Warp Factors

(Article reproduced with kind permission of The LIST - the Glasgow and Edinburgh Events Guide Magazine.)

Impress your friends with Alastair Mabbott's galactic guide to Trekkie trivia.

Before becoming a TV writer, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry was an airline pilot and then a high ranking Los Angeles police officer. He wrote speeches for the Chief of Police and was said to have been groomed for the top job himself.

Television's first interracial kiss, performed by Kirk and Uhura under mind control was filmed twice. Nervous of the reaction the episode might get in the Southern states, Roddenberry bad a second version made in which the embracing couple turned away from the camera an instant before lip contact. The original version was used, however. In the end, the only complaint the studio received was from a Southerner who believed in interracial segregation but nevertheless maintained that if Kirk had a woman like Uhura in his arms he'd be a damned fool not to kiss her.

Hot-blooded DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy) was originally approached by Roddenberry to play, of all people, Spock ! McCoy's polar opposite. Kelley declined after bearing a quick thumbnail sketch of the Vulcan’s character.

Early in the development of the TV show, Spock was conceived of as a red-skinned alien who never ate but absorbed energy through a metal plate in his stomach. Another idea was to have him played by a dwarf.

When Nichelle (Uhura) Nichols turned up for her audition for a then-unnamed character, she was carrying a book entitled Uhuru. Coincidence? Similarly, James (Montgomery Scott) Doohan's middle name actually is Montgomery. It was also Doohan, a master of accents who decided the Enterprise's chief engineer should be Scottish.

Those watching the director's cut of Star Trek IV were left In no doubt that Spock, that paragon of stoical self-control, had got his Vulcan protégé Saavik in the family way in the course of the previous film. Even in the trimmed-down version, enough hints were dropped to put observant Trekkies in the picture. Spock, though, remained blissfully unaware of his impending fatherhood he had, after all, been locked away in Dr. McCoy's brain while his body was having all the fun.

After a bit of digging around, the notorious 'blooper reels' (Trek's very own It'll Re Alright On The Night) were found not to have emanated from a sneaky studio employee but from Gene Roddenberry himself. Leonard Nimoy was enraged, and filed an injunction with the Screen Actors Guild. Their relationship never recovered.

James Doohan is missing the end of the middle finger of his right hand, a fact that the makers of the original series went to extraordinary lengths to hide. By the time the movies rolled round, disguising Mr. Scott's missing digit was no longer considered a priority

The plot of one early episode required a salt shaker, and a gofer was despatched to trawl Los Angeles for suitably futuristic examples. When they were brought back to the studio, it quickly became apparent that their space-age design completely obscured their simple function. For simplicity's sake, an ugly recognisable standard salt shaker was used in the scene, and the futuristic ones were recycled as surgical implements of Dr. McCoy's.

In real life James Doohan is such a science buff that, when visiting a lab where an ion propulsion engine was being developed, he casually pointed out a flaw that the entire scientific team had overlooked.

After Star Trek, Nichelle Nichols allegedly found a second career in NASAs astronaut recruitment programme. She knew three of the astronauts on the doomed Challenger shuttle well.

Theodore Sturgeon, prominent SF author and writer of the classic Trek episode 'Amok Time', was a dedicated nudist.

The principal characters went through a phase of hiding William Shatner's bike to prevent him being the first to the canteen every lunchtime. For some reason, this 30-year-old story is still considered amusing enough to merit being dragged out at fan conventions.

When Star Trek graduated to the big screen, Roddenberry found himself increasingly disenfranchised from his creation. Six times, whenever a new movie was proposed, he submitted his dream story: the Enterprise crew travel back in time and, depending on which draft you read, the script either has them meeting Hitler and starting World War II, or ends with Spock standing on the grassy knoll in Dallas with a rifle in his hand. The script was turned down every time. Perhaps he would have done better to punt it Oliver (JFK) Stone's way.

There's a very special place in Trekkie mythology for the belly-dancing slave girl who, to make her look good and alien, was painted a sumptuous green. When the rushes were watched the next day, she appeared to have normal human flesh tones. So, this scene was shot again, with the dancer painted a more lurid shade. The following morning, there she was again, even pinker than before. The crew tried one more time, with the darkest, deepest green make-up they could possibly concoct. And what did she look like when the film was developed? You've guessed. What had happened was that every night, the guy whose job it was to process the film had looked at the day's rushes and said to himself, 'My God, this girl is green!' and proceeded to, er, put her to rights.