Keep on Trekin’
Strange New Worlds’‘ “Subspace Rhapsody” is the first time a Star Trek series or movie has engaged the genre of the musical, but 47 years earlier a parody of the OG boldly went Broadway... by way of newsprint.
MAD Magazine took its first shot at Star Trek in 1967, but took a second crack at the series seven years after the show’s cancelation; lampooning not just the show’s characters and its format, but its syndication success and the business of selling merch to Trekkies… And did so in the format of a musical.
The comic itself is a snapshot of where Trek fandom stood in the American bicentennial year of 1776.
Where No Pilot Had Gone Before?
Since 1968 it’s often been claimed that NBC’s order for a second pilot for Star Trek was “unprecedented” and marked the “first time in television history” such an “unheard of” thing had ever happened.
Is it true? Is any of it true? Did “Where No Man Has Gone Before” truly mark the first time a prospective series had a second pilot episode? Was NBC really the first television network to order a second pilot after rejecting the first one? Did the move actually cause "quite a stir within the industry"?
Read on to find out.
The Naked Cliffhanger
“The Naked Time” is an all-time classic Star Trek episode memorable for characters going berserk and revealing their “naked” psyches. The episode ends with a “laws of physics”-defying bang as the starship restarts her engines cold in an “implosion” and is hurled into a time warp, ending—as Spock observes—in the recent past.
But a redo didn’t just happen on the screen. It happened in the production of the episode.
On Thursday, July 7th, 1966, the closing scenes of “The Naked Time” went before the cameras.
But the finale filmed on this day would not make it to the air.
Why did this happen? What was this ending? It's long been said to have been a cliffhanger. Is that true? Let’s risk an implosion and time warp back 57 years to find out.
Uhura, Black To the Future
When Lt. Uhura appeared on the debut episode of Star Trek in September 1966, she was boldly going where no black woman had gone before: as a continuing character on an American network TV series depicting a future where the color of her skin didn’t matter, only the content of her character.
The character has since become an iconic touchstone, so instead of retreading oft-told tales, let’s take a brief look instead at how Nichelle landed on Star Trek and what was the state of race portrayals on American TV in that era.
The Great Bird Of the Radio, 1974
Stories change over time and with repetition, so it’s important to preserve early accounts wherever possible. Case in point, a radio interview with Gene Roddenberry recorded only 4.5 years after the Star Trek went off the air, and only months after the premier of its Saturday morning follow-up.
In January 1974 a young DJ named Scott Arthur at WARM radio in Scranton, Pennsylvania learned that Roddenberry was scheduled to speak at a local college. “I got his phone number and set up an interview to promote the event in advance.” Decades later, Arthur found the raw recording and allowed it to be shared online. Join us as we FACT TREK this vintage recording.
Dos Trequis
Between 2006 and 2016, a popular Dos Equis beer ad campaign featured a debonair, gray-bearded gentleman, identified as “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” who ended each ad with a variation on the slogan — “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis. Stay thirsty, my friends.”
For a decade now memes identify the actor as Jonathan Goldsmith and state that he appeared as an non-speaking, unnamed redshirt in an episode of the original Star Trek.
Only one of those is true.
Isn’t that Most Interesting?
The Off-Center Seat: 55 Years of Myth Making
In today’s post-truth, fact-challenged world, just what, in fact, is a fact?
And what happens when the people who have direct and personal experience/memories of an event are no longer with us? Absent their first-hand accounts must we depend on second-, third- or nth-hand accounts by people who weren’t there?
With that in mind, let’s rip through the upholstery of “Lucy Loves Star Trek,” the debut episode of the recent docuseries The Center Seat, and see how close the oral tradition on display in this documentary conforms to historical documents, first-person accounts, and contemporaneous media coverage.