Although Star Trek was supposed to portray the incredible advances which would be available 300+ years in the future, the first pilot episode (which is not redundant, by the way, as there was a second pilot episode) was remarkably non-prescient in several respects. It featured, for example:
1. A bulky 23" cathode-ray tube cabinet-style television set in the captain’s quarters.
2. Crewmen with thick plastic-framed eyeglasses.
3. Bound paper books in bookshelves.
4. Various orders, reports, and other paper documents affixed to clipboards.
5. Husky and cumbersome communication devices (i.e. cell phones) the size of thick paperback books which looked like they were assembled from 1964 Radio Shack kits.
6. A captain who apologizes for snapping at a female junior officer because he "still has trouble accepting the concept of having a woman on the bridge."
Treckies (but no one else) will also marvel at the following items in this initial show. Spock had a pasty green complexion; he tittered with glee upon finding a pretty plant on a planet; and he expressed angst when members of the crew disappeared. The sets were remarkably primitive, and in some scenes, you can even see the nails in the paper-mache rock formations. Finally, and most amazingly, the captain made no effort at any point to threaten to blow up his own ship using the auto-destruct sequence.
The original filmstrip for this episode, which was made in 1965 and called The Cage, was cut up to be incorporated, in part, as flashbacks in a later episode during the regular series called The Menagerie. As a result, it was never broadcast or released in its original format until 1988, after a film archivist found a copy of it in stored in a photo lab.
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| CAPTAIN CHRISTOPHER PIKE FROM THE MENAGERIE Copyright Paramount Pictures 1966 |
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