Script For William Shatner's Excised Star Trek Cameo Revealed

EDIT: When I originally ran this an hour ago, I completely forgot that we'd basically presented this before, a point which the first comments were quick to point out. (It's not the end of the world, guys, really.) But there is new content here — this is the first time we've been able to link to the actual scripted scene, rather than just a description. If that's bait enough for you, then by all means carry on. Original article follows.

Now that Star Trek is out on DVD you can review the surprisingly successful J.J. Abrams film in all its glory.What you won't see in any extra material on the disc, however, is the scene scripted early on that would have brought William Shatner into the film as the original incarnation of Captain Kirk. Personally, I didn't miss him, but it's easy to say that in hindsight. Check out what might have been after the break.

TrekWeb has the script fragment in detail, which appears to be from one of the first script drafts. I'll recap it here, and you can visit the site to read the whole thing. If you haven't seen the new film yet, I suppose this could count as containing spoilers.

The cameo would have taken place at the end of the film, when Zachary Quinto's new Spock has his last interaction with Leonard Nimoy's Spock Prime. During their conversation, Prime gives a pendant to his younger self. This item was a gift from the Kirk of Prime's timeline, and it has a brief hologram message from him. The first half of the message is a birthday greeting to Spock and then a congratulations for Spock's ambassadorship (pinning down just which era Kirk this should be) and then it gets a little bit maudlin.

All things considered, this might have been a reasonable way to shoehorn Shatner into the film. The hologram device would allow for a certain degree of CGI de-aging to be applied, and it's a hokey but not altogether unprecedented bridge between the generations. There are already enough glaringly overt nods to classic ideas and character tics throughout the new film, and one more wouldn't have killed it. If the last of classic Kirk's dialogue had been toned down a bit so it wasn't quite so sentimental, I'd have been willing to buy it.

[via AICN]