Koenig: Animated Series Disappointment
2 min readFor Walter Koenig, writing The Infinite Vulcan was an often frustrating process.
Although Koenig wasn’t included in the voice work for Star Trek: The Animated Series, he was able to contribute to the series although contributing meant having to deal with Gene Roddenberry‘s many changes to his script.
The first thing about The Animated Series that made Koenig unhappy was not being included with the rest of the cast. “I felt really abused by not being involved,” he said. “I did applaud Leonard Nimoy‘s posture during this whole thing, not in terms of me, but in terms of George and Nichelle, because he took a stand, saying that he would not perform in the animated show unless they were included, since they were part of the original show and helped make it a success. It made sense, in terms of his not marshalling his forces on my behalf, because I wasn’t part of the original show. But all the same I felt I was kind of screwed around because I asked if I could come in and read for the part of Keniclius and they said ‘Yeah,’ and it was really lip service. I came in and I read, and they had no intention of hiring. So that upset me.”
Roddenberry’s assistant Susan Sackett helped Koenig, passing along his writing to Roddenberry who was impressed enough by what he saw to ask Koenig to write an episode for the series. “I had been working on a novel, or it might have been a screenplay,” Koenig said. “I don’t really remember. This was the days of typewriters, and no spell check. I asked Susan Sackett to type it up for me and said I would pay for it. She read it and told Gene about it, and told him that I could write quality material. He read it and then asked me if I’d be interested in doing an animated episode of Star Trek.”
Koenig got the idea for the episode he wrote, The Infinite Vulcan, from newspapers. “Cloning was something that was being speculated about a great deal in that period,” he said.
Working with Roddenberry proved to be the second frustration for Koenig as far as the animated series was concerned. “Well, the whole thing was a little unpleasant to me,” he said. “First of all, I did about ten drafts. I never thought I could get through ten drafts. It just was an unbearable process. Gene kept saying, ‘Let’s use talking vegetables. This is animation. Let’s do this. Let’s do that.’ So I had to keep making adjustments to accommodate the medium in which we were working. So that wasn’t very pleasant.”
Koenig’s current work includes the Raver comic book and the second vampire comic Things to Come. Koenig can be seen on television in the forthcoming episode of Shatner’s Raw Nerve, due to air March 14.
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