'The Corbomite Maneuver'

Scary dude, that Balok.

..."we've got a pile of unstable Corbomite onboard that will go kablooey if you mess with us" routine. Sure you do, Kirk, sure you do.

If the Enterprise had an Aussie instead of Scots and Russians, they might have tried the vegemite maneuver.

So they're on the dude's ship for like five minutes, and Bailey decides he wants to stay awhile. Yeah, that makes sense. :eyes:

:shrug:

He relished the Tranya!

Aliens!

Looked like somebody put a few drops of prune juice in a glass of Tang. Why the hell would Kirk drink it? :puke:

I think Ron Howard still uses him in many of his movies.

I just saw the remastered episode - very impressive! Glad they redid some pretty cheesy shots with CGI.

However, one scene I though was really stupid. Right after the 10 minute countdown when Kirk bluffs Balok with the CM,
Yeoman Rand suddenly appears on the bridge with some COFFEE!!

Some guy in a ship the size of the Death Star says he's going to destroy you in 10 minutes and you're
down in the galley heating coffee?? HELLO, MCFLY?? ANYONE AT HOME??

Geez, why not just ask Kirk down to your cabin and let him go "where no man has gone before?"

You make it or find it online? That's seriously cool... to a ST geek. :silly:

Seems like I read something in Shatner's "Star Trek Memories" about how they used Grace Lee Whitney — something like they tried to get her in wherever they could in little bits so as not to crush her spirits, since so many of her scenes had to be cut because she was stoned all the time.

I may be remembering wrong, though.

And women in those days (even though they were supposed to be in "the future") still weren't good for much more than making coffee and lusting after the male leads.

Or Christine Chapel? :shrug:



Or Kara, the Eymorg who stole Spock's brain? :rofl:

Although for the time the series was made I suppose that was groundbreaking for a black female.


Christine Chapel was a nurse, a classic female job. She seemed to spend more time lusting after Spock than nursing though.


And what did Kara do besides steal Spock's brain?

But the studio fought it. In the end Roddenberry had to trade cigarettes for Chapel. The stupio(sp) was pushing to have the crew smoking cigs. Roddenberry fought it but in the end had to do a quid pro quo. Chapel god demoted to nurse and the ciggies went bye bye.

But I didn't know about the smoking thing. Amazing the studio would fight so hard to get something like that in (probably had funds from cigarette companies behind it).

Smoking was HUGE back then.

And Gene Roddenberry, with TOS, really burned the bippies of many NBC suits. (his struggles against the network ultimately saw him leaving after season 2, to save his health... literally.)

Indeed, it has been said color TV (new at the time) also helped keep Trek on, as season 2 itself nearly didn't get produced. (we all know about the write-in campaign regarding season 3, and did you know Trek was heralded by sci-fi writers of the time for its comparative maturity to slop like "Lost in Space"?)

Speaking of bippies, for Trek season 3, it was moved to Friday 10PM (9 central) - the death slot; the slot the core audiences would miss out on. (the Neilsen ratings were tabulated differently at the time, and when Paramount gave the green light for season 3, it was solely so that the show would have a rounded 3 seasons which in turn made it available for syndication at the time. As Paramount didn't know they had the ratings, they were taking a HUGE gamble that the show might make some money in syndication. Little did they know...)

And which show went into the coveted Monday time slot? "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In". :)

I'll agree ST:TOS hasn't aged well in some respects and has proven itself to be very sexist at times... and sometimes the plots are pedestrian in nature, but there is a core theme about human nature I still find irresistible. 9 times out of 10...

But context is everything; considering Americans of African origin were still referred to as "coloreds" in national media, TOS was considerably ahead of its time in many ways. And Martin Luther King told Nichelle Nichols to stay on the show.

And if it wasn't for "the big three", Uhura would have been given more to do. Of all 3 seasons, she got the most in season 1.

I'll admit, it's interesting to note Sulu would have been given more to do in season 2 -- but with the addition of Chekov, combined with George Takei going off to do "The Green Berets" with John Wayne, you can guess who got the lines...

Read their biographies and watch the extras on the TOS DVDs. They're quite enlightening.

Majel Barrett hated Chapel, but Roddenberry wanted Majel to be in the show. But I digress. Especially when she was originally Number One and the suits didn't like the idea. (see the original pilot "The Cage", which is composed entirely of white people... the suits weren't keen on non-white roles and if you read what Nichelle had to endure from the suits, you'd probably also wonder what Bill Cosby had to endure when he was equal to Robert Culp in "I Spy" (1965-1968, also on NBC).)

Yeah, thats who it was. Ken Howard.

Ken Howard was the White Shadow.

Yeah... :blush:

Scared the bejeebees out of me.