‘Star Trek’…Intro To The Second Pilot, Unaired


‘Star Trek’…Intro To The Second Pilot, Unaired

This may be the only show that had two different pilot episodes. This is the opening from the second pilot ‘Where No Man Has Gone Before’ and this segment was never aired, but, the rest of this pilot did air as the third episode that had the new opening and theme music added.

In Roddenberry’s original concept, the lead character was Captain Robert April of the starship S.S. Yorktown. This character was developed into Captain Christopher Pike, first portrayed by Jeffrey Hunter in the first pilot called ‘The Cage’.

Roddenberry first presented Star Trek to CBS, which turned it down in favor of the Irwin Allen creation Lost in Space. He next presented his concept to the head of Desilu Studio, Herb Solow, who accepted it. Solow then successfully sold the show to NBC which paid for, but turned down, the first pilot stating that it was “too cerebral”. However, the NBC executives were still impressed with the concept, and they understood that its perceived faults had been partly because of the script that they had selected themselves. NBC made the unusual decision to pay for a second pilot, using the script called “Where No Man Has Gone Before”. Only the character of Mr. Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, was kept from the first pilot, and only two cast members, Majel Barrett and Nimoy, were carried forward into the series. This pilot proved to be satisfactory to NBC, and the network selected Star Trek to be in its upcoming television schedule for the fall of 1966.

The second pilot introduced the rest of the main characters: Captain Kirk (William Shatner), chief engineer Lt. Commander Scott (James Doohan) and Lt. Sulu (George Takei), who served as a physicist on the ship in the second pilot but subsequently became a helmsman throughout the rest of the series. Ship’s doctor Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley) joined the cast when filming began for the first season, and he remained for the rest of the series, achieving billing as the third star of the series. Also joining the ship’s permanent crew during the first season was the communications officer, Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), the first African-American woman to hold such an important role in an American television series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFtc2Ypwzl0

The original print from Star Trek’s 2nd pilot was never aired in this format. Had different opening narration, credits, had acts 1 thru 4 like an old quinn m…

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5 Comments

  1. Paul Duca October 5, 2013

    This I saw on ANTIQUES ROADSHOW–a woman came in with an interesting collection…in May 1964 her nuclear physicist father received a letter from a colleague asking him to look over something he had received–a TV show pilot script. The other man felt the woman’s father could provide scientific correctness to it, and possibly even be a technical adviser if it went on the air. The man did, and returned it with annotations to the script’s writer, subsequently meeting with him, and ultimately gave the script back to the woman’s father. The hand typed title age simply said….”STAR TREK….Created by Gene Roddenberry”–this is, in fact, the only other known copy of the actual pitch script he gave to Desilu the previous March, complete with the description of the show as “WAGON TRAIN to the stars”. and his incorrect version of the Drake Equation, a.k.a. The Second Variation. That September, Roddenberry sent the man a copy of the shooting script for “The Cage”–before Kirk or even Pike, the S.S. YORKTOWN was helmed by Captain April–along with a note featuring the Desilu Productions letterhead. The entire package together was valued at a minimum of $4000 to $6000. The wild card is the pitch script–while there is nothing truly comparable to determine its value, they were willing to think that it could sell for as much as $15,000 at auction. P.S. The man never became a show adviser…he never thought it would go anywhere, and he knew he was too much a stickler to let scripts with any scientific inaccuracy slide.

  2. Peter Enright September 29, 2013

    Gary Lockwood achieved legendary status by playing Frank Poole in 2001

  3. Peter Enright September 29, 2013

    bahahahahahaha Spock’s eyebrows are off the scale

  4. Peter Enright September 29, 2013

    it’s got that Quinn-Martin feel

  5. Tim Stepich September 29, 2013

    Interesting setup for the Star Trek story. However, the intro that ended up being used left more to the imagination.