>I wish I could say I was surprised by this, but no, no, I'm not.
>Always amazed, but never surprised.

Yeah, with as long as the franchise has gone on, there have been a lot of instances where actor input has either helped a series, hurt it, or just been outright ignored. Nimoy and Kelley, for example, were all kinds of pissed with Shatner during the making of ST:V when they were told that Spock and McCoy were scripted to turn on Kirk. Both made it rather clear to him that, after all the years the characters had been friend, they wouldn't just suddenly turn on him. The rest of the cast weren't so lucky.

>Did NOT know that. Jack Sparrow? Really? Maybe they should hire a
>Whovian to do nothing but stand there and slap the director with a
>stick of celery any time ideas like that come up.

Yeah, according to Smith, they wanted something a bit "swashbuckling" but he nixed that because he felt that was how somebody would dress up the Doctor, rather than how the Doctor would dress himself. Likewise a long black trench coat got turned down for being "too much like The Matrix."