Category Archives: Wiki Trek

Wiki Trek: Iconic redshirt edition

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“Actor Jerry Ayres made two appearances on Star Trek: The Original Series. Ayres would go on to become a regular on the soap operas General Hospital and The Bold and the Beautiful. He also had a recurring role on the TV series Dynasty.”



Now down to the poster — I think that’s him. Episode’s definitely “Arena” and he’s the best match off the Mem Alpha cast list. (Quite a pose for Kirk there.)


Photobucket



The poster’s joke would be funnier with just the title word, not the legend below it — everyone knows about redshirts, and if they don’t the poster won’t mean much to them no matter what. [ update, No, I guess people who aren’t into Star Trek might get the joke with the legend’s help: that picture speaks volumes. But for people who do know Star Trek, and there’s a lot of them, the joke would be five times better w/ out the legend. ] 

Wiki Trek: “Return of the Archons”

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The good guy among the people on the planet was played by Harry Townes, who was born in 1914 and played 200 tv parts and 29 movie parts. Wiki says he was “ordained as an Episcopal priest in St. Paul’s Cathedral on March 16, 1974, and served at St. Mary of the Angels Church in Hollywood, California.” He retired from acting in 1989, when he was 75, and lived his last 11 years in his hometown of Huntsville, Ala.

… In 1995, a movie called Project: Metalbeast, with cast members named Diaunte (one word only) and Musetta Vander.

… A tv episode titled “Long and Thin, Lorna Lynn,” from a show called The Duke (1979).

The episode’s girl, Tula, was played by Brioni Farrell, whose real name was Xenia Gratsos. She was born in Greece in 1940, then came to the U.S. to act.  She seems to have been doing okay with tv work right thru 1968, then there’s a 5-year gap, then her parts resume but not at as frequent as earlier. What she was doing around when she did “Archons,” per Wiki:

A lot of ethnic names in those parts: Rossi, Waa-Nibe, Luciana.

…as Tula


The First Lawgiver, meaning a guy in a monk’s robe and hood, is played by Sid Haig, who turns out to have a cult-films career behind him. He was in a bunch of Jack Hill films, meaning blaxploitation and the ‘70s, and a bunch of Rob Zombie films, meaning Fantagoria-type comedy-horror vehicles. And he’s worked a whole lot in tv shows. He turned down the part of Marcellus Wallace because he wanted to get out of the B’s. His real name is Sidney Mosesian and he was born in Fresno, went to the Pasadena Playhouse, met Stuart Margolin there and roomed with him.

Landru, sort of the head alien, was this guy, who sometimes played Hamilton Burger (“Perry Mason’s hapless opponent”):

 

All right, this is weird. The guy who played the brunette mid-30ish ensign (“Lindstrom”) was also in Perry Mason but as Perry Mason’s assistant. And both he and Sid Haig were in Diamonds Are Forever.

This guy is a babyface who popped up in a few Trek episodes because he was friends with Joe D’Agosta, who did casting. He did a Lucy Show too, in 1968, for whatever that tells us: by then Lucy had sold Desilu. Anyway, the guy’s credits keep on into the ‘80s. Wind-up: “Morgan eventually left acting to pursue a career in financial services and insurance. Today, he lives in Kalispell, Montana.” Here he is in “Archons”: 


 

This guy (“Bilar”) was also in Stargate and Independence Day. Born Lev Mailer, called himself Ralph Maurer:

He was born in 1933 but just starting on tv when he did Trek. Other credits around then: “The Lucy Show (1967), Mission: Impossible (1967, alongside Mark Lenard, Jack Donner, and Dick Dial), Daniel Boone (1967, with Michael Forest and Morgan Jones), and It Takes a Thief (1968, with Malachi Throne, Steve Ihnat, and Lawrence Montaigne).” That’s from Mem Alpha, so the other actors’ names are all of people who appeared in Trek. Of the shows named, Lucy and Mission: Impossible were both Desilu, and Gene L. Coon (who produced “Archons”) was producer for It Takes a Thief when Mailer/Maurer worked there.

Recurring Redshirt watch:  Lieut. Galloway, who sometimes had a name and sometimes didn’t, who died in one episode and was back in another. The actor was pushing 30.

Galloway 

Only known appearance:  Barbara Webber. The Archons had mass fits where everyone acted out, and during one of these fits she twirled around and danced.

 

Wiki Trek: “Tomorrow Is Yesterday”

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… An actress named Helen Kleeb.


I find this episode hard to remember too, possibly because I resist seeing Kirk and the rest in a present-day setting (or a 1960s present-day setting).

The air force pilot (I mean the actor) who winds up on the Enterprise was married to Joanne Worley (Laugh-In) for 25 years and did a lot of tv work from the late ’50s to the early ’90s. I thought he was good in the part, which was a leading-man role like Kirk’s: two rugged men looking hard at tough situations. But it sounds like, though the guy worked, he never bounced too high in the cast lists. Wiki here. 

The tough air force sergeant with the stare occasions this Memory Alpha sentence: “Lynch was born as James Harold Tilton Lynch in Birmingham, Alabama, but grew up in the city of Opp.” That’s hard to beat. He was friends with Lee Meriwether.

A fellow who shows up in this and a few eps is John Winston, who plays Lt. Kyle, a flagrant redshirt. Wiki’s got his filmography and looks like he was around for all 3 seasons, also Wrath of Khan. He was English. Incredibly, he appeared in the Time Tunnel pilot, entitled “Rendezvous with Yesterday” and Lee Meriwether was in it too.

… A movie from my childhood whose title would have driven me crazy with desire if I’d ever known about it: Valley of the Dragons (1961).

Sherri Townsend. This was her only known screen appearance.



Wiki Trek: “The Alternative Factor”

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“… the 1971-1972 syndicated sea adventure series Primus,” whose lead character was named Carter Primus.

… Incredibly a pilot was shot of a series that would be about a Swede and an Irishman who immigrate to the U.S., God knows when it was set, but the series had William Shatner as the Swede. His Swedish accent exists out there someplace and we’ll never hear it. Remember, there is also an episode of Mission: Impossible that is called “Cocaine” and features Shatner. The mind reels at the possibilities.
The actor in question for this episode replaced John Barrymore Jr. at the last minute because Barrymore flaked. The incident is described in Inside Star Trek. Barrymore was Drew Barrymore’s fucked-up father.
What a dreadful beard on that poor guest lead. The optic effects in this episode are also a drag, the big light blobs or inflamed trip-adelic screen transformations or whatever. This is one of the episodes I have trouble remembering, even now that I’ve gone back to watch it a second time. The show goes beyond being a snooze and starts hazing you. You get so many recurring reasons not to look at the screen.
The beard:

… as Lazarus

Wiki Trek: “Arena”

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… A 1970s tv movie called The Alpha Caper had Leonard Nimoy, Victor Taback, and James Sikking.

Also this guy, who in “Arena” plays an ensign. He gets offed or put out of commission early on. I think he gets to talk, has some sort of moment where he croaks out a warning or a few words, but basically he’s this close to being screen Kleneex, someone there to be got rid of. Meanwhile, offscreen, he was writing and putting on a stage adaptation of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman.

The guy’s wife was “a singer/comedienne” in the court of Lucille Ball, a “close friend and protege” of Ball’s, and he had studied with Uta Hagen, so you get a collision of different show-biz worlds there. Also, the Lucy connection probably helped get him the “Arena” part, since Desilu still owned the series at that point.

He had a career, Wiki says, with him and his wife doing a lot of plays, presumably in LA because they were “jointly honored with the 2002 L.A. Ovation Award for Career Achievements.” Seems all right. LA is a good-size city and I bet it’s doing all right for theater.

Here he is:

 

Wiki Trek: “Squire of Gothos”

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William Campbell was “the first actor to sing with Elvis Presley in a film,” Mem Alpha says. Campbell played the alien/little kid Trelane, who was “in part a parody of Liberace,” Wiki says. The resemblance does seem obvious when pointed out. Also Wiki: Campbell “married Judith Exner.” That bowled me over, because Exner was the woman who slept with Sam Giancana and John Kennedy. Campbell was the lead in Coppola’s first feature, Dementia 13. Apparently he was never much for the Trek convention circuit, couldn’t be bothered, so I guess he managed to save some money along the way. 

To look at him, Campbell seemed like a second-hand Tony Curtis, the way the woman in “Catspaw” seemed like a second-hand Elizabeth Taylor. Maybe these hand-me-down types still show up among tv actors. When you’re watching the old shows, they’re not hard to spot: a guy who looks like Brando but isn’t, or like Tony Curtis but isn’t.

Campbell’s Trelane (the child-alien) is one of the few really good, spirited performances by a Star Trek guest star. The guy had pizzazz. Then again it helped that the role had pizzazz: Anthony Caruso and Victor Tayback were good too in “A Piece of the Action.”

There’s an embarrassing moment in “Tribbles,” where Campbell played the chief Klingon, where he turns on his heel and struts to the door and you see his plump buttocks bouncing. He was in his 40s by then and men of the time didn’t expect to keep their figures, a fact that shows up often enough in old tv shows.

Campbell became pals with Roddenberry and Doohan, who was also a Roddenberry pal, and the three of them played poker.

And here he is:


“


Another movie title: The Gallant Hours (1960). … And Never Steal Anything Wet, the variant title of “the ’60s beach movie Catalina Caper.“

The actress who played the yeoman who dances with Trelane “was queen of the 1962 May Festival in Orange, California. Later that year, she was named Miss Orange County Press Club. In 1967, she appeared on the cover of the July issue of Playboy. Wolf abandoned her acting career after her 1968 marriage to Lawrence Taylor Tatman III, aka Skip Taylor. Taylor was co-manager of The Kaleidoscope, a short-lived LA psychedelic nightclub.” Venita Wolf, another great name.

Wiki Trek: “Shore Leave”

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… TV series of the late ’50s and early ’60s: The Man from Blackhawk, Sam Benedict, The Farmer’s Daughter. One from the late ’60s, a favorite title of mine: Bracken’s World. A boy who had a regular role on that show killed himself, something that shows up in What Really Happened to the Class of ’65.


… Jubilee Trail, a Western from the 1950s. Here’s another: Drum Beat.
Ensign Rodriguez, the young fellow with the girlfriend, was also Lt. Escobar in Chinatown. … Kirk’s long-lost love interest starred in an attempt to make a sitcom of My Sister Eileen. I like the earrings, which I assume William Theiss hunted down somewhere.

… as Ruth
The man who played Don Juan was named James Gruzal, which just hits me as an unusual name to have.