Trek guest actors in maybe surprising roles

The Galactic Journey through (current) Trek continues! The Fall season has started, so we're getting all kinds of Trek guests traipsing through other shows.

This week's episode of Mission: Impossible was particularly noteworthy. As you know, M:I and Trek are sister shows, and never has that been more apparent than the 67-09-17 episode:



First, we have Mark Lenard, as Jaime Cohenez, brown-facing it up to play a Latin colonel.



Then we have the Cestus III base with Vasquez Rocks peeping in the background.

Beyond that, the score by Gerald Fried sounds like two Trek scores put together (mostly "Amok Time", which he probably composed around the same time). It's distractingly Trekkish.

It makes me wonder why the fan Trek shows that use Trek library music, to the point where it gets a bit stale, don't raid other contemporary scores by Fried and Steiner to considerably expand the library at their disposal.

 

You left out one detail: the episode was actually titled "Trek."

I guess they're trying to be authentic. It was rare for shows to borrow cues from other shows entirely, though it did happen on occasion.

 

Thanks, I missed the title.

I also miss Dan Briggs. I know I'm in the minority.

Have you ever watched The Fugitive?

 

Not for a long time, but now that you mention it, I think Dominic Frontiere reused some of his Outer Limits cues there? As I said, it happened on occasion, but it wasn't common (at least not after the '50s, when a number of shows drew on stock music libraries), and Star Trek never did it.

Although there was some stock library usage in later decades. I remember being struck when Farscape used a cue I recognized from some other show, though I couldn't remember where. And there was a weird case where a Columbo episode (I'm pretty sure, though it may have been Quincy) used about four bars of a cue I knew well from The Incredible Hulk, just that one tiny snippet and nothing more.

 

Correct. Fugitive was mostly reused cues.

It doesn't matter that Trek never did it. Modern folks could do it so we don't hear the same rehashings every time.

Other examples are Klaus Badelt repurposing his The Time Machine score for Atlantis, or Horner repurposing TWOK for Aliens. I recognize these are not quite re-using, but it's distractingly close.

 

James Horner.

 

Ah, thanks. Fixed!

 

It matters if, as I said, the makers of the fan films are choosing to be authentic in recreating how Star Trek did things. That was my whole point -- that fan film makers are often more interested in faithfully recreating the way TOS was done than innovating beyond it. Staying within the same limits as TOS may not matter to you or me, but I'm conjecturing that it could matter to them, and that could be the answer to your question of why they don't do it.

Those don't count, because as you say, they aren't reusing the actual recordings from another production, just composing new music/performances using similar themes and motifs. So it's not stock music. In order for something to be stock music, it has to be a reuse of a pre-existing recording, not a new performance.

 

So what Trek alumni is seen behind the camera?

 

Is that Deela(?) from "Wink of an Eye"?

 

Neopeius that is correct! Perhaps not really all that hard to guess? Maybe if her hair style or color was different.
Kathie Browne/"Deela" in Mannix "The Man Outside" 1971 A professional photographer get involved taking photos of secret government documents for profit. He fate hangs in the balance.

 

Kathie Browne is possibly the Trek alum I've seen the most in my journey through 60s TV, so it wasn't a hard guess. Thank you for the challenge!

 

But would the show have been as successful had Steven Hill stayed on in the lead role. If he hadn't been fired at the end of the first season for his outburst during the filming of the episode "Action!" and came back for the second, his screen time would have most likely been limited to the tape, dossier, and apartment scenes and possibly the finale, because of his contract which said he had to leave the set each Friday before sundown to attend prayers in accordance to his Orthodox religion and would not return to work until the following Monday. It's highly doubtful that Steven Hill would have been the one dangling from the helicopter like Peter Graves did; it might be Martin Landau in that role, but then who takes over Martin's role? Is it a series of "one shot" special guest stars? And is the studio/network willing to pay a leading man salary to someone's who's screen time is limited to 5-10 minutes? There's a cascade effect that has to be considered.

 

Grammar nitpick: Alumni is plural. There's just her, so she's an alumna, or gender-neutral alum. Go back to your activities.

 

Specifically, it's masculine plural. Masculine: singular alumnus, plural alumni. Feminine: singular alumna, plural alumnae. For non-binary graduates, I suppose the closest thing would be neuter endings, alumnum/alumna.

 

I never heard why Steven Hill left the show. What was the outburst he was fired over?

 

The Wikipedia entry for Hill covers that; it draws heavily from his NYT obituary and other sources.

 

I didn't know Hill was Jewish! That would explain why our Judaiophile found him as hot as Landau and Nimoy.

Here's why I like Hill better than Graves (at least so far):

1) Hill is kind of a nebbish. I feel like agents should be nebbishes. Agents that stand out get made. Also, it was a fascinating contradiction: nebbish who is also a leader. And when Dan got mad, it looked serious.

2) Having less screen time meant less danger of the show becoming the Peter Graves show. Again, I've only seen two episodes of the second season AND I DON'T WANT SPOILERS, PLEASE. What I really enjoy about the 1st season is the ensemble nature of it. While we, the viewers, didn't understand why Hill was so often absent, it led to great things like Cinnamon getting the briefing once, and the other players getting to do more.

3) Hill's apartment was amazing. Graves' apartment is unimpressive.

4) Series of "one shot" special guest stars would be kind of amazing. The cool thing about Season 1 was never knowing who the team would be. It felt like it was always being made ad hoc anew.

Maybe the show will be just fine. After all, it goes on until the mid-70s. And the newspapers were not at all flattering to Hill after he left.

Again, PLEASE NO SPOILERS.

 

Don't worry. If you want spoilers you can visit the Classic Retro/Pop Culture thread in the Television forum. We've just started discussing the seventh season of 'M:I'.

 

I wish they had committed more fully to the variable team compositions. Like, instead of having one master of disguise do all the impersonations, bring in a different person every time, chosen for their resemblance to the subject. That's how Rollin was chosen in the pilot -- he was brought in because he was a good match for the targeted dictator (also played by Landau, of course). It loses credibility when he (or Paris) impersonates everyone. (And it led to the show casting Paul Stevens as the guy Rollin impersonated on three separate occasions, because they resembled each other.)

I mean, part of the reason for the M:I format was to go for an anthology feel by having the actors adopt different personas and roles every week. It would've been even more anthology-like if there had been only one regular team leader recruiting different guest agents every week, or at least if it had had a mix of one-shot guests and intermittently recurring semi-regulars, like in season 1 only more so.