Last Thursday (11-15) I had the rare pleasure of seeing the original Star Trek episode “The Menagerie” remastered at an AMC movie theater. If you’re not up to speed, the entire original series is currently being remastered and brought back to television since last fall. Denise and Mike Okuda, the visual effects wizards who are the masterminds of much of the contemporary Trek series (Next Generation to Enterprise) have been overseeing the project, and they enhance and update the visuals while still staying true to the feel of the originals. As one of the other effects guys on the project said in an interview (shown in a delightful set of special features in the theater before the main event), they try to create effects that would have been done had they had the technology back in the 1960s. So now all of the planets, ships, spacial anomalies, painted backgrounds, etc. are enhanced by CGI and they really look fantastic. If you haven’t taken the opportunity to watch any of this yet, check your local listings– there’s one on every week, and there’s still a year and a half left of new remastered episodes coming out. Also, the first season is now available in HD DVD.

If you know your TOS you know that “The Menagerie” is the series’ only two-parter and it uses footage from the original pilot “The Cage” as flashbacks to Captain Pike’s encounter with the Talosians. I haven’t seen it in a long time and it was mouth-watering to watch it on the big screen. It was a limited screening but got so much interest it was opened for a second night, so I’m hoping that success convinces Fathom Events to do something like this again.

Watching Captain Christopher Pike again really got me thinking: what if the network had accepted the original pilot and Star Trek went on from there? I’m aware that, of the many things Roddenberry was asked to change, Pike wasn’t one of them, and the real reason Jeffry Hunter decided not to go on with the series was that his wife didn’t take it seriously and thought it would destroy his career. But let’s say that didn’t happen either. I wonder if Star Trek would ever have achieved the success it has without Captain James T. Kirk. Would Pike have become the icon Kirk is now? Would the ratings of the syndicated re-runs have been as popular even after the show was canceled? Or would it have been more successful and never been canceled?

First off, I kind of doubt that last question. Star Trek was way ahead of its time and a lot of people who become huge Trekkies with the re-runs simply didn’t know about it while it was still new– Jeffry Hunter couldn’t have changed that. It’s quite difficult to compare the two Captains because one only got two episodes (and in his second, he’s completely paralyzed and can only speak with a button that blinks once for “yes” and twice for “no”). Kirk had 79 episodes and seven films, so we know a lot more about him. From the little we do know, though, Pike seems a little more by-the-book than Kirk, maybe a little more no-nonsense, and he certainly isn’t the womanizer Kirk is. Kirk would never have resisted all the sexual temptations on Talos no matter how much danger he was in. Heck, in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” Kirk kisses the robot girl just because she’s standing there! And Kirk would never have been able to deal with a female first officer like Number One, so I wonder how that dynamic would have played throughout the series, again, assuming the network signed off on it.

Perhaps Kirk’s womanizing isn’t exactly the essence of Star Trek, and yet it is one of the charming things about it. No one could get away with that on TV now, but for whatever reason, it’s one of the things that still makes Kirk so fun to watch. Shatner’s borderline melodramatic portrayal of him, especially when delivering a big morality monologue or when acting like he’s in intense pain, is the other side of his character that helped give him iconic status. I suppose the real question is this: is Captain Kirk Star Trek? Was he given iconic status because the series became so successful, or was it the other way around? I would argue that Spock was always at least as popular, if not more so, than Kirk, and he would have existed with Pike or Kirk (the network asked Roddenberry to get rid of him too, because he looked too much like the devil, but he wouldn’t budge). So perhaps, just because of that fact, Trek still would have gone on similarly to the way it did, and we still might have ended up with five series and 10+ movies.

But I can’t help but thinking, unless his supporting cast loosened him up a bit, that the show might have been more serious with Pike at the helm. The network called “The Cage” too cerebral, and when Roddenberry lost Pike, it seems to me like he invented a somewhat less cerebral Captain. Only Spock remained from the original cast of “The Cage,” so I wonder if in a scenario where the studio liked everything Roddenberry did, the other iconic characters of Trek might have never existed as well. Number One (hopefully she would have been given a real name at some point) would have been the first officer, and there would have been a different doctor. Who knows if McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, or anyone else would have ever been in the show. And could Trek have gone on without those characters, too? Seems unlikely since the trio of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy really came to carry the series.

I’m looking especially forward to how Pike is portrayed in the new film. Perhaps this new Pike will help us to answer some of these questions, since it’s looking like he’ll be a prominent part of the movie. We’ll have the chance to compare both Kirk and Pike at the same time. But this will be J. J. Abrams’ take on Pike, not Roddenberry, so our original question can never be truly answered. Perhaps some day we can find some parallel universe where Jeffry Hunter was the star of Trek instead of William Shatner and finally know once and for all. But hopefully while looking for it we don’t wind up in some horrible universe where Star Trek never existed. That would certainly be looking in a mirror, darkly.

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

Tags: Captain Kirk, Christopher Pike, J. J. Abrams, Jeffry Hunter, science fiction, Star Trek 11, Star Trek Remastered, StarTrek, Television, The Cage, The Menagerie, TV, William Shatner

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Capt Logan, Sci-Fi, Star Trek, Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.