It's no secret to anyone familiar with older television shows that censorship was commonplace on most programs. At the time, actors couldn't share the same bed or even say "pregnant" without facing scrutiny. Moreover, explicit language, sex, violence and other perceived vulgarities of the time weren't the only content deemed in need of removal before reaching an audience, and some of the scenes in Star Trek: The Original Series were no exception.
During the Star Trek episode titled “The Galileo Seven,” Captain Kirk sends a small skeleton crew to board the shuttlecraft Galileo on a scientific mission to investigate a nearby quasar. While investigating the phenomena from the inside, the Galileo is hit with extreme turbulence and subsequently flies off course. Upon losing the ability to utilize its sensors and communicate with the Enterprise, the lost crew of the Galileo makes an emergency landing on the desolate planet Taurus II. There, they encounter an alien so terrifying and grotesque that NBC ordered all close-ups of its face to be censored.
As two scouts research the surrounding area of the Galileo's crash site, Spock and the rest of the crew come to grips with their terrible situation. Spock asserts that the stranded team has to leave 500 pounds behind, the weight of three people, for the shuttlecraft to be light enough to make the trip back into space. Their predicament understandably distresses Spock's shipmates, but reaching escape velocity isn’t the only problem the Galileo crew has to worry about on the strange planet.
A hostile humanoid creature resembling an overgrown “cave man” wielding a gigantic spear finds and attacks one of the scouts outside the shuttlecraft, brutally killing him. These monster Taureans terrorize the crew throughout the episode, but surprisingly, they do not appear in any close-ups. The faces of the ape-like aliens were so grotesque that the network felt the need to obscure them from plain view. Perhaps their redaction was a good thing, though, because the makeup applied to the barbarous giants reportedly left more to be desired.
Thus, the close-up shots were filmed but ended up on the cutting room floor. The deleted shots of the Taureans did not air on NBC, nor did they meet the network’s quality guidelines. The censors also found the unfortunate scout’s death by a spear to be too violent. Consequently, editors hid the mortal wound through the scout's back from view. Additionally, according to the book These Are the Voyages: TOS Season One by Marc Cushman and Susan Osborn, an optical effect of mist was added during the post-production phase of the episode to further conceal the impaled scout’s mutilation at the hands of the Taureans.
It seems that NBC Broadcast Standards found more than a few elements of “The Galileo Seven” to be alarming and distasteful. Indeed, the blood-stained weapon and the scout's skewering are a gruesome sight to behold. However, the hokey costume consisting of faux fur and a rubber mask would most likely cause modern audiences to chuckle, not cower in fear from inside the safety of their homes. In truth, by today’s standards, the appearance of the Taureans could be considered silly and old-fashioned. Nevertheless, the monster’s angry face and domineering stature, combined with the prop blood and the scout the alien murdered, was enough to send shivers down the spines of the censors at NBC. As a result, the episode was edited to be more palatable for Star Trek viewers, shielding the show's spectators from the hair-raising horrors that lurk on the planet Taurus II.
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