A John Wayne War Movie Stopped A Star Trek Actor From Appearing In A Legendary Episode

John Wayne's movie star stature was on the wane in the late 1960s. He turned 60 in 1967 and looked 70, which was due in part to a protracted cancer battle that cost him a lung and a couple of ribs. Though his formidable screen presence was undiminished, he looked way too long in the tooth to be getting in punch-ups or gunfights. Factor in his awful conservative politics and the casually racist views he expressed in his infamous 1971 Playboy interview, and he came off as a dinosaur.

The old-timers in the Hollywood establishment still loved him, however, which allowed Wayne to push through vanity projects that ranged from quaint to embarrassing to "The Green Berets." In terms of box office, the 1968 Vietnam War film, directed by Wayne and Ray Kellogg, paid off for Warner Bros. by grossing $32 million against a $7 million budget. The critics, on the other hand, torched it. Roger Ebert gave "The Green Berets" a zero-out-of-four-star pan, while The New York Times' Renata Adler condemned it as "a film so unspeakable, so stupid, so rotten and false in every detail that it passes through being fun, through being funny, through being camp, through everything ..." before accusing it of doing an injustice to U.S. soldiers serving in Vietnam. Rough news for Wayne, who enlisted the assistance of the U.S. military in an effort to justify the wayward war effort.

"The Green Berets" was also a minor career atrocity for George Takei, who took a supporting role in the film while on hiatus from "Star Trek." When the movie's shoot ran over schedule due to uncooperative weather, Takei's Hikaru Sulu had to be written out of two episodes, including the classic "The Trouble with Tribbles."

When I was a kid, every time I watched "The Trouble with Tribbles," I noted the absence of Sulu. Did he have something better to do? Was he in sick bay?

I later learned Sulu had unfortunately beamed down to the Vietnam War meat-grinder to fight an utterly pointless war. Takei's character in "The Green Berets," Captain Nghiem, was actually a major departure from Sulu. He's a South Vietnamese soldier who assists Wayne's Colonel Mike Kirby by torturing information out of North Vietnamese captives. In most war movies, Nghiem would be a villain. In Wayne's film, he's a new kind of hero for a new, brutal kind of war.

Per Takei, Wayne directed "The Green Berets" with a relaxed hand. He often tossed out the script and encouraged his cast to improvise. He also betrayed an awareness, if not a fondness, for "Star Trek" by referring to Takei as "Sulu" early in the shoot (as Wayne got to know his co-star, he deigned to call him by his real name). But Takei hated being stuck on the Georgia set of "The Green Berets" as a pair of "Star Trek" episodes were shot without his involvement. As he told Cinefantastique in 1968:

"It was heartbreaking. To have the scripts and see what they're like, and to be off there in Georgia sitting in your motel room, watching the rain coming down. Sulu had wonderful things to do in 'The Gamesters of Triskelion' and 'The Trouble with Tribbles.'"

That stinks, but don't weep too hard for Takei. "Star Trek" season 2 also gave us all-timer "Mirror, Mirror," which allowed the actor to cut loose and play an evil Sulu. That's much more of a performance challenge than handling cute and furry tribbles.