Interviews with Walter Koenig

Star Trek: The Original Series

After the Original Series....

AFTER THE SERIES

When Star Trek reached its untimely end after the third season, Koenig, like many of his co-stars, found that being a household name didn't necessarily translate into steady employment away from the U.S.S. Enterprise.

"We were achieving a lot of celebrity in the public's eye, but I don't think we were featured sufficiently to achieve any recognition outside the industry. In addition to this, I was playing a very specific character, a Russian person with a dialect, and I don't think anybody had the foresight or courage to cast me away from that character I had established. When the show was cancelled, I spent the next couple of years without the phone ringing at all."

So instead, Koenig decided to turn his attention to writing. "After the show was cancelled," he explains, "within four or five months of coming to the realisation that I was not going to be flooded with job offers, I needed something to give my life some structure. I finally got started on a novel which I wrote over the course of six months. It gave my life purpose and direction and did enormous things for my spirit and morale."

"I also wrote my first screenplay," Koenig continues, "which received a lot of affirmation and was ultimately optioned and re-optioned by NBC for a movie of the week which never got made. It also came to the attention of Gene Roddenberry, who hired me to write one of the episodes of the animated Star Trek" series." (Navarro, 1997)

THE ANIMATED SERIES

Although Koenig wasn't asked to join the voice cast of the 1972 animated series, Roddenberry commissioned him to write the episode The Infinite Vulcan. As Walter recalls, it was a "hideous experience. My part of the story was the cloning of Spock, and the idea that you could have this super race of people throughout the galaxy maintaining peace. Initially, it's a terrific thing, because you're cloning someone of great virtue, a prototypically heroic figure, but then it gets out of hand and is used for ill purposes."

"Gene thought since this was animation, we should take advantage of it, and wanted me bring in these talking vegetables. I wrote those characters, and there was actually a little tongue-in-cheek description of them, referring to them as pomegranates or asparagus or whatever, but Gene kept asking me for rewrites, and I must have done 11 or 12 of them,"; Koenig recalls. "When somebody asks you to do 12 rewrites, you begin to think that you can't write at all, but of course I found out later that Gene was always asking people to do rewrites and adding his ideas to the stories. It was kind of neat to ultimately see it and knowing that, rewrites notwithstanding, it was still my words and my story. I think it was a reasonably successful episode." (Navarro, 1997)

STAR TREK: PHASE II

As for the short-lived Star Trek: Phase II mooted in the late Seventies, Koenig doesn't have much to relate. "I had heard stories about another series, and when Leonard was making himself unavailable, they were going to bring in this other actor, David Gatereaux. The one instance I remember is going in for a costume fitting and our old costumes, the 'pyjamas'. Mine was pretty much still a fit and I was very pleased about that, and they said they would call me in for a final fitting and let me know that afternoon when it was.

When I got home, there was a message from the studio wardrobe saying that the final fitting had been cancelled; that's how quickly it all changed. We were doing this series and getting fitted for it, and within a couple of hours, we weren't." (Navarro, 1997)