When they made the first star trek piolet Jeff hunter was the skippr if eh stayed would pike. mcody .spock worked as well as kirk spock .mcoy. would shatner with out trek continued in movies with a bigger or smaller level of fame :eek::smack:
I hear Pike was a heavy drinker. So I don’t know…
I can say with reasonable certainty that a Star Trek starring Jeffrey Hunter would not have stayed on the air any longer than the Star Trek starring William Shatner did. Hunter died about a month after the third season ended.
True, but his death (of a cerebral hemorrhage) seems to have been related to an injury he sustained on-set while making a movie in Spain. If he’d had a steady job on Star Trek at the time, he might not have made that movie.
It’s hard to judge from one episode, which is all we ever got to see of Hunter’s Pike. But he struck me as a very moody and dour character, in stark contrast to Shatner’s more jovial and good-humored Captain Kirk. It might have made Pike a less pleasant character to spend time with, which could have made the show less popular long-term. Of course, Pike’s seriousness is an artifact of the particular plotline of the episode “The Cage.” Given more light-hearted storylines, he might have lightened up. We’ll never know.
I will say that, in all the roles I’ve seen him in (which admittedly, is not his entire body of work), I’ve never really seen Hunter do comedy. He was mostly a dramatic actor, from what I’ve seen. Shatner seems to have had better comedic chops, and the fact that Star Trek was often funny is certainly part of its ongoing appeal.
I just can’t see him interacting with the rest of the ensemble the way Shatner did.
Fun fact: My mom knew him as Henry McKinnies from Whitefish Bay, WI. Growing up, there was a family go-to line whenever it was pointed out that I’m not at all like my dad: “Well, you’re much more like Henry.” (I’ve checked. When I would’ve been conceived, Henry had just been re-named and was out in California making the movie Sailor of the King).
I have to hope he’d drop all the self-doubt burnt-out crap by the second episode, since that’d get tiresome really fast. I think a more interesting question might be what if the show had managed to keep a woman as second-in-command. A woman wearing pants!
I’ve done kind of a “alternate universe” thing in my head where TOS ran four or five seasons. Pike was replaced by Kirk after the first one or two. The producers claimed that to be the plan all along.
I can’t picture Pike sitting under an open grain storage hold as 1,771,561 tribbles drop onto his head. (Or tossed out by Sisko and Dax. :D)
If they had kept Jeffrey Hunter, then presumably they wouldn’t have changed much of the casting at all. While they didn’t have a specific objection to Hunter as far as I recall, they did want a change of feel to the show. Ironically, if I remember correctly, it was Hunter’s wife who objected to him continuing with the effort, considering TV Sci-fi as being “beneath” him. :smack:
I don’t think that the original cast of Hunter, Barrett, Nimoy, Hoyt, Dureya, and Goodwin would have made nearly as entertaining a show as Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley, Doohan, et al. In particular, a lot of what saves Star Trek from being a generally bad show is the interaction among Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. That wouldn’t have been a part of the Pike, Number One, and Boyce trio. And don’t get me started on the “Spock” that Nimoy was playing for the pilot. Thank God he dropped that crap.
Agree that Pike, as we saw him in the first pilot, could not possibly have interacted with the rest of that cast the way Kirk did with his. Whether that would have been *worse *or better, it’s hard to say. It would definitely have been a different show.
I know there’s at least one original Pike/Number One novel out there, written by none other than Dorothy Fontana. It gives a glimpse of what might have been, as does James Blish’s adaptation of “The Cage.”
In one alternate version of Star Trek, Trek got a third pilot - in this one, Shatner is replaced by John F. Kennedy (The Kennedy Enterprise by David Gerrold)
In this alternate universe timelines:chapters_that_wacky_redhead [alternatehistory.com wiki] Lucille Ball keeps Star Trek on the air for two more seasons.
Only Shatner can go to China.
Hunter was King of Kings, but the Pike character was wrong for 60s TV Sci-fi. His character type seems more DS9 to me.
they wanted to cancel it after year 2 but a lot of fans wrote it and they got year 3. Turns out that was big since back then they normally only put a show in reruns if it had 3 seasons or more. And most people say year 3 was by far the worst season.
So if they hadn’t gotten that third season, no syndication. No syndication, no eventual discovery by a larger audience, no demand for movies, no TNG, DS9, VOY, Ent, Dsc. Wow.
Seventy-nine episodes was considered the bare minimum for syndication; normally, around a hundred were needed. Stripped five nights a week, 79 would last for approximately three months before they had to be repeated.
I remember there was a huge outcry from MPS/STP fans when WTCN (now KARE) suspended the re-runs in the summer of 1970. The station apologized and promised the series would be back in the fall.
Beeeep.
Some fans (probably college students) organized a petition that was signed by a couple of hundred people at least. It was an old-fashioned computer printout that used asterisks to build a picture of Snoopy on top of his doghouse dreaming of Star Trek. The station showed it on-air when they issued their apology.
If you look at The Cage, there are a couple of scenes between Pike and Number One. Compare them to the scenes between Kirk and Spock in the second pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before.
No contest. And McCoy wasn’t even in the second pilot!
Many fans, including me. The third season sucked because NBC put it in the 10 PM Friday timeslot of death, and Roddenberry figured it wasn’t worthwhile spending a lot of effort on a show that was doomed.
The budget was also cut to the point where rejected scripts had to be recycled. New showrunners were brought in who had no understanding of the series or interest in prolonging it, other than picking up their next paycheck.