“Menagerie,” 1 and 2. … Vina the dancing girl, who was painted green and caused other green-skinned women to pop up thru decades of Trek continuity, was played by Susan Oliver. Oliver’s last role appears to have been in 1988 on Freddie’s Nightmares, which was a syndicated horror anthology spun off from the Elm Street films. She appears as “a mysteriously gloomy maid who arrives at the young title character’s home and reveals herself to Judy as seemingly her own gray-haired future self. In Oliver’s final scene, she turns away from Judy and leaves the house, disappearing into the fog.” From green dancing girl to “gray-haired future self”: Hollywood has a brutal life cycle.
Memory Alpha says: “Oliver was also a passionate pilot, winner of the 1970 Powder Puff Derby air race and the fourth woman to fly a single-engined aircraft solo across the Atlantic. She attempted to become the first woman to fly a single-engine plane from the United States to Moscow; she made it as far as Denmark but was denied entry into Soviet airspace. ” …
… A ’60s film called Codename: Heraclitus, Ricardo Montalban in the cast.
… There’s an episode of Time Tunnel with Machiavelli “lost in time at the Battle of Gettysburg.”
… Clint Reynolds was going to play Two Face in the campy ’60s Batman show! But it never happened.
The episode uses footage from Trek‘s first pilot, when the cast was all different. For instance, the medical officer was John Hoyt, who went to Yale and joined Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater. Memory Alpha: “Perhaps Hoyt’s best-remembered TV role, however, is that of Grandpa Stanley Kanisky on the Nell Carter series Gimme a Break! Hoyt joined the cast of this series in its second season in 1982 and stayed with it until its cancellation in 1987, after which he retired from acting. He passed away just four years later.”
… There’s a play called Absence of a Cello, which sounds like it could be a Peter Cook line (“The problem, glaringly, is that no cello would appear to be involved in the operations of your string quartet.”)
Laurel Goodwin played the first of three cute yeomen whom Gene Roddenberry shoved into the series; they were meant as a starship captain’s equivalent of a good-looking secretary. The first two were rather Bambi-ish; the third (Grace Lee Whitney as Yeoman Rand) was older and not played as a dipsy-doo, but she got written out pretty fast. Anyway, Goodwin quit acting at 29, and years later she and her husband somehow wound up producing a wheels-and-beer movie that starred Burt Reynolds. Wiki says the film, Stroker Ace (1983), was “a commercial and critical bomb.” To do the film Reynolds turned down the drunken-old-astronaut part Jack Nicholson took in Terms of Endearment, the role that made Nicholson a star again.
… There was a 1953 version of The Jazz Singer!
One of the aliens (“Talosians”) in the episode’s first-pilot footage also played Cousin Itt in The Addams Family. … Here’s a guy who played a spare Starfleet officer. I think his face looks like it was drawn in the manner of Dan Clowes’s Lloyd Llewellyn, retro-’50s phase.
