Bit slow…I’ve always liked the aliens and the alienness about them, Sylvias desire for sensations.
One interesting note:
Spock: “The cat, one of the most ruthless and terrifying of creatures.” Spock? ok…course Vulcan does have terrifying cats.
Oh, I forgot. I also liked Kirks anger with Sylvia after his seduction ruse was discovered and how he marched off with his guards without even waiting for her to tell them to take him to his cell. basically: “Take to my cell men!”
And Sylvia’s, “Your men will be swept away! Your ship! Your WORLDS!!!” And Kirk doesn’t even turn around.
Notable really only because it was the first episode produced (but NOT the first aired) with Walter Koenig as Chekov.
That wig!
That’s a *sehlat *… a fat teddy bear with six-inch fangs. :o
Which one?!
I’ve always found it to be the one Trek attempt at a full-on Halloween episode. Not that there aren’t other terror-based episodes, but that this is the only one that feels like Halloween. I also believe it was the only one produced then.
It does not at all benefit from the remastering. It’s very obvious how cheap looking it is, even for the time.
By Robert Bloch, but not the best of his ST episodes.
At least the remastering got rid of the strings working the puppets at the end. I was amazed at how that ever got on the air even back in 1967. :smack:
It was intended as a Halloween episode. It was the first episode of the second season shot, but wasn’t aired until the last week in October.
I’d have to check MA, but I think the first episode aired that season (“Amok Time”) was filmed fifth.
As an aside, there’s a passage in Whitfield’s book telling how they needed “a little creature” for one episode, but there was only $500 left in the budget. I think he must have been referring to these puppets, but I find it hard to believe they cost that much!
Chekov’s “Beatles” wig. It must have been designed by the same person who did Janice Rand’s beehive hairdo. :eek:
If I’m not mistaken, he wore it three times: in “Catspaw,” “Friday’s Child,” and “Who Mourns for Adonais?” Before Trek, Koenig had been doing shows like Combat! and Jericho.* His hair must have been as short as Shatner’s was at the beginning. It took a while before he started to look like Davey Jones, which was the intent. They wanted someone who could draw in the teenage audience.
*A CBS series about Resistance fighters in WWII.
I thought the puppets were kind of cool. The strings didn’t bother me; years of watching Gerry Anderson shows conditioned me to ignore them.
The cold open has my very favourite redshirt death (although I don’t think he’s wearing a red shirt).
One of my favorite lines from the original ***Thunderbirds ***(I think it was) was “Can you pull a few strings for me?” 
Correct. It was Command gold/tenne/green:
The episode aired 27 October, 1967. A month later, on 29 November, the actor who played Korob, Theodore Marcuse, was killed in a car crash while intoxicated.
And on that cheery note… 
Theo Marcuse was fortunate he lived long enough to have an acting career. One of many war heroes from WWII.
In 1967 you were watching an analog signal of 525 lines on a TV screen that measured 23"-25" at best, drawn from an antenna that may or may not have been perfectly aligned with the broadcast signal and subject to ghosting as well as atmospheric static, a 3-gun color signal where the red, blue and green streams probably didn’t converge on a single point, and something called “fine tuning” which you had to do manually until the 1970s.
A few puppet strings weren’t a problem.