Star Trek "Lost Episodes" & Fragments

[Grendelwulf]

Quoted from Aramis in another thread:
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Also, in HS, I'd made a contact with a guy at a local TV station; he knew I was a robotech fan because he saw the Robotech RPG on the kitchen table when he installed the exterior antenna... he was cueing tape for the saturday rerun of TOS (7am... I usually didn't watch)... "Wil, sorry to wake you, but it's Pete... Watch this trek, you'll not be sorry..." It turned out to be a rough-cut episode that wasn't on the official list. "The Captain's Woman"... opens with a boot-scene... as Kirk's ensign GF gets sent on an away mission, and he has to decide how much to risk to save her... Very much like a certain TNG Episode.... No transporter visuals, no environmental sounds on the bridge. I wish I'd had a tape to record it.
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Yes, I'm serious. Seems a buddy of his at the station found extra eps in cans at the LoC. Duped one of them. The station got hit with a fine by Paramount for airing it.
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Roddenberry killed one episode after shooting began for not being "trek" enough, and the censors supposedly killed another. Given the opening scene, and a 1968 shooting (Spock's got full commander, no Checkov)... and opening with them sitting on Kirk's bunk getting dressed, the censors would have killed it. We tend to forget that the episodes had to pass the censors, and effects were very expensive... so the censors often got to see rushes, rather than finals, so that effects could be used after to fill/shorten the run time after the censrs nipped scenes.

But even incomplete, in order to protect them, they would still have to have been filed with the LoC. You're not supposed to make copies, however, of the stuff on file.

Also, they seem to have turned up a complete copy of The Cage in a German collection.
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The PTB/censors didn't seem to have a problem with the episode, Wink of an Eye. There is an infamous scene that begins after a commercial break. Captain Kirk is seated on a bed, putting on his boots, while the woman guest star is preening herself in front of a mirror.

I wonder if someone perhaps made a re-edit as a spoof or for a Trek convention somewhere and it somehow fell into someone's hands and it was broadcast.

Admittedly, I would be sceptical. But, stranger things have been known to happen.

Does this ring any bells of familiarity with anyone?
Perhaps a creatively re-edited piece used for a sci-fi convention somewhere that managed to get broadcast?

In the Quest for Truth, our ears & eyes are open...

Ciao!
Grendelwulf

[aramis]

Wink of an eye had a different moral take than a captain sleeping with a member of his own crew.

And was less obvious that both of them putting on their boots on the same bed. She was a red-skirt.

It's been 24 years; creative manipulation was far more rare because it was far harder. But that boot scene was far more blatant than Wink of an Eye's.

[Grendelwulf]

I would have thought the morals issue would be the same, no matter who he was 'sleeping' with. Yes, it was okay for our Captain to be a ladies man, but to have them in bed together...(shudder!).

There were all of those stories of how William Ware Theiss had to use all sorts of fashion tricks to get away with murder. He would expose women in ways that weren’t normally exposed at all. He would reveal parts of the body that we don’t usually look at, the underside of the breast rather than the top of the breast. It seems weirdly naughty to us because we never look at that area (or didn't back in the '60's. So, it’s the creating of new erogenous zones.

But, you know, we’re not dealing with America, we’re supposed to be dealing in other cultures that have other ideas about what is sexy and what isn’t. It’s no different than Victorian morals, in a way, you know, seeing an ankle at that point was shameless, you know. Bare shoulders back in the day would send someone away screaming in fits.

I can understand the whole Captain/Subordinate taboo being off limits. It just doesn't seem to fit with how they presented Kirk along the way. Sure, there was Yeoman Rand, but she didn't stick around after the first season. And Kirk was always "Commanding Officer" first and "Jimmy the Lech" later...unless it was apart of whatever alien race they were involving themselves with. Which, when you come to think of it, that was an even broader swath to cut. Our hero wasn't fooling around with other races, he was fooling around with other species!

Ciao!
Grendelwulf

[aramis]

In wink, it's about him being (essentially) coerced. And she gets defeated in the end. (Part of the Hayes code was that immoral behavior had to be punished in the end).

Captain's Woman showed them having a relationship, and she survives in the end; neither is punished in the end. It's an excellent moral drama, and very relevant to the time (women becoming more a part of the regular forces in the US military about that time, and the USAF having started mixed gender support units).

Heck, it's just as relevant now, but the Hayes code isn't. And while the Hayes code was for movies, the TV censors used very much the same standards. (I'm more familiar with the Hayes code due to having been the lab assistant to a film hisotry professor.)

Also one should note: When asked in 1985 or 1986 (I was in HS; he did an appearance at UAA, Arts bldg, room 150), Jimmy Doohan said he thought there were several that hadn't made it to TV, but he wasn't certain. The recent find of that partial ep proves he was at least partially right. Shatner said the pace was so high he lost all track on a TV interview. That several scripts got reused shows that they made it at least as far as scripts.

Given the pace and schedule, it's been calculated more than once that as many as 10 episodes could have been shot beyond the aired catalog; I doubt it is anywhere near that many. I expect 2-3. (Which is what friends who have been to the Library of Congress have said they found evidence for; I've not been myself. One was a trekkie working Tech for NARA, which also administers the LoC... he told me two such unaired eps exist there.)

[Falconer]

Joanna
Rockabye Baby, Or Die
The Joy Machine

Info on three lost episodes. There’s other good stuff on that site, too.

[aramis]

Those are a different kind of "lost" episode: unshot, rather than unfinished and/or unaired.

Still, cool stuff.