Production
Episode writer Norman Spinrad based the script on a novelette "The Planet Eater" that had been rejected by a number of publishers. He revived the idea when he had a chance to pitch it to Executive Producer Gene Roddenberry. Spinrad had written the script with actor Robert Ryan in mind to play Commodore Decker, but Ryan was unavailable owing to prior commitments.
According to one source the model for the USS Constellation was an off-the-shelf model while other sources claim that the smallest and least detailed Enterprise professional model was altered for the episode. It has also been stated that the Constellation's somewhat incongruous hull ID number of 1017 (all other ships of this class having been numbered 17xx) came from simply switching the digits of an Enterprise model's 1701 hull numbers.
The episode was written as a "bottle" show i.e., one that could use existing ship sets to save time and money. According to Spinrad the episode was so well received by Roddenberry that he commissioned him to write another for comedian Milton Berle who planned to do a dramatic turn on the show entitled "He Who Walks Among Us".
Read more about this topic: The Doomsday Machine (Star Trek: The Original Series)
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“It is part of the educator’s responsibility to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present, and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and, secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas. The new facts and new ideas thus obtained become the ground for further experiences in which new problems are presented.”
—John Dewey (1859–1952)
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—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)