46 Years Ago Today: The Kirk/Uhura Kiss

Was it really the first interracial kiss on TV? Interesting article on the possibilities: http://www.agonybooth.com/agonizer/TVs_First_Interracial_Kiss_Star_Trek.aspx

 

Wow! Great stuff, with great pictures and clippings.

Hmm. I guess it still counts as America's first interracial kiss shown on television (not a movie) between a Black person and a White person.

Star Trek wins!

 

Not really, unless you discount kisses not on the lips, and when I watch the show it looks really obvious to me there's no actual lip contact.

 

To read some mentions of the Uhura-Kirk "kiss" over the years, you would think it was the best thing in the series.

Truthfully, it wasn't even the best thing in "Plato's Stepchildren."

 

Oh cripe. What WAS the best thing?

 

More like first involuntary black/white kiss on a scripted American prime-time drama. (As opposed to, say, variety shows, British shows, soap operas, etc.)


Historic as it is, there are a lot of asterisks.

And, while hailing it as a milestone, people tend to skate over the fact that Kirk and Uhura are being forced to kiss against their will . . .

 

Shatner doing a bad impression of a horse?

Leonard Nimoy's singing?

Wait, I'll come up with something . . .

 

It's all good.

 

Alexander Courage's score.

Neil

 

Michael Dunn?

 

Let's not overlook the other good things as well, such as the sky outside the Platonian compound, changing from a day to night look...



I love those kinds of touches.

 

Well, it picks up dramatically after the 49th minute of running time, there's that.

 

The link's research also confirms how the perceptions of race on American TV differed depending on which race was involved with a white male.

 

I agree.

 

That's a nicely comprehensive and well-researched article . . . although, alas, it's unlikely to have a lasting effect.

At this point, the "first interracial kiss on TV" thing is so ingrained in Trek mythology, and has been cited as fact so many times, that lazy journalists are likely to keep repeating it for the rest of our lives, thereby perpetuating the myth.

 

Yep, you know journalists: "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story".

 

The article states, "As it turns out, the first references to Star Trek having “TV’s first interracial kiss” don’t show up until the early 1990s, which was not-so-coincidentally about the same time Shatner and Nichols were putting out memoirs that talked about filming the episode."

Allan Asherman mentions it in my copy of the Star Trek Compendium, which was published in September 1986.

Neil

 

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

 

It's also in the original edition of the Compendium, published in January 1981. He does call it the "first interracial kiss featured on network television" (emphasis mine).

 

Correct.

This has always bothered me.