After confusing “lunch” with “launch”, two launch pad employees are blasted into deep space. They frantically try to return to Earth, but are faced with the reality that they’re really just qualified to load food on a spaceship, not fly it.
Having already explored one planet where they found a lonely life form known as Honk, which communicates entirely by honking through a horn-like protrusion on its head, they land on a planet ruled by a mind-controlling computer named G.A.L., only to find that Junior’s thoughts somehow become reality here. That’s the only way they can escape G.A.L. and its sinister cybernetic henchmen.
written by Dick Robbins & Duane Poole
directed by Wes Kenney
music by Michael Lloyd / arranged by Reg Powell
Cast: Bob Denver (Junior), Chuck McCann (Barney), Patty Maloney (Honk), Leo Gordon (Head Dronek), Joan Gerber (voice of G.A.L.)
Notes: The series art director was Herman Zimmerman, who would go on to create the distinctive sets Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Star Trek V, Star Trek VI, Star Trek Generations, and so on. Representing Star Trek’s past was the show’s makeup chief, Fred Phillips, who had created and applied Mr. Spock’s Vulcan ears for the entire run of Star Trek in
the 1960s. The name of the all-controlling computer, “G.A.L. 36-24-36”, is both a play on 2001: a space odyssey‘s HAL 9000, and a set of measurements that was likely intended to sail directly over the heads of the show’s young audience. (An almost identical gag was used a few years later as an episode title on Quark.)
LogBook entry by Earl Green