As I’ve mentioned before, Star Trek was my first love. It was the first TV show I appreciated on a level beyond merely watching, the first one that really made me think about things, the first one I cared about enough to actually learn about. It was also the first one I “collected”; what that meant to me in those pre-home video days was, I asked for a copy of Bjo Trimble’s Star Trek Concordance (yes, the picture is of my copy, which I of course still own) and read it cover to cover, noting which episodes I’d seen and which I hadn’t. I also collected James Blish’s episode adaptations, and came to know some of the stories in print years before I ever got to see them on the tube. I knew the show backwards and forwards, and by the time I bought the DVD collections in the Oughts I had probably already seen every episode over a dozen times (and that doesn’t even count the ones I listened to on my TV band radio). So as you might expect, I tend to recognize actors who were on Star Trek when they appear in other 1960s and ’70s TV shows. In fact, it’s part of what I enjoy about watching those shows. I don’t just mean the regular cast, though of course it’s always fun to catch a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits with a pre-Trek Shatner, Nimoy, or Doohan. No, I mean that when we recently re-watched The Wild, Wild West, at least half of the episodes had an actor or actress who prompted me to say to Grace, “Hey, that’s the girl who played __________ in [episode X].” And now that we’ve moved on to Mission: Impossible (Trek‘s sister show, produced by Desilu on the next soundstage over), it’s even more so; there are few episodes that don’t have a guest star who appeared on Trek (and I’m not even counting Nimoy’s appearance as a regular in later seasons). Sometimes it’s more than one, and we recently watched one in which there were no fewer than five. I don’t really understand why it pleases me so to recognize the faces (or voices); I reckon it’s just the pleasure of familiarity, like going back to one’s home town. But just in case there was any doubt in your mind about my level of nerdiness, I hope this post has rectified that.
The Trek Connection
June 6, 2022 by Maggie McNeill
You can at least triple nerd on this one.
My brother has a large collection of TV series on DVD, mostly comedies from the 1960s, but some more dramatic shows as well (including Star Trek). He often talks about how the same actors keep appearing over and over.
One thing he likes to do is to watch all the series together in broadcast order. So, for example, one week he might watch Star Trek, Bewitched, Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Gomer Pyle, and any other show he might have that were all broadcast in the same week in 1967. He says that oftentimes, the same actor might appear on three or four shows in the same week.
He says that sometimes you can follow an actor’s career as they get better parts over time, or fewer parts, depending on how their career works out. He also has a lot of movies, covering a wider time period and including a lot of lesser-known films. Turns out a lot of TV stars in the 1960s had film careers that fizzled out in the 40s and 50s.