Fellas, I'm having a grand time watch TOS, it'll be a sad day when I run out of episodes..
If you guys recall; I took a long hiatus after watching Space Seed, about a year. A few month back I picked up on Barto's list and been posting about it, then I lost my job and oddly that got me posting less but I'm still watching, so yesterday I scrolled all the way up the Netflix season 1 list and got interested in watching The Cage, which is not on the list, without any background knowledge about the production history for the episode. Throughout the episode I had a strong deja vu feeling about everything even though I've never seen this episode according to Netflix and Barto's list, so I read up on it and found out why, The Menagerie, which I proceeded to rewatch both parts of it after The Cage last night.
So I just came here to say that this, for my money, was the most clever possible thing the show runners could have come up with to reuse the unaired pilot and incorporate it into the show, absolutely brilliant, I think modern tv producers would have made a bull shit episode where Talos IV gets mentioned somehow as a gateway for Spock to tell the story of The Cage and send us on a flashback for the rest of it, but what they've done here was very original and engaging with minimal plot holes.
Also fine job on picking the actor playing severely injured Christopher Pike in The Menagerie, it worked perfectly to have him so banged up because the original actor was not available but also in the context of the plot, I thought the make-up was gruesome and decent enough for the sixties. Pike's character arc worked beautifully for something that was not intended to be that way.
Jeffrey Hunter, Pike in The Cage, died a couple of years after The Menagerie was broadcasted at age 42, pretty tragic, great actor, anybody thinks he would have made a better lead throughout the show had The Cage been approved as the pilot? I'm 50/50 on that, he's a better actor than Shatner IMO.