Posted on 02/27/2015 9:16:14 AM PST by C19fan
Leonard Nimoy, the sonorous, gaunt-faced actor who won a worshipful global following as Mr. Spock, the resolutely logical human-alien first officer of the Starship Enterprise in the television and movie juggernaut “Star Trek,” died on Friday morning at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 83.
His wife, Susan Bay Nimoy, confirmed his death, saying the cause was end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
without, not with.
Nice analogy!
We’re living “Idiocracy”. We really are.
Yep. Bittersweet.
Mission Impossible?
Lesley Ann Warren.
I was watching Law and ORder mothership from the beginning something about Jerry Orbach death really threw me I didn’t know he was sick after he left the show I try watch with Dennis Farina couldn’t get it
Same thing with Dallas reboot when Larry Hagman was sick John Ross son character he seem he wasn’t right for the part
I don’t know why this ended up in my personal newsfeed, but it belongs here. Watched Star Trek for 43 years, & bought lots of the novelizations, along with William Shatner & Leonard Nimoy’s autobiographys, & books about the making of Star Trek.
First time I heard Walter Koenig is Jewish.
Shatner's acting in Star Trek II and III was excellent (especially his reaction in Trek III when his son is murdered), and probably underrated because its a cult sci-fi movie instead of a more "mainstream" Hollywood film.
However, he was extremely stiff in Star Trek I and seemed to playing robo-Kirk (my guess is he was "off" as Kirk since he hadn't played the role in a decade and didn't go back and review the old episodes). By the time Star Trek IV, V, VI, and Generations rolled around, he seemed to have lost interest in acting and just "played" William Shatner in a starfleet uniform.
This was the 1970s between the show and the movie.
I would actually disagree about Shatner and STI:TMP. He’s actually supposed to be uncomfortable. Returning to command a ship he is now unfamiliar with after several years of riding a desk in the Admiralty. He was literally having to re-learn what it was like to be Captain Kirk again (note especially how helpless and even incompetent he was when he pushed the ship prematurely to warp speed and they went into the wormhole and it took Captain Decker to save him and the ship from disaster). He played it exactly as he should’ve given the situation.
I’m sorry we actually didn’t get to see some of the scenes from the novelization on film, such as Kirk visiting the Straits of Gibraltar Dam, which lowered the Mediterranean by a few hundred feet or why he reacted with such shock and horror at the transporter deaths of the incoming Vulcan science officer and another person (who was revealed to be his love interest who had come to see him off), or lastly a nifty scene/showdown between the unseen Fleet Admiral Nogura and Kirk (with the one and only Toshiro Mifune playing the part).
When I met the director of TMP, Academy Award winner Robert Wise, I didn’t ask him about that, but I would’ve been curious to get his opinion on potentially having Mifune in a cameo.
Given the time and the fact that it was geared to kids, those were solid and intelligent little episodes. Animation could also allow them to do more fantastical settings that budgetary limitations of the time could not (recall the budget cutbacks for the 3rd and last season left many episodes largely shipbound).
Patent pending on the microdots. ;d
I skip the opening credits of ENT, hate that song.
The Mirror episodes had their own credits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfbsZRbwbJ4
Mayweather could have developed as a character if they had given him ANYTHING to do. Oh well, easy pay check for the actor.
Where did you meet Robert Wise?
I’ve seen a few of the cartoon epiosdes.
My favorite of the ones I’ve seen is “The Slaver Weapon”.
I met him at a Vanderbilt Film Seminar held in the Summer of 1994.
Well, apparently they have them on YouTube. I believe I’ve seen them all at some point when they ran them on Nickelodeon in the ‘80s.
As an addendum to Wise, at the time they were setting up for Trek (when they opted to go from a series continuation to anchor a new Paramount network in 1978/79 to a feature film), they had all the actors locked down, with one exception, and that was Leonard Nimoy. He was in his “I Am Not Spock” phase and simply didn’t want to return to Trek.
Instead, they were prepared to have another actor, David Gautreaux, step into the part of the new Vulcan Science Officer, Xon (with the difference being Xon was fully Vulcan and having to deal with the utterly alien humans, which would’ve made him even more “alienated” from the ship’s crew). Persis Khambatta, of course, was also slated to play Ilia in the tv series, but they held her over for the film (and killed her off). I’m not sure if Stephen Collins (as Will Decker) was to be on the series or not (adding all those folks to compensate for Nimoy’s departure made for a rather top-heavy cast).
Anyway, when Wise informed his children (whom were big Trek fans) that he was on the project, they were ecstatic. When he told them, however, that Nimoy wasn’t going to be a part of it, they were horrified. They told their dad he had to do anything and everything to get Nimoy on board with the film project. Somehow he and Roddenberry managed to persuade a very reluctant Nimoy to come back, because it just wasn’t Trek without him (Trek could likely survive with the absence of one of the lesser of the trio, McCoy, or one of the rest of the cast, Chekov (who was not on the animated series), Uhura, Sulu or Scott, but if Kirk or Spock wasn’t there, it simply wasn’t going to work).
Of course, Nimoy wanted to have Spock killed off, and got his wish, sort of, with the next film...
In a way, I’m saddened that we didn’t have a second series with Kirk & crew beginning in 1979 (which probably would’ve run at least 5-7 years), though it also would’ve meant no films, no “T.J. Hooker” for Shatner, but most of all, no Spock, as Nimoy simply would’ve refused to commit to doing a long stint again (aside from perhaps a guest appearance here or there, if that... he made only one appearance on “T.J. Hooker”).
Another tidbit on Nimoy somebody pointed out on the soap “General Hospital” message board... He played a bad guy in the early seasons of the show (circa 1963). Whether those episodes still exist is another question...
I wrote all that stuff out from memory and then I realized most of it was covered, and in more detail, on the TMP page on Wikipedia (which I actually hadn’t read in full). :-P
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Picture
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