old school star trek on you tube
 

3 old episodes ''mirror, mirror'' - ''managerie'' - ''the city on the edge of forever'' for all the trekkies to watch. i just watched all three.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNNQM...ature=featured

"City" was one of my fave original series shows. Harlan Ellison wrote it, IIRC, & while S/T's writers were usually pretty good, Harlan was just on a different level. Joan Collins was an uberbabe back when she was young, too...

He did, indeed. Handed over a script which, while good, was totally unfilmable by poor old Star Trek's standards so Roddenberry called Mr. Ellison to re-write the script with some changes to reflect the piss-poor budget ST had in the '60s. Mr. Ellison wasn't in and no one could find him so Roddenberry had the script rewritten by a staff writer (He had to; the show was always just barely ahead of itself as far as scripts went). When Harlan returned, he heard that his screenplay had been changed. He went ballistic! Ran off to a hardware store, bought a rope and tied a real (13 loop) hangman's noose in it and tossed it over a convenient anchor. He then yelled over a scene shoot, "TELL ME THAT NO ONE CHANGED MY WORDS!!!"
Took Roddenberry 2 hours to settle Harlan down. Regardless of who actually "wrote" the screenplay as filmed, Harlan got full Writer's Guild pay and sole screen credits for "written by" and his original unfilmed screenplay won the Writer's Guild of America award for that year.
I'd like to read his original version...

Oh, and by the way, its not referred to as "old school" Star Trek. It it usually referred to as Star Trek TOS (The Original Series):D

Well, I've read that Harlan was about as famous for being a difficult PITA as he was for being a writer...And his stories don't particularly lend themselves to be made into TV shows easily. There was a quote about him in "The Outer Limits" book- "What can you do w/a Genius ? You have to wait for him to "gene"..."

Oh yeah! Harlan Ellison has always had a reputation for being a 24 carat a$$hole.

Harlan's original screenplay has the Star Trek crew doing recreational drugs, which was against both the TV standards of the day, and inconceivable under Roddenberry's vision of his world; and there were scenes of Earth under an alternate future, with essentially a Nazi society. Also Spock's reconstruction of a Framestore for the Tricorder involved a contemporary scientist who was enthralled by this glimpse of a bight future. Some of that was instead added to Collin's character. The story would have been two hours long and require a film's budget. The Nazi idea WAS used in another episode but was changed enough to avoid Guild fines. Likewise the "enthralled by the future" concept was used in a story where the Enterprise goes back to 1960's Earth. For "Outer Limits" Ellison did "The Glass Hand" which was filmed quite close to his conception.

Interesting. I remember that being a great episode. I wonder if the original script would lend itself to a movie.

Nice. Thanks for sharing the links.