TREKKING BALL

Happy 50^th Birthday Star Trek!

Yes, that’s right, fifty years ago today my favorite TV show, the original Star Trek, debuted on NBC with “The Man Trap.” This Saturday evening retro network MeTV celebrates the auspicious anniversary by showing “The Man Trap,” after which their horror host Svengoolie presents the Star Trek pilot The Cage—later abridged into the two-part original series episode “The Menagerie”—as his feature selection. Talk about your must-see TV!

Obviously a Star Trek monster is called for this week, and since the hideous salt-sucking shape-shifter (or shape-sucking salt-shifter?) from “The Man Trap” was a MOTW just last year, how about…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this snarling beast…

 

…from “The Cage,” played by Janos Prohaska, who also designed and played The Mugato and The Horta!

MOURNING RAND

In honor of the DVD release this week of the submarine thriller Black Sea, check out my list, on Topless Robot, of Nerdy Submarine Adventures.

RIP to the lovely Grace Lee Whitney, passed on at 85.

Whitney was in movies like Some Like it Hot and Irma La Douce, but will almost certainly be most remembered as Yeoman Janice Rand in the first few episodes of Star Trek. I had the good luck to interview her on my KTAR radio show back in 1998, and I’m proud to say that she gave me the copy of her autobiography, The Longest Trek—much of it focused on her struggle with alcoholism—now on my bookshelf (the foreward, by the way, is by her friend Leonard Nimoy).

Anyway, in her honor…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod to the “M-113 Creature,” a vampire who sucks the salt out of people instead of the blood, and who can shape-shift into other people’s forms… 

 

…in the first-season episode “The Man Trap” (the first Star Trek episode ever aired). The M-113 Creature, disguised as a previously desalinated crewman, stalks Yeoman Rand as she dawdles along with a tray of food, leering at her salt shaker.