But I read on the internet that Magnum P.I. was the first Vietnam veteran in a TV lead role!?
Trek guest actors in maybe surprising roles
- Thread starter Maurice
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But I read on the internet that Magnum P.I. was the first Vietnam veteran in a TV lead role!?
That popinjay Fox (Gene Lyons) as another philosophical gunfighter, in a moral bind, on the Have Gun - Will Travel episode "Episode in Laredo," written by Gene Roddenberry.
Going to HAVE to kill you, or I'll look weak.
Well, no reason we can't have breakfast and chat first.
The wife and kid show up just in time to cause further moral angst.
Going to HAVE to kill you, or I'll look weak.
Well, no reason we can't have breakfast and chat first.
The wife and kid show up just in time to cause further moral angst.
The Have Gun - episode "Les Girls," written by Gene Roddenberry, featured a French woman transporting three young French mail-order brides cross-country. Only a vague resemblance to "Mudd's Women," but the idea is there. They start out dainty and decorative, but after a week of travel in a wagon with Paladin teaching them survival in the wild, end up hardy and able to take care of themselves and some rough miner husbands.
Wow…. Did not know that. Recycling ideas makes sense in those days, I mean, who would compare them after all?
The similarity wouldn't have taken anyone in those days by surprise. The "wiving settlers" trope was pretty common in Westerns, and was based on a real-life historical practice that was well known. The entire TV series Here Come the Brides from 1968-70 (starring Robert Brown, Mark Lenard, and David Soul) was built around it. "Mudd's Women" wasn't even the first science fiction iteration of the premise, since a lot of SF adapted frontier/colonial tropes from Westerns. A notable one is “The Girls from Earth” by Frank M. Robinson, published in January 1952. Similar to Mudd's scheme, it involved a fraud in which the scammers replaced the photos of plain women from Earth with photos of starlets and models to lure in the men on Mars, with the men turning out to be just as happy to have the companionship of the plain women. It was adapted on the X Minus One radio show.
Amazing information. How cool is it that I can still learn new things about tos and the genre after all these years. Thank you for sharing.
From “Star Trek Is…”:
"The Women"
Some "hanky-panky" occurs when escorting a cargo ship of women to a deep space colony. This outline was the basis of "Mudd's Women".
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John Abbot as a man who was as peaceful as any Organian, until uncouth frontier types started bullying the little man with the goatee, and he became a skilled gunslinger to defend himself. It got out of hand, and after killing 11 men who called him out, he hired Paladin to wound his hand in a mock gunfight, to put an end to his legend.
Turned on an episode of 'The Big Valley' and there is a pre-TOS William Shatner as a reluctant bank robber.
That was a good episode!
On this week's episode of The Monkees (3-13-1967), we got a couple of familiar faces. One is a fellow we see on the bridge and other places throughout the first season:
And, in makeup that looks more Vulcan than Chinese, Gene Dynarski has decided to give up Lithium mining:
Do we have this person's name?One is a fellow we see on the bridge and other places throughout the first season:
He's not even listed in the credits on Memory Alpha for "The Man Trap", but he was there:
I know I've seen him in other episodes, but I can't remember where and I don't have ready access to the photos.
Another one from Disney's Zorro
Arthur Batanides as Lazaro
As Enterprise geologist Lieutenant D'Amato in That Which Survives.
One of the few *unfortunate Blueshirts (*If death by being touched by Lee Meriwether counts as unfortunate)
He shows up as a stock "heavy" in several shows of the era The Twilight Zone, The Time Tunnel, I Spy, Mission: Impossible and an agent of KAOS in Get Smart
Also seems like adding a mustache was a sure way to get yourself a part on Disney Zorro...
Michael Forest as Anastacio
As Apollo...
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This may be the guy:He's not even listed in the credits on Memory Alpha for "The Man Trap", but he was there:
I know I've seen him in other episodes, but I can't remember where and I don't have ready access to the photos.
Walter Soo Hoo | Memory Alpha | Fandom
Noticing that also in the cast of the Monkees ep was a very young Mike Farrell (who never made a TOS appearance, but a few years later would be prominent in The Questor Tapes opposite Robert Foxworth.)
Yes! That's him. Thank you.
I just saw him in "Devil in the Dark" last week. I remembered that, but couldn't remember in what capacity.
Interesting that a recurring Trek guest was named Walter Soo Hoo, since there used to be a fan theory, before Sulu's first name was officially established as Hikaru, that his full name was Walter Sulu. I wonder if there's a connection, or if it's just coincidence.
I remember that fan theory, and when George Takei was a guest at the Denver Star Trek convention in 1990, I asked him about it during his presentation. That's when I learned that Hikaru had been planned to be revealed as his name, according to Takei as far back as when TOS was airing new.
That's not true at all. The name was coined by Vonda McIntyre in the novel The Entropy Effect in 1981, and it only became canonical because novelist Peter David happened to be on set the day the Excelsior scene in ST VI was being filmed and he suggested it to the filmmakers. According to the novel's editor David Hartwell, interviewed in Voyages of the Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion (p. 36), "Vonda corresponded with Gene Roddenberry and George Takei to give Sulu a first name, Hikaru. They both eventually agreed." They wouldn't have had to be talked into it if the name had come from them in the first place. Takei must have misremembered by the time of that convention.
After all, Sulu wasn't originally conceived as specifically Japanese. He was supposed to be "pan-Asian," of unspecified Asian nationality and representing the entire continent (I think I read once that it was so all Asian-American viewers could see themselves in him). That's why Roddenberry named him after the Sulu Sea, under the mistaken impression that it abutted multiple Asian countries (instead of just Malaysia and the Philippines). Fans and novelists later assumed that Sulu was Japanese because Takei was (despite "Sulu" not being a Japanese name at all), and McIntyre chose the name Hikaru after the epithet of the main character in The Tale of Genji, one of the most famous works of Japanese literature. I profoundly doubt that Roddenberry and the makers of TOS would have chosen such a distinctly Japanese name for their "pan-Asian" character.
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