Welcome to the greatest commercial success story in the Star Trek movie series … until this next summer, that is.  But I digress.  As you may remember, I am working my way through the ten Star Trek movies in preparation for the May release of the new Trek film.  Of course, I love this film.  I really liked that they completely changed the tone from the previous three and had some fun – like they used to in the episodes!  I’ll admit, the way they threw out the rules of time travel, continuity, etc., might have irked me if I was a nit picker type, but I’ll forgive a lot when it’s good!  Here are some interesting bits of trivia …

• Eddie Murphy is a big Star Trek fan and was originally supposed to be in this movie.  He was going to be the marine biologist (later turned into a woman and rewritten as a love interest for Kirk), kind of like Richard Pryor in Superman III.  The cast was less than enthusiastic about it – it would have become all about him.  Another movie deal came up, though, so Murphy backed out.  Thank goodness.
• Leonard Nimoy wrote and directed this film; his second directorial effort in the Trek series, first turn at writing.  This pretty much cemented the opinion that he knows how to make a Star Trek film.
• There’s a hilarious scene where Uhura and Chekov were on the streets of 1987 San Fransisco asking for directions to the Naval base.  As scripted wasn’t working, so they decided to just improvise it and ask actual pedestrians who had no idea what was going on.  So those responses?  People not knowing where it was, how to get there, spitting out ridiculous statements?  All real stuff.