by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I had planned to attend the Vintage Sci-Fi
screening in Golden Hill (http://sdvsf.org/) —
especially since he had the day off and therefore we could go together — and
the screening proprietor had planned to screen all three incarnations of the
pilots for Star Trek. First was “The
Cage,” the 1964 version with Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike, Majel
Barrett as his second-in-command, a tall,raven-haired, emotionless woman simply
called “Number One,” and virtually none of the familiar cast members we came to
know and love from the 1966-1969 series. Besides a different captain and
second-in-command, there was a different ship’s doctor (veteran character actor
John Hoyt as “Dr. Phillip Boyce”), engineer, helmsman and everybody else. The
only character from this episode to carry over to the series was Leonard Nimoy
as Mr. Spock — ironically, since one of the reasons NBC rejected this pilot
submission was they didn’t want someone visibly alien on board and they
especially thought people wouldn’t want to see those now-famous pointy ears
every week. I’ve known the history ever since I read the book The
World of Star Trek
in the 1970’s: Gene Roddenberry, whose one previous TV series was a cop show
called The Lieutenant that aired
for one season (1963-64) on ABC, wanted to do a science-fiction series that
would have continuing characters, not an anthology like Tales of
Tomorrow, The Twilight Zone or The
Outer Limits. He pitched it to potential
studios and networks as “Wagon Train
to the Stars,” and he first went to MGM, which had produced The
Lieutenant with him. MGM heard out his
pitch and then told him they were already developing their own sci-fi series, Lost
in Space, and they wouldn’t be interested
in Star Trek. Neither would CBS,
which had agreed to air Lost in Space and therefore wasn’t going to put on a competing show. Roddenberry
ended up at Desilu Studios, created by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball to produce I
Love Lucy and now Ball’s property following
her 1960 divorce from Arnaz. He successfully pitched a prospectus to NBC and
got a budget for a pilot episode — which he blew through quickly thanks to all
the elaborate sets, including the interiors of the starship Enterprise, that had to be built (and of course could be
re-used for the series if it were picked up).
Out of several stories
Roddenberry submitted to NBC, they picked one called “The Cage,” which dealt
with the Enterprise being lured
to the planet Talos-4 by a phony distress call, ostensibly from a ship called Columbia with crash-landed there 18 years earlier. The
Talosians, like the long-deceased Krell of the 1956 MGM film Forbidden
Planet, solved the problem of supporting
themselves so well they eventually developed their mental powers and became
androgynous beings (they were actually played by women but their voices were
dubbed by men) who created illusions to entertain themselves and relieve the
boredom of not having to struggle for existence. Only they did such a good job
of developing their intellects that they neglected everything else about their
planet, including losing the technological skills that had built their
infrastructure in the first place. So they decided to create illusions that
would lure other species to their world in hopes of finding one they could
breed and use to create a race of permanent slaves that could do the manual and
technical labor needed to maintain their world and once again live on its
surface instead of underground, which is what they’re doing when we meet them.
Christopher Pike (Jeffrey Hunter), captain of the starship Enterprise, beams down to Talos-4 and is promptly kidnapped by
the Talosians, who decide he’s going to be their Adam and sire a race of human
slaves. His Eve is going to be Vina (Susan Oliver, listed as “Guest Star” on
the credits), the one survivor of the Columbia crash, whom the Talosians rescued and reconstructed
as best they could. In a series of illusions created by the Talosians,
Vina
appears as the damsel in distress Pike previously rescued from a creepy monster
on the planet Rigel-7; as his old girlfriend in a bucolic scene set in farm
country that’s the one time the 1960’s Star Trek ever attempted a depiction of the earth of its time
(now that I’ve read a lot more
science fiction than I had then, this sequence seems quite obviously, shall we
say, inspired by the similar
illusion in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles), and a green Orion slave girl in an orgy sequence
obviously modeled on Cecil B. DeMille’s depictions of ancient Rome. (This last
sequence posed a problem for Roddenberry and his director, Robert Butler: they
kept putting green makeup on Susan Oliver and the footage kept coming back with
her skin color looking white-person normal. They painted her darker green and
she still came back from the
processing lab looking like a normally-colored white woman. Then they found out
that someone at the processing lab, thinking they were correcting a hideous
mistake, had been taking the green out of her and changing Oliver’s footage
back to normal color.) When the Enterprise crew decides to send a landing party down to the surface of Talos-4 to
investigate what’s going on — and to bring a laser cannon to breach the
entrance from the surface to the Talosian caves so they can break in and rescue
Captain Pike — only the two women are beamed down, and the Talosian “Keeper”
(Meg Wyllie, voiced by Malachi Throne) explains to Pike that since Vina
apparently hasn’t suited him, he has the choice of two other women to be Eve to
his Adam. The Talosians also have a particularly cruel set of punishments they
can inflict on their captives — they can either send pain waves directly into
their bodies or surround them with an illusion like the fire that engulfs Pike
in one scene (“From a fable you once heard in childhood,” the Keeper explains —
to which I couldn’t help leaning over to Charles and saying, referencing
Hunter’s most famous credit as Jesus Christ in the 1961 remake of King
of Kings, “I played Jesus Christ! I know all about suffering!”) — and the Keeper gives
a matter-of-fact explanation that’s the siren song of totalitarians everywhere:
“Wrong thinking is punishable; right thinking will be as quickly rewarded. You
will find it an effective combination.”
The Talosians also hack into the data
banks of the Enterprise to get
background information on the human race, and they make the discovery that
humans hate being held captive, “even when it is pleasant,” and therefore they
won’t make good slaves after all even though they’re otherwise the most
adaptable workers they’ve been able to find. “Your unsuitability has condemned
the Talosian race to extinction,” the Keeper says as he allows the Enterprise crew members to beam back up to their ship — while
Vina stays behind after, in a scene obviously copied from the famous ending of Lost
Horizon, the Talosians strip her of her illusion
of beauty and show her as she really is, not only old and decrepit but also
lopsided because the Talosians had never seen an earth woman before and thus
didn’t know quite how to put her back together from the wreckage of the Columbia. (Charles flagged this as a plot hole, pointing out
that since the Talosians themselves have bilateral symmetry, they would have
made their reconstruction of Vina bilaterally symmetrical as well instead of
having her lean over like a woman who’s been given a single radical
mastectomy.) I wouldn’t go so far as to call “The Cage” the best
science-fiction film ever made to that point — if pressed I’d probably say
either Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or
Robert Wise’s original 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still — but it’s an estimable one and would probably have
done at least fairly well at the box office if it had been released
theatrically as a one-off after NBC turned it down. Instead, NBC actually
commissioned a second Star Trek
pilot — which became the other film screened last night, “Where No Man Has Gone
Before” — and ultimately agreed to air Star Trek as a weekly series.
“The Cage” — or significant
portions of it — first saw the light of day when it was incorporated into a
two-part episode (the only time
the original Star Trek did a
serial!) called “The Menagerie,” with a newly filmed framing story in which
after the events of “The Cage” the United Federation of Planets slapped an
embargo on Talos-4 that was punishable by death — the only death penalty left
in the universe, or at least any Federation member planet — and Captain
Christopher Pike suffered a horrible space accident that left him in an odd
self-moving wheelchair that looked like a portable sauna. He was able to answer
yes-or-no questions by blinking one or another light on the front of his chair,
but otherwise couldn’t communicate any more than he could move without the
chair. Spock takes the ship to Talos-4 against not only the orders of his new
captain, James T. Kirk (William Shatner), and the footage of “The Cage” appears
to illustrate what happened to Pike there 13 years earlier. There are some
glitches in the transition — though the ship is visibly the same size, in “The
Cage” it had a crew of only 200, not the 430 established as its complement in the
later show; and it’s Number One, not Mr. Spock, who’s the emotionless, logical
member of the officer corps — but overall the two parts of “The Menagerie” were
among the most compelling episodes of the original Star Trek. Alas, in extracting the sequences from “The Cage”
used in “The Menagerie,” Desilu Studios lost track of the clips they deleted
from the version ultimately aired on TV, and for years the only copy of “The
Cage” known to exist was a black-and-white 16 mm work print from Gene
Roddenberry’s personal collection. Roddenberry showed this to several Star
Trek and science-fiction conventions, and
in the process the print suffered damage.
Then in the 1980’s Paramount, which
had taken over the Star Trek
property by buying Desilu in 1967, decided to issue “The Cage” on home video.
They took the scenes that had been used in “The Menagerie” and ran those in
color, while splicing in the scenes that hadn’t been used in the TV version from Roddenberry’s
black-and-white work print, restoring them as best they could. Then a
researcher named Ron Furmanek was going through Paramount’s vaults looking for
old prints of 1950’s 3-D films and came upon the scraps of film that had been
removed from “The Cage” when it became “The Menagerie.” Alas, the footage was
all there visually (except for a couple of scraps still missing) but there was
no sound, so the soundtrack had to be pulled from Roddenberry’s old
black-and-white work print. This was the version we saw last night —
interestingly, a lot of people who’ve seen this one have thought it was a
version in which the black-and-white scenes were colorized — and it remains a
quite effective piece of science-fiction filmmaking. It also sparks the obvious
debate over whether the series would have been stronger or weaker with Jeffrey
Hunter as the captain instead of William Shatner — an argument a Fanfare magazine critic made when reviewing albums of the Star
Trek scores in the 1980’s, in which he said
he’d never been that much of a Star Trek fan largely because he’d been put off by Shatner’s overacting. He
thought the quiet, less overwrought Hunter would have made a better series lead
— and it’s not clear why Gene Roddenberry didn’t keep Hunter on the show when
he made the second pilot, the one NBC bought. One report is that Jeffrey
Hunter’s wife talked him out of it, saying he was a serious actor and shouldn’t
be wasting his time doing science-fiction; another is that it was a simple
scheduling conflict — Hunter was working on something else when the call came
for a second Star Trek pilot.
Ironically, Hunter died quite young — age 41, on May 27, 1969 (ironically, just
about the time the original run of Star Trek was coming to an end), of a stroke and a fall — and
the potential of a Star Trek
series with him in the lead remained tantalizingly unfulfilled.
