Trivia / Star Trek: The Next Generation S2E4 "The Outrageous Okona"

• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: The episode extends the myth that Burns and Allen actually used the joke "Say good night, Gracie." "Good night, Gracie."
• Cast the Runner-Up: Billy Campbell had been the second choice of producers to play Riker before Jonathan Frakes won the part.
• Deleted Scene: More scenes featuring B.G. Robinson were filmed than appeared in the finished episode. As a result of this, Teri Hatcher asked for her name to be removed from the credits.
• Harpo Does Something Funny: Joe Piscopo was reportedly solely responsible for his character's dialogue and jokes.
• Prop Recycling:
  • Okona's freighter is the Talarian freighter model reused from "Heart Of Glory", which itself was cobbled together from models used in the V miniseries and Captain EO.
  • The Atlec vessel is a reuse of the Merchantman spaceship model from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
• Throw It In!:
  • Brent Spiner and Joe Piscopo did a lot of improvising together. This has led to jokes that the script's humor was so bad that even the soon-to-be washed up Piscopo looked at it and thought "I can do better than this." Considering how his performance in the episode isn't that funny anyway, the original script must have been truly awful.
  • Similarly, the "You're a droid and I'm annoyed" sequence was apparently improvised on-set by Spiner and Whoopi Goldberg, as the script contains a completely different (and near-incomprehensible) joke.
• Uncredited Role: Teri Hatcher asked for her name to be removed from the credits, as many of her scenes were cut.
• What Could Have Been:
  • According to the podcast Mission Log, Jerry Lewis was first approached for the role of Mr Comic, but he was busy appearing on Wiseguy.
  • The crew's attitude toward Okona was, for the most part, heavily toned down from the near-final version of the script, where they spent practically the whole story falling over themselves to tell Okona how wonderful he is. In the finished version it's reduced to just Wesley treating him like this, with Picard and Worf not buying into his act for a moment, and Riker and Geordi only showing a begrudging admiration for his success with the opposite sex.
  • The same script also had the Atlec and Straleb delegations stay on their ships throughout the story. The producers realized that having the story resolved by having a bunch of people yelling at each other over the viewscreen wouldn't make for a terribly interesting climax, and changed the script so that the various parties beamed aboard the Enterprise to discuss things in person.
  • Script notes say that the natives of the planets were meant to be two different races but were changed to be one race colonizing both planets.
• Working Title: "Lost and Found."

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