We got STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION shortly after STAR TREK IV was a smash hit. And we got that after STAR TREK III made $87 million on a $16 million budget, after the even better STAR TREK II made even more money on an even smaller budget. And before that, STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE made plenty of money too.
And so TNG begat DS9, and then William Shatner passed the torch to Patrick Stewart to keep things going on the big screen, and VOYAGER gave way to ENTERPRISE, and then Leonard Nimoy passed the torch to a bunch of kids who weren’t even alive when the original series went off the air; it’s a franchise with legs, is what I’m saying.
But back when, it was just a show that had been canceled the better part of a decade earlier; it’d had a brief cartoon, but that had been canceled the better part of a decade likewise by the time TMP came out.
So I got to wondering: it’s the '70s, and STAR WARS is out there breaking records, and you have the power to get a Star Trek movie underway – but not all of the original castmembers are still on board. Maybe they’re dead. Maybe they’re just unwilling. Whatever. Does the project still get off the ground without Shatner? Without Nimoy? Could we lose DeForest Kelley or James Doohan or Nichelle Nichols, but not Kelley and Doohan and Nichols? Could we lose Koenig without folks much noticing?
IIRC, Nimoy did not commit to TMP until filming was already under way. Neither was he interested in doing the Phase II TV series. A new character (Xon) was created to take his place on TV, while his replacement in the movie was killed early on by a transporter accident to make room for his return.
Walter Koening was left out of the TAS cast, and a new character (Arex), voiced by James Doohan, was created to replace Chekov.
We saw on TOS that there were other (female) communications officers on board besides Uhura.
So yes, it’s certainly possible they would have gone ahead with one or more character missing.
The premiere episode of a new series: Kirk is MIA (or “reported” KIA). A new captain beams aboard to take command of the Enterprise. While in mourning for Kirk (who could theoretically reappear at any time), the remaining crew members re-devote themselves to accomplishing their interstellar mission. Flashbacks suffice to keep Kirk’s memory alive. Eventually, the old crew and the new captain forge close a new team and carry on in Kirk’s absence.
Yeah, Shatner was the only one who was absolutely necessary. If he was the only returning cast member they could have built a new crew around him. It wouldn’t have been the same, but it would have been recognizably Star Trek and its popularity would have been determined by script and chemistry with the new crew.
Nimoy was at least as popular at the time, but Spock wasn’t the captain and they would either have had to make him Captain or put the crew under a new actor as Captain.
It might have been interesting to have a Star Trek series with Spock as Captain, but the absence of Kirk would have loomed over it all, I think.
Wiki seems to indicate that Nimoy was in full costume on the bridge set after attending the press conference before filming started on August 7th of '78.
(I mean, yes, it looks like he’d insisted on having script approval; and, yes, the script wasn’t finished when filming started; and, yes, I guess technically that means he hadn’t committed to TMP; but if they in fact gave him script approval, then you could just as technically say he’d in fact committed before they started filming.)
The way I heard it, they had to rewrite a lot of the script once he agreed to return, which meant killing off the new Science Officer, whose introductory scene at SF HQ had already been filmed. But that’s just what I heard; I wouldn’t swear to the veracity of it in court.
A radiation leak catches Spock, and its effect is to put him in a state of perpetual Pon Farr. Now you can have a babe of the week who hooks up with Spock, only this time Spock kills anyone who gets in his way, then after sex becomes totally logical again just in time to solve the mission of the week.
Why not just set the series in the Mirror Universe, after Evil Kirk has been assassinated? Then Really-Good-on-the-Inside-but-Forced-to-Act-Evil-on-the-Outside Spock would have to wrestle with a new moral dilemma each week while managing to keep his precarious position as the new captain of ISS Enterprise.
Roddenberry made a college tour in the mid-70s, where he was pushing for a movie or a series. I saw him at Illinois. He said that the studio told him that they wanted Charlton Heston to play Kirk in a movie. :eek: He said no. So it is possible that a movie could get made without Shatner, but it wouldn’t have been the same.
There really wasn’t anything wrong with Decker’s character that would have prevented a good show or movie with him the the big chair. Maybe without the Shat’s line-counting, scene chewing ego clogging everything up, maybe Phase II/TMP might have been a great show/movie, rather than the stillborn/boring mess it was.
Don’t get me wrong - Kirk was absolutely necessary for TWoK (the best ST movie evah!), but quite possibly a different greatest movie evah could have been made just as well without Kirk. And a world without ST:V would be a wonderful one indeed!
I think there was such a pent-up enthusiasm among the fans for more Star Trek that they could have moved Gavin Macleod from the Love Boat to the Enterprise, and it would have succeeded.
I don’t know that it could have been done without any of the original characters, but any one or two could have been worked around.
