http://io9.com/the-weirdest-things-you- ... 1662774616
No matter how much you already know about the original Star Trek, there's still undiscovered territory out there. And just like with season one, the new book series These Are The Voyages by Marc Cushman uncovers loads of surprising secrets. Here are a dozen things you probably never knew about Star Trek's second season.
Book:
http://www.amazon.com/These-are-Voyages ... 0989238156?
Leonard Nimoy almost walked. At the start of season two, it was clear that Nimoy was as much the star of the show as William Shatner, and Nimoy's agent argued that his contract was void — because it specified Spock as a secondary character. Nimoy was making $1,125 per episode, and his agent demanded an increase to an unheard-of $9,000 per episode. A stalemate ensued, and the show set about figuring out how to replace Spock in season two — a new Vulcan would have to join the Enterprise crew, and candidates for the role included Mark Lenard (who had played a Romulan and later played Spock's father) and David Carradine (later to star in Kung Fu.) In the end, they settled on Lawrence Montaigne, who had also played a Romulan and would later appear as Stonn in the episode "Amok Time." Montaigne signed a contract that held him for the entire season but guaranteed him only one episode's work (which is why he wound up playing Stonn.) Desilu's Herb Solow told Nimoy's agent that it doesn't matter who plays the role. "It's the pointed ears that count; they're the star."
But in the end, the studio blinked, giving Nimoy a smaller pay hike than he had asked for, along with script input. Later in the season, the rumors of a "feud" between Nimoy and Shatner started appearing in the press — and they were somewhat overblown, although numerous sources do report that Shatner would count his lines to make sure he had more lines in a scene than Nimoy. And in the episode "Catspaw," Kirk and Spock leave the Bridge to rush down to the Transporter Room, but Kirk arrives at the Transporter Room alone. (Spock got lost along the way.)
One character got promoted out of existence. DeSalle, a minor character, was given a red uniform top instead of a yellow one, because he got promoted to Assistant Chief Engineer — the thinking being that during the episodes where Kirk and Spock are on a planet's surface and Scotty is in command, the show needed to cut to someone in Engineering. But in the end, whenever Scotty is in command, the show never shows Engineering at all, so instead of gaining prominence, DeSalle wound up getting written out because of his promotion.
"Friday's Child" originally featured a really bad mother. In Dorothy (DC) Fontana's script draft of "Friday's Child," the princess Eleen doesn't protect her baby at all costs, the way she does in the aired version. Instead, she hates her baby and is willing to hand the newborn over to be murdered, in exchange for her own safety. Fontana wanted to break out of the stereotype of women always being good, self-sacrificing mothers on television — but Roddenberry nixed this and rewrote it so Eleen is selfless and devoted to her baby. Also, the earlier script had the native Capellans saying things like, "We are not an industrial people, Captain," but Roddenberry wanted them to speak more like TV "natives," and changed that line to, "We are herdsmen. To dig into the ground for metals is a thing strange to us."
The original "Mirror Mirror" was very different. In the original script, Kirk alone is beamed to an alternate universe — where McCoy has a beard, not Spock — and discovers that the Federation is losing a war against some aliens. And Kirk is married to a woman who surprises him in his quarters. Kirk realizes this alternate Federation is losing the war because it doesn't have phaser technology, so he's forced to "invent" the phaser overnight. Also, there's no explanation of where the other Kirk went when "our" Kirk went to this universe.
Roddenberry tried to push the storytelling about race further. The show famously had the first interracial kiss — but Gene Roddenberry wanted that to happen way earlier, in the episode "The Alternative Factor." The network shot the idea down in season one, so it had to wait until later. Also, Roddenberry pushed hard to have a story called "Portrait in Black and White," set on an alternate Earth where blacks enslaved whites prior to the Civil War — the studio nixed it for season one, so he came back and tried to do it in season two. Also nixed for season one: the Vietnam war allegory "The Omega Glory," which Roddenberry considered a brilliant script and which he did manage to film in season two. (Roddenberry kept trying to get the network to promote "The Omega Glory" for Emmy consideration, to no avail.)
They debated the boundary of the galaxy. In the episode "By Any Other Name," the Kelvans want to take the Enterprise to the Andromeda galaxy, so the ship once again encounters the energy barrier around the galaxy, as seen in the show's second pilot. The show's researchers, De Forest Research, pointed out that there's no astronomical justification for this idea, and in fact Isaac Asimov had blasted the show for this notion when it first appeared — although Asimov later became of the show's biggest fans. But the producers decided to keep the barrier at the edge of the galaxy, since it had already been established, and they could save money by reusing the footage from "Where No Man Has Gone Before." They did, however, make sure the travel time to Andromeda was accurate — going Warp 14, or 8,192 times the speed of light, it would indeed take around 280 years.
There's more in the link. Also i09 called these weird but I don't think they're weird at all.
