The story concerns a starship crew's investigation of a far-off planet which was the site of a shipwreck eighteen years earlier and their encounter with telepathic aliens who seek a human male specimen for their menagerie.
[5] The process of editing the pilot into "The Menagerie" disassembled the original camera negative of "The Cage", and thus, for many years it was considered partly lost.
Enterprise, under the command of Captain Christopher Pike, receives a distress call from the fourth planet in the Talos star group.
Tracking the distress signal to its source, the landing party discovers a camp of elderly male survivors from the Columbia, a scientific vessel that has been missing for eighteen years.
Captivated by her beauty, Pike is caught off guard and falls into a trap set by the native Talosians, a race of humanoids with bulbous heads who live beneath the planet's surface.
It is revealed that both the distress call and the crash survivors (except for Vina) are telepathic illusions created by the Talosians to lure the Enterprise to the planet.
The Talosians use their powers to tempt Pike; first, by playing on his sense of duty by dressing Vina as a Rigellian princess in distress, then appealing to his homesickness by placing her on a lush, green Earth farm.
Wanting to focus on his more productive film career, Hunter declined to return and was replaced with the character of James T. Kirk as portrayed by William Shatner.
You may be certain I hold no grudge or ill feelings and expect to continue to reflect publicly and privately the high regard I learned for you during the production of our pilot.
Although Captain Pike was set to return for a guest appearance in the episode "The Menagerie", Hunter was unable to reprise the role and so a stand-in was used instead.
[citation needed] He hired several Outer Limits alumni, among them Robert Justman and Wah Chang, for the production of Star Trek.
The process used to make pointed ears for David McCallum in "The Sixth Finger" was reused in Star Trek for certain humanoid characters such as Spock.
The "ion storm" seen in "The Mutant" (a projector beam shining through a container holding glitter in liquid suspension) became the transporter effect.
This was done to give the impression that the Talosians had focused their efforts on mental development to the detriment of their physical strength and size, while also making them suitably alien to viewers.
Throne's unaltered voice work as The Keeper only survives as a brief sample that can be heard in the preview trailer for "The Menagerie" (Part II).
[16] It was broadcast as part of a television special hosted by Patrick Stewart called The Star Trek Saga: From One Generation to the Next.
[18] On October 10, 1990 a Collector's Edition of "The Cage" with a runtime of 64 minutes featuring all-color footage, minus the Roddenberry introduction and closing, was released on LaserDisc in the US.
[28] Gene Roddenberry in fact had another personal 16mm copy of "The Cage" which he gave to a friend and advisor in California shortly following production and accompanied by another 16mm reel labelled "Star Trek Out Takes".
[citation needed] In 1996, in a review of the episode in The Times, Elizabeth Cowley said it was "unintentionally hilarious", but Star Trek fans would enjoy watching it.
CBS All Access officially ordered Star Trek: Strange New Worlds to series in May 2020[32] featuring the characters of Captain Pike, Number One, and Spock.
At 55 years between The Cage and the announcement of Strange New Worlds, co-showrunner and executive producer Henry Alonso Myers calls this the longest pilot to series pick up in television history.