ABC bought distribution rights in the US for The Avengers that started in 1965, and ABC did not broadcast five episodes for reasons to do with sex and violence [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Avengers_(TV_series)#In_Canada_and_the_United_States].
"Plato's Stepchildren" and Southern TV Stations
- Thread starter Joanna McCoy-Kirk
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I'm one for watching old science fiction movies and I can't remember too many movies where a woman is a regular member of the crew. I'm in Australia so maybe we don't get to see all the American movies but when a woman does go on a space ship generally she is the attractive daughter/girlfriend of a scientist/leading man. Not there because she's earnt her position by hard work. Uhura/Number One were there because they were a regular part of the crew not because they were the girlfriend of the producer (well they were but that's beside the point). In the Star Trek world Uhura and Number One had got there on their merits s that means other women could too. People forget in the 60s that women couldn't be crew on ships or planes or rocket ships (in America and Australia at least) so it was a big thing to me at least. I mean a woman being an astronaut. Wow.
I'm happy for someone to show me dozens of movies in the 40s/50s/60s where women crewed space ships or time machines whatever and got there not because of who they knew. I'm thinking of one but I can't remember its name.
Although I'm being hypocritical here Batgirl was one woman who obtained her position through her own work despite her being the daughter of the police commissioner.
I'm happy for someone to show me dozens of movies in the 40s/50s/60s where women crewed space ships or time machines whatever and got there not because of who they knew. I'm thinking of one but I can't remember its name.
Although I'm being hypocritical here Batgirl was one woman who obtained her position through her own work despite her being the daughter of the police commissioner.
What we've been saying about Star Trek since Fact Trek day one is this:
It doesn't need to be the first at any given thing to be important.
Cicely Tyson on East Side/West Side beat Uhura to the non-stereotypical role for a black woman by three years—heck she even wore her hair natural (and George C. Scott wanted his character to marry hers!)—but Uhura demonstrates a future where black women are included as equals. We'd argue that's just as significant.
Giving Star Trek approbation for work it didn't do is a barrier to recognizing what it did do.
It doesn't need to be the first at any given thing to be important.
Cicely Tyson on East Side/West Side beat Uhura to the non-stereotypical role for a black woman by three years—heck she even wore her hair natural (and George C. Scott wanted his character to marry hers!)—but Uhura demonstrates a future where black women are included as equals. We'd argue that's just as significant.
Giving Star Trek approbation for work it didn't do is a barrier to recognizing what it did do.
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That's defining it too narrowly. I'm not talking about the superficial element of a woman being a military officer or not, but the broader trope of the inclusion of a female character in a conventionally male role such as scientist or expedition member, with it usually being justified by her being exceptional for her sex in the same way Number One was -- cool and detached and consciously unfeminine, but ultimately defined by her suppressed romantic interest in a male lead.
In other words, I'm not saying there was nothing progressive about Number One as a character -- just that it has to be put in perspective, that it's not as revolutionary as it's often hyped to be, because she was really a well-established stock character type that played into the well-established sexist trope that a woman had to act manly and be an exception to her sex in order to function in a conventionally male profession. Her character is progressive in some ways, stereotyped in others. Because social progress is usually incremental rather than revolutionary. It's important to recognize that texture and nuance rather than try to reduce everything to a single value.
That's not true. It was a common trope to have at least one female crew member on a rocketship, like Osa Massen in Rocketship X-M, Naura Hayden in The Angry Red Planet, Shirley Patterson and Ann Doran in It! The Terror from Beyond Space, Virginia Huston in Flight to Mars, etc. Sometimes the female presence was more contrived, like having Debra Paget's character stow away on the rocketship in From the Earth to the Moon, but it certainly wasn't unheard of for women to be included on spaceship crews, or to be key members of scientific expeditions in monster or disaster movies. (Sometimes more justifiably than others. Mara Corday's character in The Giant Claw was a mathematician who did the calculations for the expedition, a role often performed by women in the sciences, as seen in the movie Hidden Figures. The word "computer" was originally a job title for the people, usually women, who did that kind of work until electronic computers rendered them obsolete.)
But the female lead got as much attention and story focus as her male counterparts, was shown to be intelligent, calculating, and cool under pressure, and was often depicted as capable in physical combat. Much of that describes Uhura, but Uhura never got an equal share of attention. It doesn't matter how progressive a female character's job is if she's never allowed to be the focus character in a story, if she's perpetually kept in the background of stories that focus on the male leads. That reduces it to a token advancement.
And again, the point is not to reduce this to some kind of pissing contest, but merely to put Star Trek in the context of its time and recognize that the claims that it was uniquely progressive and revolutionary are exaggerated and unfair to many of its contemporaries. It was part of a larger trend toward inclusion and progress, and there were ways it fell short of its professed aspirations.
Again, the last thing I want to do is reduce anything to such a facile binary. My goal is to add context and perspective, because you have to consider every aspect of a thing in order to truly understand it.
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I've got a new Smart TV and it says I can watch over 10 000 things for free. I'm gonna look up those movies with women crew members once I get rid of my company.
There's one I tracked down in the old TCM Genre movies thread, The Night the World Exploded, with Kathryn Grant as a scientist who was treated pretty respectfully by the film and by the male characters, yet it was still implied that she was only working as a scientist because she was in love with the lead male scientist, and presumed that she would give up her career to get married.
The only one that comes to mind (because I watched it recently) is Angry Red Planet (1959) where Nora Hayden played a scientist who was simply a member of the crew.
Oh, and THEM! (1954) featured a female scientist (Joan Weldon) as a main character. She was the "wise old scientist"'s daughter, yes, but she certainly had agency of her own in the film (once they got past the 1950s "but you're a woman" moment).
EDIT: I see Christopher covered Angry Red Planet. I jumped ahead.
"The Time Tunnel" had Ann Macgegor manning the console and doing timey wimey stuff without qualification. In the unaired pilot, she was a scientist, but by the end of the series, the guys referred to her as a technician (but this could be a ploy to make her less valuable to the alien who kidnapped her). She fell into the standard "SF girl isn't quite at the same level as the men" stereotype now and again, but she was usually very competent and quite smart. For an Irwin Allen show, that was groundbreaking.
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Oh, I don't know. Maureen Robinson on Lost in Space was a biochemist, though it rarely came up.
That's very true, she was Dr. Maureen Robinson in the pilot but midway through the first year she seemed to forget all that and got a little airy sometimes. Like when John was asking her about the 4th state of matter in "The Sky Is Falling."
After that, it was all about making lunch and taking care of the Space Laundry.
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Hey. Define "trope".
I was using the word "trope" in the sense of definition 3 here:
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/trope
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/trope
^ Formatting error, most likely, in the copy-paste.
I saw that too, clicked the link and boom...1-2-3!^Amusingly the preview only shows two definitions.But yes, it's there if one follows the link.
Yes, the two subdefinitions under definition 3, as you can see at the link. Naturally I only chose to quote the relevant ones. Evidently the "3" heading didn't come through when I copied and pasted.
Yeah. I hate the word 'trope.'
Do you mean 'plot element'? 'Motif'? 'Theme'? 'Cliché'? 'Stereotype'?
Trope is the inadvertent NewSpeak for cinematic discussion. Replace it with "thing" and you get the same amount of value.
(cuts @Christopher off before he can tell me exactly how useful 'trope' is, as he said.)
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