Gene Roddenberry initially envisaged a very different version of Star Trek Wesley Crusher

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The original casting sheets of “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, sent for the first time among Paramount in 1986, were written before the finalization of the characters in the program. Some of the well-known crew members of the USS Enterprise-D were familiar, but others were radically different from what the public ended up seeing. Captain Jean-Luc Picard, for example, was originally called Julien Picard. Worf had not yet been invented. More dramatically, the security guard Tasha Yar was originally intended to be a Latina character named Macha Hernandez. More and more development and casting coups have led to the various changes.

Also dramatically different: the teenager Wunderkind Wesley Crusher, played by actor Wil Wheaton, was – at some point during development – imagined as a teenager named Leslie Crusher. The full description of the character on the 1986 casting sheet was as follows:

Leslie Crusher: “An attractive Caucasian girl of 15 years (needs little 18 years or almost 18 years to play 15). Her remarkable spirit and her photographic memory does not seem unlikely that she becomes for her, at 15, a unharmed Starfleet. Otherwise, she is a normal teenager.”

Leslie was also supposed to be a close friend and almost the Kid’s sister to the character of Macha Hernandez. Producer Robert Justman designed Leslie, believing that a teenage character was too commonplace.

An overview of Joel Engel’s biography in 1994 “Gene Roddenberry: The Myth and The Man Behind Star Trek” reveals even stranger for some of the characters. For example, the advisor Deanna Troi – the empathetic character finally played by Marina Sirtis – was envisaged once as an intersex character with high libido with four breasts. Those who know the legendary horn of Roddenberry will probably believe this proposal. Moreso, Wesley Crusher was proposed as a miniature character “Yoda-ish”.

What?

The biography uses an out-of-model word for a little person’s actor to describe Wesley, so the description expurgated was: “a yodaish m **** t named Wesley Crusher.” It was a description taken from a very, very old Bible Bible where Roddenberry was still essentially Spitball ideas for his new series. This first Bible did not specify if this Yodaish Wesley was supposed to be the same public of teenagers finally seen, or a brand new adult foreigner who had just had the name “Wesley Crusher”. Was the teenager son of the company’s head doctor also supposed to look like Yoda? And was Dr. Beverly Crusher still a human in this scenario, or was she also a member of the same species of Yodaish?

Finally, cooler heads prevailed and the crushers have both become human characters. Wheaton, already a established star, was interpreted as Wes, while the choreographer and actress Gates McFadden were interpreted as Dr Crusher. As the “next generation” finally revealed, the deceased father of Wesley was also a human. The character of the Yodaish seems to have become a footnote in the history of the production of “Star Trek”.

The series of the series was rewritten in the first months of 1987, and the character was finally perfected. The 1987 Bible said:

“Wesley ‘Wes’ Crusher: A four-foot-fifteen-inch and 15 year old boy. Several centuries before, he could have been one of the young wizards who presented computers in a perplexed world, but here on the spaceship, he begins as a son (unique family) of Beverly Crusher, the chief doctor of the company. Wes inherited the genius of his two parents. This appears in its superior memory and its insight on the mechanisms of computer circuits and Warship Warp engines. Otherwise, he is a normal boy of 15 years. “”

It is strange that “the normal adolescent” is the single through the line which took over the Leslie / Wesley flip.

Wheaton, meanwhile, was very faithful to the franchise, hosting “Star Trek” Talk Shows and Returning for “Star Trek: Prodigy” in 2022.