Welcome to This Week in Genre History, where Tim Grierson and Will Leitch, the hosts of the
Grierson & Leitch podcast, take turns looking back at the world’s greatest, craziest, most infamous genre movies on the week that they were first released.
David Howard was sitting in an IMAX theater waiting for his movie to start when he saw a trailer for an outer space project that was narrated by a voice he knew but couldn’t place. Soon, he figured out who it was: Spock. “The voiceover for this trailer was Leonard Nimoy… Then it just struck me, ‘Aw, that poor guy,’” the screenwriter later recalled. Howard started imagining what it might be like if Nimoy were reduced to these kinds of paycheck gigs that played off his long association with that iconic Vulcan. “The idea of being trapped in that world struck me as something potentially very funny,” Howard said. “How do you walk away from that and decide, ‘No, I m not going to do that anymore?’” And then another id