final credits - james doohan
november 16, 2005 update | february 21, 2006 update
"He's dead, Jim."
The Star Trek universe glows a little dimmer with the loss of another one its stars. James Doohan, who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott, chief engineer on the U.S.S. Enterprise featured in the late 1960s TV series "Star Trek," joins DeForest Kelley (June 11, 1999) and series creator Gene Roddenberry (October 24, 1991) on another plane of existence. Doohan died July 20, 2005 at the age of 85 from pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease.
Conceived in Belfast, Doohan was born in Vancouver, British Columbia but grew up Sarnia, Ontario. He was eager to leave home to escape his abusive father and joined the Royal Canadian Artillery, eventually landing on Juno Beach at Normandy on D-Day. Doohan was shot at least six times that day, taking four hits in his leg, several which took off his middle right finger, and one that would have entered his chest but struck his sterling silver cigarette case instead. He managed to hide the missing finger on-screen (close-ups involved the use of a 'stunt hand'), and he later described his sacrifice as "giving Hitler the finger." The spectacle of the June 6, 1944 landing was immortalized in the 1998 Steven Spielberg film "Saving Private Ryan," which Doohan praised for not sanitizing the gore of the actual event.
Returning to Canada, Doohan enrolled in a drama class in Toronto on a whim. His talent won him a two-year scholarship at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse, where fellow students included Leslie Nielsen, Jackie Gleason, Tony Randall and Richard Boone.
Doohan soon shuttled between New York and Canada, working on, by his own count, 4000 radio programs, 400 live and taped television shows and several films. His first trip into space was on a Canadian vessel, Spaceship XSW1, on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation series "Space Command," first broadcast in 1953. The show was about a crew of explorers searching out alien races for Earth's Space Command.
Doohan starred in a 1956 instalment of CBC Television's General Motors Theatre called "Flight Into Danger," inspired by Canadian writer Arthur Hailey's experience onboard an airliner. Hailey turned the teleplay into the novel Airport, and which later became the movie that inspired the disaster film genre.
Doohan, like numerous Canadian actors, heard the distant but loud call of Hollywood. His feature film debut was in Edmonton, Alberta-born Arthur Hiller's "The Wheeler Dealers," playing a defence attorney. His versatility and talent as a dialectician earned him an audition for the role of an engineer in a new 'space western' that Gene Roddenberry was creating for NBC television (and produced by Desi-Lu, the Lucille Ball/Desi Arnez company). He tried seven different accents and later said, "If this character is going to be an engineer, you'd better make him a Scotsman." Doohan also had the privilege of naming his character, honouring his mother's father -- an Irishman.
"Star Trek" originally ran from 1966 to 1969, and despite being a cult favourite among science fiction fans, it fared poorly in the ratings. NBC cancelled it after three seasons, two years short of the Enterprise's planned five-year mission.
Despite the show's brief run, the series has become seared into pop culture history. Whenever people find themselves in a seemingly inescapable jam, the phrase "Beam me up, Scotty" invariably comes to mind. Doohan himself has heard the line yelled at him across four lanes of freeway traffic at 70 miles an hour, and even Elvis Presley and Groucho Marx could come up with no more clever a salutation when they met Doohan.
And whenever the Enterprise was in peril, Scotty would squeeze himself into the nearest Jeffries tube to work his magic on the warp drive, manipulating the dilithium crystals despite the fact the engines just couldn't take it anymore, performing the task in exactly thirty minutes because he couldn't change the laws of physics. Scotty accomplished all of this while muttering under his breath with a peculiar and ancient Earth accent that managed to survive into the latter half of the twenty-third century, a feat that must fascinate linguists of the engineer's day.
"Star Trek" continued in TV syndication around the world, its following growing larger and more dedicated. The success of the "Star Wars" franchise prompted Paramount Pictures to plan a movie based on the original series. The studio managed bring back the entire TV cast and "Star Trek - The Motion Picture" spawned nine sequels and four TV spinoffs. Doohan served as engineer, later promoted to commander, in seven of the "Star Trek" movies. The last appearance of Scotty was in the 1994 film, "Star Trek: Generations." An animated series, dismissed even by Roddenberry himself, ran in the early 1970s.
In addition to the career apogee that was "Star Trek," Doohan had roles in more than 100 motion pictures and television series, including "The Twilight Zone," "The Outer Limits," "Gunsmoke," "The Fugitve," "Fantasy Island," "Loaded Weapon 1" and "Double Trouble." But the success of his extra-terrestrial career forever typecast him as Montgomery Scott. It was Doohan's dentist who advised him, "Jimmy, you're going to be Scotty long after you're dead. If I were you, I'd go with the flow." Doohan took his advice, but when applying for other movie roles, he was often told, "I'm sorry, but we don't have a part for a Scotsman."
Doohan's ease with his dual persona made him a popular guest at fan conventions and events such as the unveiling of the Canadian-built space shuttle Canadarm. CBC Archives has a clip of the fictional engineer giving his design blessings at a National Research Council facility. Watch for his right hand at the 00:42 second mark.
It was Doohan who devised the Vulcan and Klingon languages, first heard in the initial film of the series. Klingon was later refined by Marc Okrand, but Doohan can be credited with creating the world’s most popular artificial language -- even Shakespeare and parts of the Bible have been translated into Klingon. Doohan also provided the voices of most 'guest villains' for the purist-shunned animated series.
The two most popular phrases long associated with the TV series were never actually heard in the original episodes. Kelley long maintained he never said "He's dead, Jim," and "Beam me up, Scotty" was not uttered until the fourth movie in the series. The phrases have become the "Play it again, Sam" of the TV era.
Of his time aboard the set of the Enterprise, Doohan only had reservations about playing with fellow Canadian Bill Shatner, the porcine Energizer bunny of dubious celebrity status. He accused Shatner of hogging the camera, adding: "I like Captain Kirk, but I sure don't like Bill. He's so insecure that all he can think about is himself. I wanted to thump him on more than one occasion -- he believes the world orbits him."
In August, 2004 Doohan was recognized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was one of his last public appearances. He had been suffering from Parkinson's disease, diabetes and lung fibrosis, which he developed after chemical exposure during the Second World War. He long denied that he had Alzheimer's disease saying, "If I had Alzheimer's, I think I'd remember." Doohan's death came when, for this first time since 1987, no original "Star Trek" programming was set to air.
Doohan was married three times, and his seventh child, Sarah, was born in April, 2000 when he was 80. Doohan will finally make his trip into the cosmos later in 2005 aboard a Houston-based Space Services Inc. rocket used specifically for space memorials. It was a wish Doohan had shared with his family. Doohan will join Gene Roddenberry, whose ashes were launched into space six years after he died in 1991. His remains will be sealed in a capsule that will stay in orbit for hundreds of years and burn up when it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere. Doohan's autobiography Beam Me Up, Scotty: Star Trek’s Scotty in His Own Words was published in 1996.
Recently, the actor who played a character who attempted to frame Scotty for murder in the "Wolf in the Fold" episode of the original series died. John Fiedler passed away June 25, 2005. Fiedler also was the voice of Piglet in the animated Winnie The Pooh series.
For more about "Star Trek," visit the official site or the entry at Wikipedia, which also has an entry for Doohan who has a Bacon number of 1.
november 16, 2005 update
Space Services Inc. announced it has re-scheduled plans to launch the late actor's remains into space aboard its Explorers Flight. The commercial space flight operator will now launch the mission on a SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California early in 2006.
Doohan's cremated remains will be packed into a special tube (left) that is ejected from the rocket when it reaches orbit. Doohan is expected to orbit Earth for about 50 to 200 years before plunging into the planet's atmosphere and burning up. However, "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry's remains, shot into space in 1991, returned to Earth in 2002.
Doohan will be among more than 170 others from 8 countries on board the flight. Included will be remains of an unidentified astronaut, Mareta West, the astrogeologist who determined the site for Apollo 11's landing on the moon, early Star Trek director/writer John Meredyth Lucas and country music singer-songwriter Randy Vanwarmer.
Fans can post tributes to Doohan (which will be digitized and "packed" with him) at the Space Services web site. Space Services will be using a Falcon I launch vehicle, a completely reusable rocket built by SpaceX, a company founded by Elon Musk, best known as the co-founder of PayPal.
february 21, 2006 update
If it was up to Doohan's Star Trek character, he would have been in orbit by now. Space Services Inc. has announced that it will send Doohan off to his final frontier sometime no earlier than May 2006.
News of the revised launch date also revealed the identity of the "mystery" astronaut mentioned in earlier press announcements. Making his third trip into space will be Gordon "Gordo" Cooper, one of the "Original 7" astronauts who first flew in the last of the Mercury capsules, "Faith 7," on a 22-orbit mission May 15-16, 1963.
Cooper later served as command pilot of the 8-day 120-revolution Gemini 5 mission which began on August 21, 1965, becoming the first man to make a second orbital flight. He and pilot Charles Conrad established a new space endurance record of 190 hours and 56 minutes. He served as backup command pilot for Gemini 12 and as backup commander for Apollo X, and retired from the Air Force and NASA in 1970.
Space Services Inc. attributes the delay to due birthing-pangs associated with the Falcon I launch vehicle, a new-technology reusable rocket ... and the weather, problems that wouldn't have fazed Scotty in a Klingon heartbeat.
Editor's note. Public reaction to Doohan's passing has seemed disproportionate to his 'secondary' role in the show. Perhaps the program's audience saw the U.S.S. Enterprise as the true star of the series, and it was Doohan's Scotty that served as its master, defender, nursemaid and emotional centrepoint. It's either that or all us one-time closet geeks are now major players in the media mainstream.