First of all, I’m no Trekkie, but I’ve seen a few episodes of Star Trek and I know who Captain Kirk, Spock, Scotty, etc… are. A few days ago, I saw an old episode of Star Trek, but except for Spock, all of the characters were completely different. The only name I remember is the Captain was called Pike. What did I see? Was it an old pilot episode or something?
That was probably “The Menagerie”. The original pilot of Star Trek was called “The Cage”, and only had one character in common with the actual series. That character was, of course, Spock. “The Cage” was never aired.
Roddenberry didn’t want the pilot to go to waste, so he put together a two-part episode later in the first season (originally aired on the 17th and 24th of November, 1966. Makes them 35 years old last week) which used the footage.
The plot was that Spock had served on the Enterprise years before the rest of the regular cast, so he had a lot of loyalty to the former captain, Christopher Pike. When Pike needed him, Spock did some things that violated Star Fleet regulations to help him. At his “court martial”, he used film of a mission he was on with Pike as part of his explanation for his actions. That ‘exhibit’ was “The Cage”.
Yes, that was “The Menagerie”, the pilot for the original series.
Oops! Simulpost!
Well, I was close. Obviously, I am not a real Trekkie, either.
Christopher Pike (Jeffrey Hunter) was Captain of the Enterprise in the original pilot for Star Trek, which apparently was never aired during the show’s original run. Much of the footage was re-edited and used in the two-parter “The Menagerie” late in the show’s first season, and I do seem to recall seeing the pilot shown intact during some cable channel’s “Star Trek Marathon” one year.
Cocking my eybrow in a Spock-like manner, I found it ‘fascinating’ that there were such a number of changes to the cast, set, uniforms and even acting styles (Nimoy’s portryal of Spock, for example) that the footage from the pilot seemed convincingly to have been from a voyage of the Enterprise made 13 years earlier, as stated in the script for “The Menagerie”. Pointless trivia: different actors played Pike in the new and old footage, and Majel Barrett, who played Nurse Chapel during the regular series run, was second-in-command to Pike in the first pilot.
Thanks for the info. I’m thinking I saw the original pilot intact, because there were no “regular” characters at all in the entire episode, except for Spock. The storyline of the ep. was the Enterprise answered a distress call from some survivors of a crash on a planet. Pike was captured and is accompanied by a blond girl. He escapes, and the blond girl turns out to be horribly disfigured (from the crash), and her beauty was an illusion. Oh, and there is some alien race that’s dying out.
Wasn’t George Takai also in the original pilot as an unnamed Blueshirt? They might have cut his appearance out of the Menagere; he was only shown standing around the bridge for a few moments IIRC.
Yes and no. Takei was there, but his shirt was not blue. 
FTR, Kirk was the THIRD captain of the Enterprise. There was Pike and Robert April.
And Captain Christopher Pike went on to a rewarding career writig mstery novels.
At least that’s what I always think when I’m in the bookstore.
(You think that’s bad – Raymond Burr’s character in Godzilla is named Steve Martin!)
I saw a “reconstructed” version of “The Cage.” The original was either shot or broadcast in black and white. Occasionally, some of that wonderful, oozy color footage from “The Menagerie” had to be substituted.
How do you make a color two-part episode by using the leftover footage of a black and white pilot? I don’t know. I’d sure like to find out.
I remember the opening of the pilot had some rather moody, thermister-sounding music, without a spoken introduction.
One shot which made it into both the pilot and the two part episode is that of Spock smiling at some alien, musical flowers. Eh, he was younger then.
And, if I remember rightly, Captain Pike had an executive officer, referred to only as “Number One.”
You may remember Jeffrey Hunter as “the guy who buys it at Omaha while planting a bangalore torpedo” from The Longest Day. That’s how I remember him, anyway. He also reinforces the TOS tradition of prior acting experience in a Western. Hunter was in The Searchers, one of the best ever.
A few mistakes to be cleared up:
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George Takei did not appear in “The Cage,” even as a blue shirt or a red shirt or any other shirt! However, he did appear in the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before;” he got into the series even before Scotty and Uhura and Chekov did. (See Takei’s credits here.)
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“The Cage” was filmed entirely in color, of course. When it was incorporated into “The Menagerie,” only parts of the original color footage was used, the rest was discarded. When TOS came out on VHS, Paramount could not locate the discarded color footage and had to use B&W footage instead. (For continuity’s sake, they had to discard part of the original color footage when making “The Menagerie,” because, in “The Cage,” the Enterprise turned transparent while using the warp drive, something never done in the series.)
Scotty was in WNMHGB, so Sulu only preceded Uhura and Chekov. And although he was called Mr. Sulu, in that episode his stated occupation was “mathematician”.
And I love pointing out that Chekov joined the cast after the Space Seed episode, so Khan should not have recognized him in ST2:TWOK.
And I’m not a Trekie either. No, really, I’m not…
booop booop
I’m willing to admit that I have only a dim memory of Takei in one of those velour golden uniform tops, and I may well be remembering it from “Where No Man …” So I’ll once again stand corrected.
You’re right! I remember now that he was kept busy repairing the ship’s systems that had been damaged by their encounter with the energy barrier.
However, I was right when I said Uhura was not there and the doctor was someone named “Piper” and not McCoy.
Although not canon, it’s generally accepted among your finer class of geeks that Chekov was on board the Enterprise for “Space Seed,” just not on the bridge crew.
I had thought he was “Physicist Sulu”
Which, incidentally, is something that might lend it’s skills to interstellar navigation, or commanding a mission to study planetary gases.
I’ll accept April, but I’ve never been able to find an on-screen reference or Roddenberry quote to support it. The Star Trek Chronology, etc. mention him, and he appears in some novels, but then, the books talk about Warrantors of Peace, too.
Commodore Robert April and his wife Sarah appear in the Star Trek animated episode The Counter-Clock Incident. Robert April was the first captain of the Enterprise and Sarah was the first Chief Medical Officer. It’s canon.
What gets me is how astonishingly good the writing and sets and acting are for the Cage, and I guess they spliced the “menagerie” writing somewhat seamlessly together to make a good two-part episode. I suppose the budget might have had something to do with it, but it’s light years ahead of some of the second and third season dreck they had to work with at the end. Must have been a hell of a show for the mid 60’s.
Supposedly, the gurus at Paramont or whoever thought dimly of the pilot. "too cerebral, I thought this was going to be “Wagon Train to the Stars!”; Roddenberry was quite a guy.