Examining the non-Star Trek roles of George Takei

George Takei has become something of a Facebook deity in recent years, using the social media platform to share jokes on a daily basis and occasionally take a stand with his political beliefs. Of course, he will always be best known as Mr. Sulu, the helmsman of the USS Enterprise on Star Trek. But he has also had an extensive film career portraying a variety of different characters over the last fifty years.

Seeing as Mr Takei brightens up our newsfeed every day, it’s surely time we gave the man some credit for his wider filmography. Join us as we have a trawl through his best work…

Live action

After some TV appearances, voiceover redubbings and Broadway stints, Mr. Takei’s first foray into Hollywood came by cameoing as a bandaged soldier in Frank Sinatra vehicle Never So Few in 1959. Around the same time, he popped up for similarly small supporting roles alongside a number of big stars – with Richard Burton in Ice Palace, Jeffrey Hunter (who played the Enterprise’s Captain Pike in the first Star Trek pilot) in Hell To Eternity, Alec Guinness in Majority Of One, James Caan in Red Line 7000, and Cary Grant in Walk, Don’t Run (the highest-rated – according to review aggregators – non-Star Trekfilm to feature Takei, albeit fleetingly).

Although he wasn’t given a chance to take center stage at this stage of his career, that remains an undeniably impressive body of talent to have worked with. TV appearances on The Twilight Zone and Mission: Impossible came next, as did a humorus death scene in Jerry Lewis comedy The Big Mouth, and another comedy appearance in Which Way To The Front?, all before Star Trek came along in 1965.

Here’s that The Big Mouth death scene…

Takei’s early roles were quite low profile. Clearly keen to carve out a name for himself, though, it’s interesting to consider where he might have ended up if it wasn’t for Star Trek. Had he kept persevering with the big screen bit parts, perhaps he could have eventually cracked the star system. Considering how shut-off the star system was to non-white actors, though, this route would have been lengthy and difficult.

His film career kept rolling throughout the Star Trek years though, with his turn alongside John Wayne as the South Vietnamese Captain Nim in 1968’s The Green Beretsmeaning that Mr. Sulu could only appear in half the episodes of Star Trek’s second season, due to Takei’s time away. More than most of his early roles, The Green Berets cast Takei a little closer to the action and allows him plenty of dialogue about wanting to ‘kill all the stinking Viet Cong.’ Things were on the up, then, it would seem.

In the 1970s, Takei’s run at a political career, coupled with his involvement in the initiation of the Los Angeles Subway System, and his co-writing of the novel Mirror Friend, Mirror Foe, all combined to distract from his film career.

Outside of Star Trek, TV was Takei’s home at this time, as he appeared in guest roles in the likes of Miami Vice, MacGyver, Beyond Westworld, Murder She Wrote, and Jonny Quest. It would take until 1989 and 1990 for Takei to return to non-Star Trek cinema. These years saw Takei with an impressive-seeming double bill of Return From The River Kwai and Australian POW drama Prisoners Of The Sun (also known as Blood Oath). This sombre trailer, and the evidence it holds that Takei was the second-biggest name on the bill, suggests that Takei’s film career was perhaps about to take a leap forward…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yffcx-GgSh8

By this point, Takei had some appearances in impressive films under his belt, yet remained best known for Star Trek. Sadly, despite showing promise, Prisoners Of The Sun wasn’t exactly a hit, and did little to help Takei’s fledgling extracurricular film career.

However, the 1990s offered more. He began taking larger roles in smaller budget films such as Vietnam veteran flick Live By The Fist (in which he played a wise former inmate of the lead character played by kickboxing champion Jerry Trimble). Here’s the trailer…

For a film called Live By The Fist, there’s certainly a lot of kicking isn’t there? At least, at this stage, Takei seemed to be having a bit more fun, having spent many years supplementing his Star Trek career with smaller wartime supporting roles. One early example of this can be found in Oblivion, a cult sci-fi film from 1994 where George Takei embraced the possibility of self-referential comedy as a means to making more of a name for himself.

Oblivion was, and still is, a silly cowboys versus aliens comedy, but Takei at least makes an impact. He steals one of the biggest laughs as an alcoholic doctor that mutters ‘Jim… beam me up’ while drinking Jim Beam whisky. It was a flash of fun, self-aware comedy, which must have given Mr. Takei some ideas. He returned in 1996 for the sequel Backlash: Oblivion 2.

It’s the 2000s though where Mr Takei’s non-Star Trek work really began to take flight. Perhaps inspired by the fun everyone seemed to have on Oblivion, George Takei finally started embracing the fun of being an iconic sci-fi star by accepting fun-poking cameos left and right. Naturally, this meant that his extra-curricular work veered into television more than film.

Scrubs was the first one to catch the attention of this writer, although each of you may have a different favorite Takei cameo. In the hospital comedy, not-Mr-Sulu turned up in the unlikely location of a wedding ceremony…

Around this time, Takei also appeared as himself in Malcolm In The Middle, Will & Grace, Drawn Together, According To Jim, and Party Down. More recently, he brought his unique brand of cameo comedy to The Big Bang Theory, Archer, and Community (as a voicemail message). Arguably, this embracing of fun and whimsical appearances played a vital part in giving Takei a further resurgence of fame, combined with his tremendous use of social media, of course.

It was during this comedy onslaught that Takei landed the recurring role of Kaito Nakamura in Heroes, which is the closest he’s really got to a part which rivals the years he has spent as Mr Sulu. He played Kaito, the stern father of protagonist Hiro, over 12 episodes.

Takei took Kaito’s relationship with Hiro on a journey from disappointment to respect, and it was a pleasure to see him given another opportunity to develop a character over an extended period. A deleted scene showed us Kaito’s superpower, but it’s a shame he never got to use it in the show…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSLrQ_6zi3Y

At the moment, there’s a lot of short films and TV projects on his slate, but Takei’s increased fame in recent years could well mean that his perfect film role outside of Mr. Sulu could still be found in the future. We live in hope.

Voice performances

So, there we have the story of how George Takei took the journey from supporting character in war films, to a self-referential comedy star, to another enjoyable sci-fi performance to rival his role in Star Trek. However, it would be remiss of us not to mention the stellar voice work that Takei has completed throughout his career.

Takei’s best known voice role, outside of vocal appearances as Mr. Sulu of course, would be the First Ancestor in Mulan. It’s a powerful performance, in which Takei delivers authority and intimidation far more than you would usually expect. Although the sequel (which Takei returned for) gets a bad rap, Takei’s performance in the first one is highly enjoyable.

As well as Mulan, and appearances in modern classic cartoons like Hey Arnold and Scooby-Doo, Takei has also lent his voice to a long list of geek-friendly animated projects. Perhaps best of all was his turn in the generally-loved Batman Beyond from 1999, where he plays Mr. Fixx. If you skip forward to 1:36 in this clip from the show, you will get an idea of the menace he brought to this villainous character with a singular line of dialogue in this enigmatic voice performance…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEmn9MNTws4

Takei has also played Doctor Strange’s assistant Wong in the 1990s Spider-Man series, a warden in Avatar: The Last Airbender, Yoketron in the noughties Transformers series, a monk in Ultimate Spider-Man and even made the jump from Trek to Wars by playing Lok Durd in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

And then there are his online videos. Such as this one, of George Takei brokering ‘star peace’ after a bizarre argument between William Shatner and Carrie Fisher…

Takei might not have had his fair share of juice characters on the big screen, but his animated voice work certainly makes up for it a little. As if we needed more convincing, Takei recently lent his enigmatic vocal chords to short film The Missing Scarf by Eoin Duffy, which went on to be shortlisted for the 2014 Academy Awards and win a host of other prizes.

You can watch the whole thing here…

As a subject matter

And finally, we would just like to mention one of our favourite non-Star Trek George Takei projects, even if it is a bit of a cheat. On DVD and American Netflix now, To Be Takei is the documentary following the recent exploits of the man himself.

Check out the trailer here…

Mr Takei, we salute you…