The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack Obama

[ChristopherPike]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

The features on that additional face on Rushmore don't scream African American to me. More like Native American, I'd say...

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

Looking at the image, I wonder if the fifth face is meant to represent someone pre-Washington. Like Pocahontas, for instance.

 

[Broccoli]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

The features on that additional face on Rushmore don't scream African American to me. More like Native American, I'd say...

I was about to say...the fifth face doesn't look black at all. Native American, I agree with.

 

[Good Will Riker]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

I can see why they cut that scene... it's not a very convincing matte painting. True, pre-digital matte paintings tend to look surprisingly impressionist when you look at still reproductions of them, which actually works well with the film grain, but that one still seems pretty unconvincing.

Well, what do you expect when we are dealing with the special-effects budget for Star Trek V: The Final Frontier?

The rest of the effects for the film were so bad that I figured that was just par for the course.

 

[Peach Wookiee]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

Hmmm...Maybe that POTUS was someone with a background like Tiger Woods.

 

[Maurice]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

According to Paul Madell's article on TFF's effects "Star Trek V: Sharing the Pain", from Cinefex #42,

"Chekov and Sulu are wandering around lost in the forest and there was supposed to be a pull-back and tilt-up to reveal that they are unknowingly right at the foot of Mount Rushmore with the great stone heads looming above them. The joke was that here is now a fifth head -- a future woman president of some unspecified multiethnic background. Syd worked on the painting and it pretty far along, to the point where it was shown in previews -- but no one in the preview audiences was laughing. Either the people watching had no idea how many heads there were on Mount Rushmore or, if they did, they were trying to recognize who the extra head was. In either event, the joke misfired. Since the scene did nothing to advance the story, it was ultimately cut before the shot was finished."

So, the shot looks terrible in part because it was a work in progress and not a finished matte.

 

[FalTorPan]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

A five-headed Mount Rushmore was supposed to be a joke?

Ooooookay.

 

[Good Will Riker]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

According to Paul Madell's article on TFF's effects "Star Trek V: Sharing the Pain", from Cinefex #42,

"Chekov and Sulu are wandering around lost in the forest and there was supposed to be a pull-back and tilt-up to reveal that they are unknowingly right at the foot of Mount Rushmore with the great stone heads looming above them. The joke was that here is now a fifth head -- a future woman president of some unspecified multiethnic background. Syd worked on the painting and it pretty far along, to the point where it was shown in previews -- but no one in the preview audiences was laughing. Either the people watching had no idea how man heads there were on Mount Rushmore or, if they did, they were trying to recognize who the extra head was. In either event, the joke misfired. Since the scene did nothing to advance the story, it was ultimately cut before the shot was finished."

So, the shot looks terrible in part because it was a work in progress and not a finished matte.

What?!?!!

Having a non-white/non-woman United States president was supposed to be "a joke" now?

The audience probably took it seriously to see if who this great "non-white" president really was? I hate it when white people try to make a joke out of serious roles and/or positions of non-caucasian figures in the media. That 5th face on Mt. Rushmore seems pretty prominently featured to be considered rather "important."

If they wanted to make it into a joke, they should have just put Pauly Shore's face up there!

 

[Christopher]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

^^Now, come on, I hardly think they meant it in that sense. Not a joke in the sense that the individual being represented was worthy of ridicule, but simply in the sense of giving the audience a surprise, showing them something familiar but with an unexpected twist on it -- five heads on Mt. Rushmore instead of four. The kind of "joke" like in Back to the Future Part 2 where we see Jaws XVIII or whatever it was, or shoelaces that tie automatically.

EDIT: Or rather, what Therin said in the post below this.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

A five-headed Mount Rushmore was supposed to be a joke?

No, the joke was, and still is, that Starfleet's supposedly best navigator and pilot are both lost, and yet they're unwittingly standing beneath a well-known, unmissable landmark.

As in "...no one in the preview audiences was laughing [at Chekov and Sulu being hopelessly lost]. "Either the people watching had no idea how many heads there were [normally] on Mount Rushmore or, if they did, they were trying to recognize who the extra head was" [instead of laughing at Chekov and Sulu].

 

[Sci]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

Firstly, my understanding of the geology of Mt. Rushmore is that you can't put another face there; the granite it too porous.

Secondly, Star Trek's past isn't exactly our present. While I think there is an episode of Enterprise that established that George W. Bush was an American president, there's no reason that he had to serve two terms, that he led the United States into a war of choice, etc. Likewise, it's not necessarily true that Barack Obama ran for President in the Star Trek universe or was elected such.

True. Buuut....

There are basically two points where we can ID the Trek timeline as diverging from ours so far:

1) Late 1960s/early 1970s: The US launches a space-based nuclear weapons system; Augments developed beneath India by Project Chrysalis

2) Early-to-mid 1990s: Eugenics Wars

Greg Cox's The Eugenics Wars duology reconciled Trek with real history already.

Prior to what can be marked as the absolute no-reconciliation-with-real-history-possible-in-any-way demarcation between the Realverse and the Trekverse -- i.e., the outbreak of World War III circa 2053 -- the next relevant piece of data we have are the manned flights to Saturn in the early 2000s, the Bell Riots of 2024, the manned flight to Mars in 2032. We do know from the use of stock footage in the Temporal Cold War's "limbo" scenes in ENT that Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were both late 20th/early 21st Century US Presidents, that Tony Blair was UK Prime Minister, that Osama bin Ladin was around, and that 9/11 happened.

Personally, I'd always prefer that we try to reconcile Trek with real-world history for as long as we possibly can.

 

[Good Will Riker]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

^^Now, come on, I hardly think they meant it in that sense. Not a joke in the sense that the individual being represented was worthy of ridicule, but simply in the sense of giving the audience a surprise, showing them something familiar but with an unexpected twist on it -- five heads on Mt. Rushmore instead of four. The kind of "joke" like in Back to the Future Part 2 where we see Jaws XVIII or whatever it was, or shoelaces that tie automatically.

EDIT: Or rather, what Therin said in the post below this.

Perhaps, you are right.

The scene by itself was funny, but within the framework of the rest of the film it may not have come across as "5 Faces on Mt. Rushmore" humor, but rather a more serious "Whose face is that?" and cut to the next scene.

Which kind of reminds me of the way Uhura's fan dance didn't work in the rest of the picture, either, but they still kept it.

 

[FalTorPan]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

And there is no way in Hades that the fan dancer's body belonged to Nichelle Nichols. I'm just saying.

 

[Good Will Riker]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

And there is no way in Hades that the fan dancer's body belonged to Nichelle Nichols. I'm just saying.

When the late-Gene Roddenberry screened that scene back in early-1988, he called up Nichelle and told her "Those are still your legs?"

(source: "Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories" by Nichelle Nichols)

 

[Christopher]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

And there is no way in Hades that the fan dancer's body belonged to Nichelle Nichols. I'm just saying.

Actually, according to all accounts, it was really her. The problem is that those double-breasted uniform jackets make full-busted women look fat. Nichols was always campaigining to get to wear something more formfitting, but they never let her. That's probably why she was willing to do the fan dance in the first place.

 

[FalTorPan]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

If the dancer was truly Nichelle Nichols, and I'm not convinced that this is true, then the Shat should have lit her consistently from head to toe -- and shown her face -- to make it bloody obvious.

In this shot this shot the dancer's legs and head are lit very differently, and with her face unlit, the woman could be anyone.

If Nichols was truly that well built between 1979 and 1991, then at least one of the Trek flicks should have exploited this. Sheesh!

 

[Christopher]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

If the dancer was truly Nichelle Nichols, and I'm not convinced that this is true, then the Shat should have lit her consistently from head to toe -- and shown her face -- to make it bloody obvious.

In this shot this shot the dancer's legs and head are lit very differently, and with her face unlit, the woman could be anyone.

The whole point of the scene was that we couldn't see her face clearly at first -- that it was a surprise when we realized who was doing the dancing.

And that does look to me like it could be the body of a healthy older woman. It's definitely not some rail-thin model or actress type like we usually get today.

If Nichols was truly that well built between 1979 and 1991, then at least one of the Trek flicks should have exploited this. Sheesh!

Which is pretty much what she kept telling Harve Bennett. And at least one film did exploit it -- the one you just posted a screencap from.

 

[EyalM]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

The fact of the matter is we now know "how" a black American can be elected to the presidency of the United States

By running in the elections?

but that said image doesn't quite fill in the gap of how a US president who happens to be black American could have achieved greatness that would have merited her face being on Mt. Rushmore ahead of historical presidential greats such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt who pulled the United States out of the Great Depression.

Maybe South Dakota elected a mad scientist as governor?

 

[Peach Wookiee]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

If the dancer was truly Nichelle Nichols, and I'm not convinced that this is true, then the Shat should have lit her consistently from head to toe -- and shown her face -- to make it bloody obvious.

In this shot this shot the dancer's legs and head are lit very differently, and with her face unlit, the woman could be anyone.

If Nichols was truly that well built between 1979 and 1991, then at least one of the Trek flicks should have exploited this. Sheesh!

She was that well-built, and I must say, I'm impressed!

 

[DizzyMan]

Re: The 5th US president on Mt. Rushmore: Was her inspiration Barack O

OK, here is my attempt at putting Barack on Rushmore…

What do you think?