Animated Views

Walter Koenig played Chekov on Star Trek for over 20 years. When he died at 90, William Shatner's goodbye began with: we didn't know each other well. In the video below, Koenig reveals what it was really like to work next to Captain Kirk. Koenig joined the original series in 1967 as the young Russian navigator. He stayed through all six movies. Shatner was the star and, as Koenig put it, the money player. Every shot was set up so that Kirk was in the foreground. Behind the scenes, the money was just as uneven. George Takei says Shatner's contract guaranteed that if anyone was ever paid more than him, his pay would rise to match. When the rest of the cast asked for the same deal, they were turned down. None of them ever got a cent from the decades of reruns. And when Star Trek became a cartoon in 1973, Koenig was the one cut from the cast because the budget couldn't fit him. Koenig says Shatner never tried to be friends with the supporting cast. Only later did he learn how angry Takei really was, and he says Shatner insisted a scene where Sulu is promoted to captain be cut from the movie. This week, Koenig died, and Patrick Stewart, the captain who came after Kirk, died three days later. Shatner and Takei are now the last two left from the original crew. Is Shatner's goodbye honest, or should you say more about someone you spent 20 years working with?