The character, first brought to life by Leonard Nimoy in the original Star Trek series from 1966 to 1969, was named one of 50 greatest TV characters and has since appeared in everything from cartoons to video games and SNL parodies to comic books, fan fiction and movies.

This weekend Zachary Quinto dons the pointy ears to play the Starfleet officer in Star Trek Into Darkness, the 12th film to boldly go where no man has gone before.

In advance of the film’s release, here are a few things about Spock you never knew.

1. In the pitch for Star Trek, series creator Gene Roddenberry described the character as “probably half Martian; he has a slightly reddish complexion and semi-pointed ears.”

2. The name of Spock’s planet, Vulcan, was created because Roddenberry thought it was possible that man might land on Mars during the run of the show.

3. The part of Spock was originally offered to DeForest Kelley, who turned down the role in favour of playing Dr. Bones.

4. The role was also offered to Adam West before Nimoy signed on.

5. Spock’s arched eyebrows and pointed ears almost didn’t make it past the NBC censor. Concerned that his appearance was too Satanic, they asked for changes.

Roddenberry countered that he deliberately gave the half-Vulcan character a “slight look of the devil” because he “thought that might be particularly provocative to women.”

6. The character is usually referred to as Mister or Commander Spock, but his full name is S’chn T’gai Spock. How do you say it?

In the episode This Side of Paradise, he says, “you could never pronounce it.”

That gruesome image is courtesy of Chris Evans, the handsome actor best known for playing Captain America, the superhero dedicated to defending American ideals.

His new film The Iceman co-stars Michael Shannon as real-life Mafia hitman Richard Kuklinski. Evans plays his mentor Robert ‘Mr. Softee’ Pronge, a vicious killer who out-psychos the psychotic main character.

“No villain thinks he’s the villain,” he says. “They don’t think, ‘I’m the bad guy,’ so you can’t approach it thinking you’re bad. You have to (examine) what part of our brains stops us from doing these things.”

To play Pronge, who ran his business out of an ice cream truck, the actor had to explore his own dark side.

“I may be revealing too much,” he says, “but on a daily basis I can’t tell you how many times I think, ‘What if I just did this right now?’ — jerked the wheel into traffic or walked off this building. On a daily basis your brain tells you what not to do, so you have to imagine that for a real sociopath that voice holds no water in their brain.

“(As an actor) you kind of just start liberating yourself of all restraint and it starts getting really fun. You come to set and think, ‘I’m going to do whatever I want.

Say whatever I want to say. Act however I want to act and what kind of person will come out of that? How would that person interact?” Evans, who stepped into the role when James Franco dropped out, had to get under Pronge’s skin to figure out what made him tick.

“I’m sure even Pronge didn’t start out killing somebody,” he says. “He probably started doing something else that was liberating in terms of his social restraint, and then found a liking and became addicted to that sensation and it ultimately became this complete disregard for human life because it was just completely freeing.”

The result is a creepy performance that may shave some of the smooth edges off of Evans’ all-American image.

“I still have strange thoughts,” he says. “I still think the things I think throughout the day but I’d never act on them. At least not now.”

On the HBO series, Chase (Adrian Grenier) was a fast-fading movie star until Martin Scorsese cast him in a movie based on the book. That fictional film became a big hit and put Chase back on top of the Hollywood heap.

This weekend The Great Gatsby comes to the big screen for real when Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrmann unleashes a 3D version of the story starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan.

It’s not the first time the life and times of doomed Jazz Age millionaire Jay Gatsby has appeared in theatres.

In 1926, just one year after the book was published, a silent movie starring William Powell was released. The movie was popular with audiences but at least two paying customers weren’t impressed.

Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda, walked out of a screening. Later an incensed Zelda wrote to her daughter, “We saw The Great Gatsby in the movies. It’s rotten!”

A 1949 film noir version spun the story to fit its lead actor. Movie tough guy Alan Ladd — billed as Ladd: Man of Violence and Mystery — stars in a cautionary tale about learning “the hard way about the wages of sin.”

To play up to Ladd’s core audience he’s seen firing a machine gun in a story that focuses on Gatsby’s violent history as a bootlegger. Despite Ladd’s fame and passion for the project (he personally convinced Paramount to make the film), the movie was not a success, and was eventually withdrawn by the studio. To this day it’s still hard to find a copy.

The most famous version to date starred two of the biggest stars of the 1970s: Robert Redford and Mia Farrow. Working from a script by Francis Ford Coppola — who lived in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s home while he wrote the screenplay — the movie stays true to the novel. Embellished by beautiful set design and lush costumes, it’s a treat for the eyes, but received tepid reviews. The New York Times wrote, “the movie itself is as lifeless as a body that’s been too long at the bottom of a swimming pool.”

His latest character, The Mandarin in Iron Man 3, is one of the great comic book baddies. He’s Iron Man’s oldest foe, a scientific genius and an unbeatable martial artist, who draws his power from 10 finger rings he created using alien technology.

How bad is this guy? This bad: “Some people call me a terrorist. I consider myself a teacher,” he says. “Lesson number one: Heroes — there is no such thing.”

The filmmakers say Mandarin is partially based on Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now and another character Kingsley made famous.

In Sexy Beast, Kingsley played Don Logan, a vile English gangster who intimidates an old colleague into coming out of retirement for one last job. How bad is this guy? This bad: He starts a brawl on an airplane because he was asked to stub out a cigarette.

“I do know that Shane Black, our writer-director, loved Sexy Beast,” said Kingsley, “and was very influenced in his choice of me playing The Mandarin.”

Logan isn’t the only villain Kingsley has brought to life on the big screen, however.

In BloodRayne, the Oscar winner plays king of the vampires Kagan, a vicious character who must quell a rebellion led by his daughter. When asked why he would appear in a movie that ranked in Rotten Tomatoes’ list of the 100 worst reviewed films of the 2000s, he said, “I have always wanted to play a vampire, with the teeth and the long black cape. Let’s say that my motives were somewhat immature for doing it.”

As The Hood in Thunderbirds, Kingsley uses his mental powers — telekinesis and hypnosis — to take over the International Rescue headquarters. He took the role in the big screen treatment of the 1960s British children’s marionette show at the urging of his kids. “My son has a Thunderbirds alarm clock. That’s how big a fan he is of the TV series.”

He’s also played villains in War Inc, Prince of Persia and Oliver Twist and says, “as an actor, I have to push the word ‘villain’ right to the back of my mind and bring forward their distorted sense of righteousness and destiny. Because I think classic villains like The Mandarin have to have a profound sense of right.”

Hijinks ensue, but like all movies with the word “wedding” in the title, audiences don’t buy a ticket for the shenanigans. They go to see the ceremony.

Anything that happens before the walk down the aisle is window dressing, the journey that gets the audience where they really want to be — at the altar.

The famous wedding scene in The Godfather — including the much-quoted Luca Brasi line, “Don Corleone, I am honoured and grateful that you have invited me to your home on the wedding day of your daughter. And may their first child be a masculine child,” — featured many Staten Island Italian-Americans as extras.

They were invited to the set to enjoy homemade wine, traditional Italian food and enjoy themselves as though it were a real wedding.

Inspiration for the film Four Weddings and a Funeral came when writer Richard Curtis realized he had been to 72 weddings in 10 years.

The movie, about a confirmed bachelor who discovers love, made an international star of Hugh Grant, who won the role after auditioning with a tape from when he was best man at his brother’s wedding.

Both those films, plus others like Wedding Crashers, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Fiddler on the Roof feature wonderful wedding scenes. But what about when nuptials turn nasty?

Who could forget Mr. Robinson howling, “You punk! You crazy punk! I’ll kill you!” at the lovesick Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman) in The Graduate after he interrupted the wedding of Elaine Robinson (Katharine Ross) to another man? Elaine leaves her intended at the altar, running off with Ben to an uncertain future, creating one of the classic endings in movie history.

In Runaway Bride Richard Gere plays a reporter investigating the story of Maggie Carpenter, a serial bride who has had multiple disastrous weddings, leaving three men at the altar. “Always a bride,” she says, “never a bridesmaid!”

The biggest bummer wedding in movie history has to be in Kill Bill Vol. 2.

“How it happened, who was there, how many got killed and who killed them, changes depending on who’s telling the story,” says The Bride (Uma Thurman). “In actual fact, the massacre didn’t happen during a wedding at all. It was a wedding
rehearsal.”

No fewer than three upcoming movies portray the Earth meeting an untimely end.

After Earth sees Will and Jaden Smith star as a father and son who crash land on Earth after an alien war has left the planet dead and abandoned. A Seth Rogen comedy aptly titled This is the End sees a cast of young A-listers — like Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Paul Rudd and Emma Watson — at a Hollywood party when the world suddenly ends.

This weekend Tom Cruise brings us Oblivion, another story about a scorched Earth, which Cruise’s character, a drone maintenance man, discovers the planet might not be completely abandoned.

It’s the end of the world as we know it, at least according to Hawking and Hollywood, but it isn’t the first time the world has ended, on screen anyway.

Coming a just half a dozen years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Five goes down in the almanac as the first sci-fi nuclear war film. It’s set in a world destroyed by nuclear holocaust. The only five Americans to survive include a pregnant woman and her unborn baby, a neo-Nazi, an African-American man and a bank clerk. The story of subsistence and racial intolerance is an influential movie — Roger Corman and several others have borrowed the basic plot line — but its director, Arch Oboler, was a radio producer and the film is as visually interesting as you would guess a movie made by a sound engineer to be.

The Bed Sitting Room is a British take on Five, only with jokes instead of Oboler’s earnest message. Starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, it’s set in a post-nuclear-holocaust London following the Second World War. The war lasted only two minutes and 28 seconds before the bomb was dropped, leaving this strange group of survivors, including a civilian who is next in line for the throne, to explore their devastated city.

So far we’ve talked about serious and strange end of the world movies, but how about a silly one? That would be Savage Planet, an abandoned Earth movie that sees the planet taken over by giant killer space bears!

The second baseman is remembered not only as a veteran of six World Series, the recipient of the inaugural MLB Rookie of the Year Award in 1947 and an inductee into the Baseball Hall of Fame, but especially as the first African American man to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era.

His accomplishments are many. He was the first black player to win the National League Most Valuable Player Award and was awarded both the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.

In tribute, every April 15, the date the Brooklyn Dodgers started Robinson at first base, all uniformed personnel at 15 different ballparks wear Jackie’s retired number 42.

This weekend a tribute of another kind comes to theatres. The movie 42 details the Hall of Famer’s history-making breaking of the colour barrier in professional baseball. The film focuses on Robinson’s (Chadwick Boseman) relationship with Branch Rickey, played by Harrison Ford, the MLB executive who facilitated the player’s signing to the ball team.

The story is custom-made for the movies. Spike Lee tried unsuccessfully to get a biopic of Robinson, starring Denzel Washington, off the ground in 1995, but others have had better luck.

Robinson portrayed himself in The Jackie Robinson Story. Filmed over the winter of 1949, during the off-season from the Brooklyn Dodgers, the film earned good reviews at the time, with the New York Times saying, “Mr. Robinson displays a calm assurance and composure that might be envied by many a Hollywood star.”

Despite his acclaimed performance, he never made another film.

Since then he has been the subject of a variety of projects.

A 1978 ABC after-school special called A Home Run for Love used the player — portrayed by John Lafayette — as the heart of a tale about friendship and racial tolerance.

The First was a short-lived Broadway musical starring David Alan Grier as Robinson, and both Andre Braugher and Blair Underwood have played him in television dramas.

Back on the big screen Robinson was played by Keith David in Blue in the Face, an improvised love letter to Brooklyn featuring celebrity cameos by everyone from Harvey Keitel and Lily Tomlin to Madonna and Lou Reed. In a cameo we see Robinson from behind as he talks about breaking the colour barrier in baseball.

That phrase has been the starting point for many scary scripts, conjuring up visions of ancient evil life forms, dangerous hillbilly types, mysterious incantations and lines like, “No matter what, we have to stay together.”

The cabin-in-the-woods genre is decades old, but almost always follows the same formula: five good-looking teens, say, a jock, a stoner, some hot girls, one a brainiac, and a party girl go to a cabin, and only one or two make it home.

This weekend’s Evil Dead shakes up the formula to an extent.

In it some handsome people head to an isolated cottage not to drink and party but to help Mia (Jane Levy) kick her addiction to drugs.

The details are different, but the outcome — and this isn’t a spoiler, just a statement of fact — is the same and that’s what we like about the genre.

The most well loved cabin in the woods movies must be the first two Sam Raimi Evil Dead films.

The original, and namesake of the series, was actually shot in a real life abandoned cottage.

In it five friends go to a cabin in the woods (sound familiar?), discover a Book of the Dead and unleash flesh-possessing demons.

It made a star of Bruce Campbell and led to a sequel, Evil Dead II, another cabin movie that is equal parts silly and scary.

Eli Roth made his directorial debut with Cabin Fever, a movie inspired by real life events.

The idea for a film about a group of friends in a (you guessed it!) cabin in the woods, tormented by a flesh-eating virus and homicidal townsfolk, came to him as he worked on a horse farm.

“I was cleaning hay out of this barn and got this infection on my face,” he says.

The rash got so bad that, “I went to shave and I literally shaved a third of my face off.”

It hurt, but he looked at the bright side.

“I thought, ‘This is actually going make a great movie one day.’”

Sleepaway Camp — ignore the sequels, although the number two’s title Unhappy Campers is pretty great — sets the action at a summer camp.

This gory slasher flick is most notable for a wild twist ending that has been called a “jaw-dropping, tape-rewinding, pause-and-stare-and-call-your-friends-over-to-stare” moment.

Sounds grim, but remember, this is from the lady who gave us sparkly vampires and undying love, so the alien inside is kind of a lovesick creature who helps the host body find her loved ones.

That’s a lot more benign than other parasitic alien movies.

The most famous alien organism — in the movie Alien, naturally — literally burst on the screen, poking its horrible head through the chest of John Hurt in one of cinema’s most indelibly creepy moments.

To get a natural reaction from his actors, director Ridley Scott didn’t fully explain what was about to happen as they shot the scene.

“Everyone (on the crew) was wearing raincoats,” said Sigourney Weaver. “We should have been a little suspicious.”

When the alien came careening out of Hurt’s body the actors were genuinely surprised.

Blood oozed all over the set and the shock was so intense it’s alleged that Veronica Cartwright passed out and Yaphet Kotto was so freaked out he went to his room and wouldn’t talk to anyone.

Much less bloody is The Puppet Masters, which sees the earth invaded by alien “slugs” that piggyback on people’s backs, controlling their minds.

Based on the Robert A. Heinlein 1951 novel, the film starred Donald Sutherland, who also appeared in one of the genre’s classics, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The original movie of the story, taken from Jack Finney’s classic novel The Body Snatchers, dates from 1956 and has been declared by the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, or esthetically significant,” but it is the Sutherland version, from 1978, that is truly chilling.

The story of alien infiltration — humans are being replaced one by one by emotionless ETs — was called “the best film of its kind ever made” by The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael and a movie that “validates the entire concept of remakes,” according to Variety.

The strangest movie parasite wasn’t an alien, but a bug that feeds on fear.

In the Tingler, these parasites attach themselves to their host’s spine and tingle when the host is frightened or scared.

In its original 1959 run it was shown with the Percepto! gimmick that gave some of the theatre seats a small electrical jolt — or tingle — during the movie’s climax.

For nine years on Saturday Night Live she worked behind the scenes — as the show’s first female head writer — and on camera as the anchor of Weekend Update.

“She might be the best Weekend Update anchor who ever did it,” said Dennis Miller. “She writes the funniest jokes.”

Then came 30 Rock, the medium-rated but critically adored sitcom, a best selling book and a celebrated impersonation of Sarah Palin that even got the thumbs up from the ex-Governor.

This weekend she’s on the big screen in Admission, a comedy co-starring Paul Rudd. She plays a Princeton admissions officer who thinks one of her new recruits is the son she gave up for adoption years ago.

Fey made her film debut a decade ago in the quirky comedy Martin & Orloff as part of an ensemble cast that included SNLers Amy Poehler and Rachel Dratch.

That movie didn’t garner much attention, and her role of Southern Woman even less, but in 2004 she shortened the unwieldy title Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughters Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence to Mean Girls. The story of high school in-groups was a hit and launched the careers of Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried.

She co-starred in Mean Girls as math teacher Ms. Norbury and made on-screen appearances as Front Desk Girl in Beer League but got her name over the title in Baby Mama.

She played Kate, a single 37-year-old businesswoman so desperate to have a baby she hires Angie, an inappropriate South Philly wild child (Amy Poehler) to be her surrogate.

Next was the stranded-in-big-bad-New-York-City movie Date Night opposite Steve Carell.

The movie wouldn’t be as enjoyable as it is without the two leads. Fey and Carell breathe life into a hackneyed situation, bringing not only likeability, but also great chemistry and a way with a line that really works.

In the animated Megamind she voiced intrepid girl reporter Roxanne Ritchi, kidnapped by the master of all villainy Megamind (voice of Will Ferrell) and next year she stars with Ricky Gervais in The Muppets … again.