Useless but essential pop culture tidbits and trivia from the worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror that will not help get you out of a speeding ticket.
All Star Trek fans are familiar with Data, the android who longed to be human and who Brent Spinner brought to life memorably in The Next Generation. But did you know that Data was not Gene Roddenberry’s first attempt to bring a living robot to the small screen as a recurring character? In fact, way back in the dark ages (before facebook, texting, and botox injections) the Star Trek creator helmed a TV series pilot titled The Questor Tapes with an early prototype of the character. This 1974 television movie followed one in a long line of super-androids created by a mysterious race known as “The Master” to assist humanity in its development. Robert Foxworth starred as Questor and a pre-M*A*S*H Mike Farrell tagged along as his companion who would help the android understand the strange ways of our race. The Questor Tapes was originally greenlighted to go to series, but various conflicts between Roddenberry and the NBC brass (including scheduling it in the Friday night 10 PM EST “Death Slot” which previously killed Star Trek as well as NBC’s desire to drop Mike Farrell’s character) led to them pulling the plug before it even got started.
If you go back and watch The Questor Tapes, which unfortunately has not received a DVD release yet (though I have an old video tape of it), you can definitely see the genesis of the Data character in Foxworth’s portrayal of Questor. He had many of Data’s super-human powers such as the ability to calculate and analyze at great speeds as well as heightened strength, and he also possesses the desire to understand and be more like the humans he resembles. You can also see where Questor hearkens back to Spock a bit and offers the logical bridge between the Vulcan of the original Trek and the android of TNG. But there is even another link between Questor and Data that probably few Trek fans know about. The infamous “fully functional” line that Data used in response to Tasha Yar’s inquiries in the episode “The Naked Now” (referring to his sexual capacity), originated with Questor. He used it in a similar circumstance and it was equally hilarious when he did it nearly fifteen years early (and it must have slipped past the censors).
Currently, Eugene Roddenberry, Gene’s son, is working on reviving The Questor Tapes as a potential television series. And we can only hope he succeeds because the concept had a ton of potential. In the mean time, we can hope that the original eventually finds its way to DVD like two of Roddenberry’s other 70’s pilots: Genesis II and Planet Earth.
You can read more about Gene Roddenberry’s The Questor Tapes at its Wikipedia entry.
