In Sydney, Australia, my Star Trek club was compiling our bimonthly newsletters, with its traditional movie-news "sealed section" to prevent exposure to spoilers for those avoiding them.
The rumour mill for ST V was simply bizarre. There was a funny "Entertainment Tonight" interview with Nichelle Nichols where she suggests we might expect... unicorns! (And we got one: a blue one!) DC Fontana had been distressed about Shatner's addition of Sybok. During her time with TOS, DC had written memos imploring the writers to avoid the temptation of giving Spock siblings. I am sure that Shatner suggested his "Enterprise encounters God" storyline thinking it would thrill Roddenberry, since so many TOS episodes had gods, would-be gods and mentions of paradise in them, and he was perplexed when GR disliked it, later pronouncing that he, GR, considered that "parts of ST V are apocryphal".
We went as a group to an advance screening of ST V during a ST convention in Brisbane, a special favour from Paramount Australia. Then we saw the film at a brand new cinema complex in Sydney. The film was as wacky as we expected/feared. We did appreciate some of Shatner's clever directorial choices. As we came out, we saw this US poster on the wall, and we just fell about laughing:
To stop people leaving early? by
Ian McLean, on Flickr
Prior to this, our first exposure to the ST V trailer had been during a "Sit Long and Prosper" event of TMP, ST II, ST III and ST IV. Although the scene of Scotty knocking himself unconscious was such a crowdpleaser on first viewing, it's the one scene that summed up our conclusions of the film as a whole:
In ST IV, we were laughing
with the characters. In ST V, we were laughing
at them.
