Who’s Who in Star Trek: Volume 1

We boldly go into the next exciting era of WHO'S WHO with Volume 1 of WHO'S WHO IN STAR TREK! Rob welcomes fellow Network All-Stars Chris Franklin and Siskoid to talk about The Andorians, Chekhov, The Gorns, Edith Keeler, Khan, Kirk, Dr. McCoy, and more!

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Our fantastic opening theme is by Daniel Adams and Ashton Burge with their band The Bad Mamma Jammas! http://www.facebook.com/BadMammaJammas Closing Music by Alexander Courage.

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31 responses to “Who’s Who in Star Trek: Volume 1

  1. Hey rob big fan of The Who’s who books and figured this would be good one to write in too.

    I’ve mebe been a big trek fan growing up I was more into Star Wars though I did occasionally watch a couple episodes of TNG i stuck with Wars for a majority of my life until a few years back and decided to give Trek try and I’ve enjoying my trip through all the series.

    I want to comment on the why is there still racism in Star Trek bit well one of things I’ve come to to realize is that no matter how enlightened or progressive we become there are still going to be things that people just don’t like or have issue with and seeing how Kirk acts in the undiscovered country there are things about aliens act or do that would rub people the wrong way and as for the character brother no Native American i actually like that as I think we forget that any person no matter their race orientation or creed they are still human and in every person there is the captaicty to hate and is something I wish more stories would do as it brings up this interesting quandary.

    I also want to comment on the art of ken penders which judging from the reactions really wasn’t that good.
    Now the thing is i know him not from these books but from his long run on the Archie sonic the hedgehog comics which he drew and wrote for.

    If you think the stuff in this was bad try looking at some the stuff he did in those comics.

    He had a weird fixation with knuckles and when that character got a spin off series he wrote the series in this mix of star Trek and jack kirby only not as good he also had adult topics that felt very weird in a character that was from a video game.
    He also tryed to use the comic as a way to jump start his own project which was just a knock off of x men.

    He is also responsible for suing Archie it was either over some characters in a sonic game that where homages to his stuff or rights issues with trades of his work anyway to avoid the lawsuit Archie gave him all the characters he created and rebooted the series with him trying to created a franchise with his characters.

    Sorry this post wasn’t as Star Trek heavy but I definitely wanted to mention this as hearing from where he got his start abd when is the next tim I’m going to get to talk about him

    Anyway cant wait for the next episode definitely enjoying this start.

  2. So I remembered which Mego dolls I had: Spider-Man (those red hands are vivid in my memory now), Batman and Robin. Where they disappeared to is anybody’s guess. Were they even mine, or some visiting uncle’s? I don’t know.

    1. Nice! Yes, Spidey’s red hands are quite memorable. Some Spideys have red torsos as well.

      Of the super heroes I had those three, Superman, Captain America and the Hulk. I had a few other odds & ends Mego 8″ figures like Spock, Fonzie and the Dukes of Hazzard characters.

      Chris

  3. Browsing through the pictures, I saw the Horta, which sent my brain careening down memory lane…

    Does anyone here remember the screensaver program, After Dark? Back in the day (settle in kids, long meandering story…), before screens came with built-in protection so they don’t burn in whatever screen you’re on while you’re at the bathroom, After Dark kept that screen damage from happening by playing cute animations. They were famous for being the first to offer a cool fish tank (before Microsoft!) and for their flying toasters. Anyway, there were a series of Star Trek screensavers, and one of them included the Horta! The Horta would burrow around on a replica of your screen’s desktop, making tunnels, laying eggs, and burning the phrase “No Kill I” into rocks. Sometimes Spock would come out and do a Vulcan Mind Meld.

    Here’s a link to a video recording: https://youtu.be/buRo9bOsU-k

    Later add-ons had Next Generation references, including one with Data tap dancing!

    1. At one point, I had a bunch of these screen savers, including some of the non-Star Trek ones like Disney (and, I think there was a Marvel one too, maybe?). They took up more of my hard drive space than my other programs.

  4. Can anyone who’s a fan of “In Search Of…” offer some memory assistance?

    I recall an episode on Alien Abduction (I think). Leonard Nimoy was speaking to a gent who had encountered a group of aliens. (This in itself was weird because Nimoy rarely appeared on camera. It must’ve been one of the very first episodes.) The gent described what happened and then they offered an artist’s depiction of one of the leaders, and I recall it looking almost exactly like Balok. To me, it was unmistakeable because Balok always appeared during the end credits of TOS. Does anyone else remember this?

  5. Much love for the Gorn chat!

    I know Gene Roddenbury didn’t want to go the “Lost in Space” route of people in costumes for aliens, but the Gorn was my favorite. (Followed up by the white gorilla with the unicorn horn!)

    Rob’s description of the Megs Gorn figure was spot-on.

  6. I was all set to listen to this but I’m afraid, in all good conscience, I cannot. I had been led to believe that this podcast was available in Klingon, which is how I listen to all my Star Trek podcasts. I didn’t get my PhD. in Klingon from Klingon U. to listen to podcasts about Star Trek in English. Sorry, guys.

    toDSaH! ‘ej vaj SoSwI’.

  7. A few notes:
    That Balok still in the closing credits scared me a little kid. I’d run out of the room before his still appeared and then back in when it was offscreen.

    To Chris Franklin – any Monkees knowledge is good knowledge. It should be shared and cultivated.

    To Rob’s point about the regret of not making time for someone, I passed up the chance to meet Art Nodell at SDCC for some useless Batman panel or something. That was his final year there and then he passed away. Big regret.

    Re: Sulu promised Excelsior – I want to say that was in a filmed scene in ST 2 or 3. Kirk congratulated Sulu on his promotion and ship assignment. Story goes that Shatner (intentionally?) played the scene so badly it couldn’t be used.

  8. The best explanation for the different Klingon races that I heard was out of the FASA Role-Playing Game. Essentially, the race with the ridges were the Imperial Klingons. They then inter-bred with whatever race bordered them, both to get more of an intelligence on how they operated, but also to make those races more “at ease” when dealing with the Empire.

    So in TOS we had Imperial-Human hybrids, but if you were on the boarder with the Romulans, you would have seen Imperial-Romulan hybrids. That’s a much better explanation than, say, a genetic disease.

    http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qrrdRcW0jPA/VoFjSli9CaI/AAAAAAAAh7A/hplX9l_EX-A/s1600/Klingons.png

    And Ilia is pronounced Eye-Lee-Ah, dammit!

    Sorry. I don’t know what came over me.

    1. Well, that falls apart with the ones who showed up in DS9, though.

      Of course, it’s really impossible to make a theory that doesn’t fall apart trying to explain TOS Kahless, though.

      1. I agree with it falling apart for DS9, but I can make the case that TOS Kahless was produced from the Excalibans reading the Enterprise’s logs. The Federation had heard of Kahless, probably through some diplomatic mission or other, but they had only met the Imperial-Human hybrids. So the Excalibans went off of incomplete information and Kirk & Spock didn’t know this was false.

  9. Oh my goodness! I love the altered theme song!

    This was a great episode overall and it sounds like you chaps had fun recording it. Because I’m a bit of an obsessive Trek fan, here are some comments about several of this episode’s entries.

    Andorians—The flabbjellah originated from notes by costume designer Robert Fletcher, which are quoted in the book, The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

    Bearclaw—At the time of DC’s original comic series, stories were not brought to Gene’s attention. Licensing was a bit of a haphazard affair at the time and wouldn’t become such a rigid institution until TNG was well underway.

    Gorn—The Gorn did appear on Star Trek: Enterprise, but it was in the Mirror Universe so all bets of first appearances in the proper universe are off in that case. I will grant Mr. Franklin that the CG looked terrible.

    Iotians—When the DS9 producers were looking for 30th anniversary episodes, one of the ideas was revisiting Sigma Iotia and finding everyone walking about in Starfleet uniforms as a result of McCoy’s communicator being left behind.

    Konom—One aspect of the DC Comics characters that did appear later was Bernie the Klingon. He would later take the name Kobry (a combined name incorporating Konom and Bryce) and appeared in the TNG novel Strike Zone by Peter David, with a significant mention in Keith DeCandido’s novel, The Art of the Impossible.

    Marcus, Carol—In the novelization for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Klingons attack a colony where Carol Marcus resides. Kirk gets wind of this and it reignites his hatred of the Klingons.

  10. I’m only about 15 minutes in… Good job so far!

    I think the major source for background info you are forgetting is the FASA role-playing game. It is most likely the source for the added Andorian content. They were writing a ton of their own stuff at that point with little-to-no interference from Paramount.

    About a year later, when TNG was on the air, the Roddenberry office cracked down on everything they were publishing, supposedly because it contradicted a lot of Gene’s ideas. The soon extended the crackdown to the books and comics, leading to a long period in which there was no inter-continuity from book to book and some very restrictive guidelines for all licensed creators. They even went so far as to tell Peter David that Kirk was no longer interested in women in the period after Star Trek V.

  11. I love this episode, guys! I read the heck out of these issues.

    1. De above gets where the Andorian stuff comes from, though I wouldn’t be surprised if some of it came out of the Star Trek Phase II bible as well. I remember there being a consistency in the alien descriptions on the back of the trading cards, the Happy Meals, the Make Your Own Costume book where I read a lot of it. http://amzn.to/2frVQQL It’s also why we know that the bug-helmeted Zaranites breathe fluorine (and shown in the Star Trek comic strip) and that the Arcturians (the melty face aliens) are cloned.

    • As far as Spock being tied to Sherlock Holmes, there used to be these Star Trek fanzine articles collected into book form called Best of Trek. I seem to recall that being mentioned there. I recall, too, that in the spirit of that Doc Savage biography that they DID tie Amanda Grayson into Dick Grayson, because the writer, not being a comic fan, decided that Dick Grayson took over for Bruce Wayne at some point. Apparently he was completely unaware of how the DC multiverse explains why Batman was in the 40’s and the 80’s. What do they teach in schools?

    Rob, I’m sure you expected a huge litany of corrections, but that was all I heard, really. One little note, though: I don’t know if David knew who his father was in ST2. His line about “That boy scout you used to run around with” makes me think he didn’t as it’s too dismissive. And Carol’s reply was very much of the “You don’t know who you’re talking about” variety. But some of that could have just been trying to hid it from the audience. But that’s all opinion, too.

    Awesome episode! I’m looking forward to the next one!

    1. Sherlock connection: Me too, and I have a couple of those books, and I looked and looked… maybe one of those best ofs feel behind the shelf? I’ll look again, thanks for corroborating my memory!

  12. Nice new intro song.

    Well, they certainly made it easy for me as far as Egregious Omissions: making the only individual named Klingon to get a page the one from the comics only gives me tons of choices. From them I’ll go with the obvious top three, here: Kor, Kang, and Koloth, and give an Honorable Mention to Kahless the (Ironically called) Unforgettable and, yeah, Kruge.

  13. Love this episode. I haven’t seen the original episodes in years but hearing you talk about the characters brought them bubbling up from my memory bank.

    I have to say that I love the Horta. Maybe it says something about our backgrounds Chris, but I always thought it looked more like shambling Eggplant Parmigiana than it did meatloaf. The idea that one of them became a Star Fleet officer is ludicrous … I wish I saw that. The Horta also involves my favorite “Damn it Jim, I’m a doctor! Not a _____!’ line. ‘Damn it Jim, I’m a doctor not a bricklayer!’

    And I love Siskoid’s impression of the wooden Robin Curtis saying ‘David is dead’. Not as funny as Cindy’s but close. I actually would love to hear all the podcasters on the network deadpan that line. Maybe when you review the Saavik entry.

  14. Stellar show, guys (see what I did there?). I’m late to the party, but I couldn’t be more thrilled to finally get to these issues. In my mind, these are the last of the “real” Who’s Whos. I’ll hang with you through the Legion and *yawn* loose leaf versions, but this is really the end of my enthusiasm.

    So, an interesting twist on my comments this episode. I listened to the show during my Thanksgiving travels, so my wife (who is slightly more of a Trekie than I am) was forced to listen along. So, in lieu of my usual ramblings, I’ll just transcribe her comments. Let’s see if she is less “insane” than I am.

    1. The background of the Christine Chapel entry is brilliant! The “crossword” pattern, as you called it, is meant to evoke the onboard computer light board. This is because Majel Barrett, who played Nurse Chapel, also voiced the computer. We both can’t believe you missed that inside joke.

    2. Despite the comments about organizing the characters by last name, Khan is listed under the K’s and not S for Singh, proving the point that the alphabetizing was more about ease of locating specific characters than it was a hard and fast rule.

    3. This podcast makes me want to binge watch all of the Star Treks (and break out the comic book run).

    4. Gray Morrow is a beast! That McCoy entry I’d perfection.

    Until next time, guys, Live long and prosper.

  15. I had so much fun listening to this podcast. After all the craziness going in the news it was a relief to escape reality with Star Trek and comics – like peanut butter and chocolate!

  16. Really great episode, Rob! Siskoid and Chris are top notch co-hosts and the knowledge and passion for Trek is apparent.

    For as much as I love Star Trek and as much of it as I’ve seen, I’m humbled to hear just how much these two could pull from memory about these characters and their universe. You all made driving my cat to the vet a lot more fun.

  17. I’m a passive Star Trek fan. I like the property, particularly the original films and the Next Generation, but outside of watching the odd episode of the original series, DS9 and Voyager I haven’t swam into the larger ocean of Trek. Because of that I wasn’t sure how much I would get out of this episode.

    It turns out I would get quite a lot. Rob, Siskoid and Chris were informative, funny and insightful. I even missed Shag and wondered what he would have brought to the conversation. More than anything this episode made me want to finally get off my ass and watch the entirety of the original series. I know they aren’t all winners

    Three random comments:

    1. Have any of you seen the movie FREE ENTERPRISE? If not I recommend it. It was a geek culture movie (starring Shatner as himself) made in 1998 and finally released in 2002 on DVD. It’s a fun flick.

    2. In addition to the original Star Trek theme Alexander Courage also scored SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE. I know I am once again defending the film but the score was really good. #itallcomesbacktosuperman

    3. At one point GENERATIONS was brought up. I know that film is widely disliked I have fond memories of seeing it and like a large part of it. To be fair I wasn’t as plugged into the gestalt of Kirk when I saw originally saw it but as a Next Gen fan I was pretty happy.

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