Hey, I Know Her!

A week or so ago AMC was having its "King for a Day" festival: All Elvis All Day. I TiVoed a couple of films: Girls! Girls! Girls! and Blue Hawaii. Ends up these films have a lot in common. They are produced by the same guy (Hal B. Wallis), directed by the same guy (Norman Taurog), written by the same guy (Allen Weiss), and both take place in Hawaii. Neither are great films, though Elvis does "get down" during some of the songs in Blue Hawaii and is pretty impressive to watch. But that's not what I'm here to talk to you about. No, I want to talk about the leading actress in Girls! Girls! Girls!, one Laurel Goodwin.

In Girls! Girls! Girls! she's billed as "Introducing Laurel Goodwin" and IMDb verifies that GGG was indeed her first film, of which she only made six. As I watched I was struck by her sweet perkiness and, I have to admit, her wonderful rear. Every time she turned her back to the camera I stood up and took notice (OK, maybe I didn't really stand up and take notice, but I did hit the "slo mo" button on my TiVo). She was the highlight of the film for me, which is saying a lot about a film that also stars Stella Stevens.

Yep, Laurel Goodwin: cute, perky, nice ass and something else... there was something else... she seemed vaguely familiar. The more I watched the more familiar she became. I knew I had seen her somewhere before... but where? Maybe, I thought, it was a western. After all, she had that sweet "rancher's daughter" face and a figure that would have looked great all trussed up in those constricting dresses the women inevitably wore in most westerns. That seemed about right... but it was wrong. I didn't remember Laurel Goodwin from a western, well, unless you remember that Star Trek was pitched to Paramount as Wagon Train in space.

Laurel Goodwin played Yeoman J.M. Colt in Star Trek:The Cage the original pilot to the Star Trek series. The Cage footage was later used in the Star Trek two-parter, The Menagerie, where footage from the Cage was presented as alien recordings of a previous voyage of the USS Enterprise under Captain Christopher Pike.

When I saw the entry in Laurel's IMDb listing I remembered her like I saw the episode yesterday, not 20 or so years ago. As a kid I thought she was just cute as a button and wished she had been one of the cast members to make it to the series, but such was not to be. Laurel only made one other film after the Star Trek pilot. Seems a shame to me.

A little more snooping on the web located this biography of Laurel at a Star Trek site.

Like I said, "Hey, I know her!"