I watched The Man Trap. I noticed with some amusement Uhura flirting with Spock on the bridge, but it seemed to be in a teasing manner and Spock seemed perplexed at her apparent interest in him. Still, it influenced their relationship in the current series of movies.
Also, the command uniforms were green. Kirk’s everyday tunic was green, and even Jeffrey Hunter’s uniform in The Cage had a green hue.
I’ve watched a couple more episodes. Uhura’s crush on Spock is now gone. But in The Man Trap and Charlie X it was definitely there, in both episodes. After that (so far), it is gone. In Where No Man Has Gone Before (E03, or episode 3), the normal crew isnt’t there at all - only Kirk, Spock and Scottie are there. No McCoy, Uhura, Sulu, Janice Rand, Nurse Chapel, or Chekhov.
It is in E04, The Naked Time, the one where a contamination picked up from a planet causes the contaminated person to lose their inhibitions and let their emotions run unchecked, where Nurse Chapel shows her crush on Spock, and where Spock clearly has feelings for her and struggles to keep them in check.
Anyway, the Uhura crush on Spock was definitely there in E01 & E02, and that was a big surprise.
I’m also noting a couple of interesting (to me) things, like:
[ul]
[li]Who else sits in Kirk’s command chair on the bridge? Spock, surprisingly, is the first person we ever see sitting in that chair. Not Kirk! E01’s opening scene show Spock in the chair. Kirk is already on the planet.[/li]
[li]Who gets the Vulcan neck pinch? Sulu was the first, in E04. The second was Kirk in E05, The Evil Within - Kirk’s evil persona gets it.[/ul][/li]
When I say Sulu was ‘the first’ to get the neck pinch, and Spock was ‘the first’ to sit in the Captain’s chair, I refer to the episode order as broadcast in the series.
The nerve pinch originated in “Enemy” because Nimoy balked at hitting Evil Kirk over the head with the butt of his phaser, like in an old Western. He suggested they try something different, and Roddenberry loved it when he saw the footage the next day.
Scotty was second officer, so he had the center seat when both Kirk and Spock were off the ship. I’m not sure which is the first episode to officially depict him as being in command, though.
Scotty was never actually said to be Second Officer, but yes, more often than not he was left in command when both Kirk and Spock were off the ship (although Sulu was in “Errand of Mercy”). I agree that Scotty’s first time in the big chair was, IIRC, “A Taste of Armageddon.”
Sulu happened to be on duty as Helmsman and Weapons Officer when the Klingons attacked; Scotty was probably down in Engineering. When they returned to Organia with the fleet, however, Sulu was in the command chair, for reasons unexplained. (They’d probably already gone over budget on that episode and couldn’t afford Doohan.)
I think the closest they ever came to declaring Scotty third-in-command was in “Journey to Babel,” when McCoy told Spock he could turn command over to Scotty during the blood transfusion. No other alternative was considered.
It has been said that “the red shirt guys are the ones who die”, or, if a crewperson of the Enterprise dies, he typically wears a red shirt.
Well, in the first episodes of the first season, the first guys to die were not wearing red shirts. They wore gold or blue shirts. In the first six episodes that is true. It wasn’t until E07 that the first red shirts die. In What Are Little Girls Made Of?, a guy named Matthews was the very first to die in a red shirt. The second, Rayborn (Rayburn?), died soon after.
Yes, but the point is that Security personnel, who wear red shirts, have a much greater chance of dying in any given episode than Science or Command personnel.
I vividly remember the first episode I saw when the series was first broadcast: Catspaw. It wasn’t a great episode, but it was memorable to me. When the two magicians were revealed to actually be little puppet-critters, I was very creeped out for some reason. Maybe it was because I was nine years old!
I taped this episode during the marathon and am going to watch it soon just to see what creeped me out so much.
One thing that’s always bugged me in TOS was how close-ups of female characters were always done in that weird soft-focus style. Was that a common convention in 60s TV?
On occasion, women would be filmed in soft focus. Jerry Finnerman, the director of photography on TOS, was encouraged in particular to experiment with lighting and focus since “It’s all in the future, so no one can tell us it’s wrong.”
Under Jerry, sets were seldom painted anything other than in neutral grey; color was added with filters and gels, allowing the sets to be reused from episode to episode.
Concerning “Catspaw,” it wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I realized what “catspaw” meant. I had just assumed it had something to the giant black kitty that was pursuing them.
And, this is a pretty trivial nitpick, but. . .
In “Arena,” Spock is talking to Scotty, and asks him about if he had tried diverting power to from other sources to get the Enterprise moving again. The first time it cuts to Scotty’s response, Scotty looks like he’s hung over. Then the second time, obviously filmed at a different time, he looks. . . ‘normal.’
They always have a ceremony in conjunction with each stamp’s release, so it might have had to do with the reservation of the space and the booking of the talent in attendance for the ceremony.