News Introducing Fact Trek
- Thread starter Harvey
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The network decided on the airing order, so it's not necessarily indicative of post-production order, certainly not that early in the season. Logically, they would've banked a number of episodes ahead of time, since it took more than a week to produce an episode so they needed a headstart to keep up with the airdates. And it stands to reason that they would've done post-production on the pilot first, since it was already made.
The "created by" credit was dropped due to an issue with the DGA. Business affairs sent down a memo on August 26, 1966 indicating that the "created by" credit in the main titles had to go immediately. It was too late in the post-production pipeline to change the main titles for the first two episodes broadcast, but they were able to fix this for "Where No Man Has Gone Before."
There's no documentation about this, but I wonder if the narration and sound effects were dropped from the main title for this episode because of the crunch to complete post-production on it and deliver to NBC? (Note that this is wild speculation.)
Entirely logical—but not how things panned out.
They did not start cutting "Where No Man Has Gone Before" for air until sometime after August 15, 1966 (every episode status report on and before that date indicates it was "to be re-cut for airtime"). Eight regular episodes were already in editorial before they tackled the second pilot.
And you might expect that they had a number of completed episodes by the time the series premiered, but that was not the case. As of September 6, 1966—the same date Star Trek first aired in Canada and two days before the U.S. premiere date on NBC—only "The Man Trap," "Charlie X," and "Where No Man Has Gone Before" were completed. "The Naked Time" was on the dubbing stage and seven other episodes were still in editorial. The struggle to meet their air dates was constant.
Hm, that's good to know. I never really thought about why the creator credit moved from the main titles to the end of the episode.
What was the reason that it wasn't allowed in the titles? It was back there in the animated series, so something must have changed in the interim.
Oh, that's interesting. I always assumed the different main titles on WNMHGB meant that it had been completed first and had a rough draft of the titles. If it was actually edited that late, that makes it strange that it didn't have the narration.
It was back for the second and third season. If I understand @Harvey's blog post correctly, moving the writer and director credits to the top of the episode cleared up the WGA objections and allowed Roddenberry his main title credit.
Anytime you wanna tackle that, Harvey, I'd be happy to help...at least from the Laserdisc/VHS history onward...
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The same could be said for "Mission: Impossible".
According to my "The Complete Mission: Impossible Dossier", twenty-two of the twenty-eight episodes in the first season went over schedule and over budget.
The most expensive being the two-parter, 'Old Man Out' which took seventeen days to film and went over budget by $84,000.
Eleven episodes took seven days or more to film.
In a sense, it was the other way around, in that it was designed to rely heavily on the concept of parallel development to justify having Earthlike alien cultures so they could reuse props, sets, and costumes from historical productions. GR knew that science fiction would be difficult to do affordably, so his pitch document repeatedly stressed how the parallel-worlds concept would keep the show practical to film by reusing existing backlots and assets.
Interestingly, the pitch document proposed a couple of other money-saving options that TOS ultimately didn't use. One was writing scripts to take advantage of "current studio construction," e.g. if there was an Ancient Egypt movie about to wrap, they could write an Egyptian-planet episode to use its sets before they tore them down. The other was "Set and Locale Carry-over," proposing doing three or four stories on a sufficiently advantageous set or location or a sufficiently interesting world. I think the only time they did anything like that was reusing Starbase 11 in "Court Martial" and "The Menagerie."
I've mentioned before that I'm surprised they never wrote an episode around stock footage from a movie, the way The Time Tunnel often did. Paramount didn't have a lot of sci-fi in its library, but maybe they could've gotten some useful footage from Crack in the Earth or Robinson Crusoe on Mars, say. Or they could've used historical footage for something on a parallel-culture world. They used a bit of stock movie footage in "City on the Edge" for images of the past, but that was about it.
And in the end, Trek availed itself of Western sets and accoutrements -- "Arena", "Return of the Archons", of course "Spectre of the Gun"...
Also the castle in "Errand of Mercy". But your point stands.
Considering the audience reaction to Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea mining Irwin Allen's "The Lost World" (as evidenced in TV Guide letters) for an episode the first time, I can see why the Trek folks didn't build around stock. Irwin Allen did it all too often on Voyage and, as you mentioned, The Time Tunnel was built around it. I could also see Roddenberry, Justman (etc.) and NBC wishing to not be seen as similar to Irwin's brand of sci-fi.
It wasn't unique to Allen, though. The Twilight Zone got a lot of use out of stock footage of the C57-D from Forbidden Planet, and the episode "To Serve Man" cribbed footage from The Day the Earth Stood Still and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. I gather that The Outer Limits (which Justman worked on) also recycled spaceship footage from earlier productions from time to time. And those were the classy sci-fi shows that Roddenberry aspired to emulate.
Heck, there were movies and serials going back to the '30s that recycled footage from earlier movies and serials to save money. It's a perennial Hollywood practice.
It may not have been unique to Irwin Allen, but with The Time Tunnel, he built an entire TV series around libery footage. He created at least 5 episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea out of stock footage. He took it way beyond grabbing random effects scenes and costumes here and there.
Turn Back the Clock
Killers of the Deep
The Shape of Doom
No Escape from Death
The Mermaid
All of those are built around pre-existing movie or episodic footage. He practically elevated it to an art form.
I can't think of another TV producer who cribbed so much library footage on a regular basis.
Cheapie bottom bill films, sure. Universal did it for their double features too
Turn Back the Clock
Killers of the Deep
The Shape of Doom
No Escape from Death
The Mermaid
All of those are built around pre-existing movie or episodic footage. He practically elevated it to an art form.
I can't think of another TV producer who cribbed so much library footage on a regular basis.
Cheapie bottom bill films, sure. Universal did it for their double features too
Season 1 of The Incredible Hulk built three episodes around stock footage from Universal movies -- Airport 75 for "747," Earthquake for "Earthquakes Happen," and Duel (the TV movie that was Steven Spielberg's directorial debut) for "Never Give a Trucker an Even Break." Later, season 1 of MacGyver did the same with The Naked Jungle ("Trumbo's World") and The Italian Job ("Thief of Budapest"), and used smaller amounts of stock movie footage in a couple of other episodes.
I forgot about the first season Hulk's. Yeah, they did have a lot of stock in a couple of them. Eventually they stopped doing that and did a "clip show" here and there, but tried to bring something new to the storyline (McGee discovering that someone transforms into the Hulk for example).
Don't get me wrong, I actually applaud the ingenuity Irwin Allen's people put into incorporating stock footage into the episodes. They actually created new stories out of them instead of conjuring an excuse to stop and remember past episodes. Or remake episodes as Bewitched did later on (which probably didn't seem as obvious at the time).
Don't get me wrong, I actually applaud the ingenuity Irwin Allen's people put into incorporating stock footage into the episodes. They actually created new stories out of them instead of conjuring an excuse to stop and remember past episodes. Or remake episodes as Bewitched did later on (which probably didn't seem as obvious at the time).
That didn't happen in a clip show, but in the "Mystery Man" 2-parter, where McGee and a face-bandaged, amnesiac David were stranded together after a helicopter crash. That had a bit of flashback content as David recovered his memories, but the whole thing wasn't built around reusing clips.
You're thinking of the later "Proof Positive," which was a semi-clip show centering on McGee because Bill Bixby was unavailable that week due to a court date for a messy divorce. It involved McGee trying to convince his new publisher that the Hulk was real. "Interview With the Hulk" in season 4, where a rival reporter played by Michael Conrad discovers David's secret and interviews him, also contains some flashback content recapping the pilot and "Married."
Most series used to do clip shows as a matter of course, and some still do (e.g. Power Rangers, which for years has had an annual tradition of Halloween and Christmas clip episodes -- which is weird, because the whole franchise is built around recycling Japanese action footage, so it's already nothing but clip shows). That's why it's so bizarre that the myth still persists that Trek: TNG's "Shades of Gray" clip show was a result of the '88 writers' strike. For one thing, it was a year after that, and for another thing, clip shows still need writers. They're done simply to save money, and at the time they were done routinely by many shows, whereas writers' strikes were far more infrequent.
But it's more unusual for a show to build an episode around footage from a different production, which is the sort of thing I'm talking about.
I can talk about clip shows all day, but this got way off topic again. 
Anyway, I guess we can assume safely that the lack of narration goes all the way back to the original air date for WNMHGB. I'd still love know for certain which episodes have the electric violin theme.
Anyway, I guess we can assume safely that the lack of narration goes all the way back to the original air date for WNMHGB. I'd still love know for certain which episodes have the electric violin theme.
Clip shows were around long before that; indeed, they predate television. A lot of the theatrical adventure serials of the 1930s-50s would save money or make up for schedule delays by doing chapters midway through or close to the end that recapped the events of previous chapters. Theatrical cartoon studios in the same era would sometimes do "cheaters," cartoons that recycled material from earlier cartoons with a frame sequence around it.
Heck, Star Trek: "The Menagerie" is essentially a clip show, just using clips nobody had seen yet. Gilligan's Island did something similar with their first-season Christmas episode, presenting footage from the unaired pilot as a flashback to their first day on the island.
