helped sabotage Excelsior in STIII alongside Scotty and affected his command chances as a result. The movies barely play out any differently with that slight change.
I think Nick Meyer said the decision to put Chekov on the Reliant was completely arbitrary. It could easily have been Sulu or Uhura.
It must have stung a bit for Takei that Koenig often got the best scenes out of the gang of four, whereas Sulu was just kind of there. His one thing was getting to be a captain, and he had to wait until the last film for that.
He also had the bad luck when his big character scene with the kid in TVH didn't work out. Basically all does is fly a helicopter for ten seconds, whereas Chekov and Uhura get their own cool spy mission and the nuclear wessels scene. Chekov gets to pretend to be the captain in TFF as well.
But the whole thing about Shatner sabotaging the "Captain Sulu" line in TWOK has been completely debunked. It was just a cut line because it offered nothing to the scene.
One telling anecdote about Takei is that he absolutely hated the "don't call me tiny scene". That is, until he saw the audience's reaction in the theatre. He thought it made fun of his character, which shows he doesn't really get it. Perhaps he was (like Shatner) conscious of his height. He was unable to grasp that it was a fun scene with Sulu kicking a bully's ass. Audiences always love those scenes because everyone wants to deck the bully.
I think his character is probably the least interesting and memorable of the original cast, but it's not really Shatner's fault. It's pretty obvious Shatner could be a dick on set and always wanted to hog the limelight, but he was the star of the show after all.
It must have stung a bit for Takei that Koenig often got the best scenes out of the gang of four, whereas Sulu was just kind of there. His one thing was getting to be a captain, and he had to wait until the last film for that.
He also had the bad luck when his big character scene with the kid in TVH didn't work out. Basically all does is fly a helicopter for ten seconds, whereas Chekov and Uhura get their own cool spy mission and the nuclear wessels scene. Chekov gets to pretend to be the captain in TFF as well.
But the whole thing about Shatner sabotaging the "Captain Sulu" line in TWOK has been completely debunked. It was just a cut line because it offered nothing to the scene.
One telling anecdote about Takei is that he absolutely hated the "don't call me tiny scene". That is, until he saw the audience's reaction in the theatre. He thought it made fun of his character, which shows he doesn't really get it. Perhaps he was (like Shatner) conscious of his height. He was unable to grasp that it was a fun scene with Sulu kicking a bully's ass. Audiences always love those scenes because everyone wants to deck the bully.
I think his character is probably the least interesting and memorable of the original cast, but it's not really Shatner's fault. It's pretty obvious Shatner could be a dick on set and always wanted to hog the limelight, but he was the star of the show after all.
And if you go back to the original series, Checkov even as the new guy gets far more screen time and lines. Didn't Takei have an issue with Koenig for that very reason? Interesting that the character of Sulu was never really given much to do and then all of a sudden there's Checkov getting more lines, going on more away missions etc.
During TOS I believe the story is that the producers wanted to capitalize on the success of the Beatles, etc.
So they introduced a character that even looked like a member of such a band.
It was the attempt of fishing in their pool of fans for new viewers?
I think it was a combination of wanting to showcase the cute new character and George being unavailable for stories that would otherwise have featured him. Season one Sulu is a great character. He's pretty cool in That Which Survives as well.
Chekov did take over from the yeomen asking dumb questions to be explained for the audience but also explaining things to the other characters as a know it all. So some of his dialogue serves a purpose beyond characterisation.
Exactly, which is why Walter Koenig didn't want to point out the mistake of having Chekov and Khan remember each other in TWOK when the Chekov character hadn't yet been introduced at the time of "Space Seed." He realized how easy it would've been for them to just write Chekov out of those scenes and replace him with one of the other supporting characters. And Koenig didn't want to lose out on a substantial role, so he stayed quiet.
And heck, something similar happened in Generations. The character of Demora Sulu was originally written to be Chekov's daughter, but they changed it to Sulu's daughter when they got Koenig and James Doohan to sub for Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley. It shows you just how arbitrary and interchangeable most of the supporting characters were.
Fixed it for you.
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