Star Trek’s Most Infamous Scene Began With A Beloved Actor Stripping Down

By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated 23 seconds ago

For a franchise that is known for its progressive messages, Star Trek has always been known for something else: sex appeal. The first pilot episode featured a scantily-clad Orion slave girl; later spinoffs would shamelessly put attractive female characters in skimpy clothing, from the skant of Deanna Troi to the skintight catsuit of Seven of Nine. Eventually, Enterprise one-upped everything that came before with a sexy Vulcan in a skintight suit and a plot contrivance where characters would regularly strip down to their skivvies and massage each other with gel.

While early Trek was insanely popular with women, the franchise has historically been targeted at men. That’s why the above examples predominantly feature sexy ladies wearing as little as possible. However, The Original Series threw the ladies some serious eye candy in “The Naked Time,” an episode in which George Takei’s Sulu ditches his shirt and shows off a seriously buff bod. What most fans don’t realize is how this scene started: with a director demanding that Takei take off his clothes to make sure he’d look good stripping down onscreen!

Back On The Fence

“The Naked Time” is one of those Star Trek episodes that really shouldn’t work. The plot involves the Enterprise crew getting infected with a weird space virus that makes everyone act drunk. While this is meant to be a dangerous situation (left unchecked, it will get the whole crew killed), the episode is filled with silly situations that are hard to take seriously, including a wonderfully surreal, wonderfully drunk Irish ballad. 

Arguably, the most memorable moment from the episode involves George Takei’s Sulu. He inexplicably takes off his shirt and runs around with a sword like a lost member of the Three Musketeers. Because Takei was in such great shape, fans have spent decades fixated on his topless misadventures. Those misadventures were later referenced in Star Trek (2009), which confirmed that even the Kelvinverse Sulu is a master of fencing.

Interestingly, Takei wasn’t originally scripted to run around the Enterprise half-naked. Rather, Sulu was simply written as someone roaming the ship with a sword, fully clothed. Writer John D.T. Black was divided on whether it should be a samurai sword (signaling Sulu’s Japanese heritage) or a fencing blade. He left the decision to Takei, and the actor chose the fencing blade as a way of signifying that in the far future, nobody’s preferences would be restricted by their ethnicity. Takei ended up really taking to the blade: he practiced extensively with it on set, which resulted in a nearly hypnotic performance onscreen.

Oh, My!

So, why did he end up stripping down? This was apparently a command decision on the part of director Marc Daniels. He reasoned (correctly, as it turned out) that Sulu’s big fencing scene would have more impact if the character were shirtless, but he didn’t know if the actor had the physique to pull it off. 

Accordingly, he visited Takei’s trailer and asked the man to take off his shirt. Daniels liked what he saw and promptly declared that the fencing scene would be shirtless. As for Takei, he was a little nervous about the scene, so he did what most of us would do in his place: he spent the three days before shooting performing as many pushups as humanly possible.

Putting Star Trek On The Map

Fortunately, all that hard work paid off, and Takei looked absolutely stunning as he swashbuckled his way across the screen. This became the most iconic moment of a Star Trek episode that was nominated for a Hugo and named by Gene Roddenberry as one of his personal favorites. Later, “The Naked Time” was homaged in the Next Generation episode “The Naked Now,” where Captain Picard’s crew deals with the same space virus (oh, and Data got lucky).

This Original Series episode even put the show on the map, with Leonard Nimoy estimating that his fan mail went from a few dozen letters per week to a few thousand after it aired. As an episode that has entertained audiences for 60 years, “The Naked Time” helped define decades of Star Trek history. However, that might have never happened if a director hadn’t walked into George Takei’s trailer and asked him to strip down!