Is Scotty's accent actually bad?

I always assumed that Picard, his family and friends all speak with English accents simply because the local English teacher in La Barre did.

 

Should we worry about Kirk's occasional Canadian accent?

 

The more notable thing about Picard is that he even speaks French with an English accent. Perhaps Data's reference to it becoming an obscure language by the 24th century wasn't too far off the mark if a native Frenchman doesn't speak his own language like a native.

Kor

 

I'm sure they could could have cut the arbitrary submarine for something as momentous as the first man in space.

Perhaps he was conceived as such, but he was apparently from the U.S.A., not that I could tell the difference, of course, for as with Uhura, and Kirk their ethnicity could not really be felt. One might make an argument McCoy is a slight U.S.A. folksy stereotype, but certainly not by much and he too could have been from anywhere.

This is strangely offset by Scott and especially Chekov being caricatures of their ethnicity.

People say it is a function of the time, and I find myself disagreeing, as anything after T.O.S. became even more U.S.A.-centric.

No, I know well the U.S.A. is the third most populous country on the planet with about 300 million inhabitants, with the first and second both being slightly more than a billion.

 

they already had several scenes of people in space helmets. maybe they could have put that dog the russians killed in orbit, on the screen, instead.

 

Ah, now I see why they didn't do it. Apparently some people are offended at the display of Soviet achievements.

Notwithstanding the many issues with humans experimenting on nonhuman animals for their own gain, let us be honest that is not an issue bound to only one side of the iron curtain, and apart from that, such scientific advancement is certainly a more noble goal to sacrifice the life of a nonhuman animal than the temporary carnal joy of a hamburger produced on the back of a cow's most inhumane existence in a farm.

 

As I noted earlier in the thread, the Writers' Guide explicitly said that McCoy was from Georgia. He also references Georgia in a few episodes, like "This Side of Paradise", where talks about making a Georgia-style mint julep:

 

McCoy is clearly from the American South. A specific part of the American South. Sounds like my Dad.

 

I'm fond of Gagarin. I celebrate Yuri's Night, sometimes when I know anyone around doing so. I think stepping into that Vostok capsule, or even moreso, jumping out of it to before it hit the ground is one of the great acts of bravery. I'm not dismissive of Soviet space achievements though I will state that apart from being a year or two ahead in some areas, they were generally behind and Russian space activity would be a historical footnote except for the US bankrolling their own efforts on ISS to keep it going, politically. I'm also realistic that there was less than two minutes in a credit scene (my favorite of any Trek series) packed with stuff, and Gagarin being included would have been awkward.

 

Interestingly the US was apparently capable of lobbing a satellite into orbit before Sputnik using the Jupiter-C rocket, but as that was derivative of the V-2 and an Army missile for partly political reasons they went with Vanguard instead and literally blew it (up). Only after several Vanguard embarrassments did they give the go-ahead to use the Jupiter-C, but they went with JPL’s satellite instead of von Braun’s.

 

Yes, that is the impression I gained but I wasn't too sure. It being for a U.S.A. audiences these references are of course more subtle than what a European can easily determine.

Certainly the first artificial satellite and human in space are monumentous achievements in space exploration worthy of inclusion in a title about space exploration.

The first human in space is the biggest singularity one can think of what separates earth exploration from space exploration.

 

I'd agree with that.

I'm not sure what "apparently from the U.S.A." means. He came off as American as Kirk, who was explicitly not American (again, "Iowa" notwithstanding, he at least spent his young teens on Tarsus IV). And Uhura spoke Swahili in her very first appearance.

McCoy was not a slight U.S.A. folksy stereotype. He was as Southern Gentleman from Georgia as Scotty was from Aberdeen.

Riley, too. But that is more a function of the time, too. In 50s and 60s litSF, it was all about demographic diversity (not that they'd use the name), which at the time included ethnicities we'd just call today, for better or worse, "white". So stories would make a big point of having a crew composed of folks with last names "Cohen", "Leahy", "Andersen", "Alessandro", "Papandreou", "Kowalski". And often a "Chen", "Yamato", or "Singh" thrown in for leavening.

Occasionally, you'd get an explicitly Black character. Very rarely, you'd get a woman.

The fact is, Sulu would have been as much a caricature as any of the others had not the actor actively fought against it.

Things don't progress linearly. TOS was very progressive TV casting for its time. Subsequent Treks were on par for their times.

 

Sounds like the roll call for a squad of US soldiers in a WWII flick.

I was a bit shocked to find some blatant yellow face in some 80's Doctor Who.

 

One of the primary political reasons was that, by letting the Soviets orbit a satellite first, that precluded them complaining when we did it. Ike was not worried about a technological gap; the public blowback was something of a surprise.

As for JPL getting the contract, the army sat would have just been a radio beacon like Sputnik 1. The Van Allen ion counter proved to be a much more momentous payload.

There's a nice, if somewhat Army-focused summary of Von Braun's Project Orbiter, in the latest issue of Analog (June '67) we covered.

Fun fact: I corresponded with Jim before he died. I am also friends with his right-hand at SUI, Carl McIlwain, who designed the experiment on Explorer 4 (and then Pioneers 0-2). He's retired but still working faculty at UCSD.

 

Hahaha. Exactly.

All played by Jewish actors...

 

Rahda isn't in "Requiem for Methuselah," but your good point stands.

 

Apparently in this case means that it was something that was mentioned at one point but did not make a particular impact.

I can't say it made as much of an impact on me as it did on others amidst the sea of other “North American English accents” on characters that should not be having them.

Ordinarily I would simply say that all of them are “North-American” because they speak with North-American English accents, but that falls logic has proven wrong when many characters in Star Trek that are not North-American do so, and of course Picard appears very English to me, despite being French. The characters seem to mostly follow the accent of the actors in practice., which is perhaps why Scott and Chekov were the only ones that felt so excessive, as they were faking theirs.

Well, firstly, I never used the word “progressive”; the last time I got into a debate about that, I found that people have very different definitions of that word, I used “U.S.A.-centric” to be more specific, but it can be specificity to any country.
And I find myself not agreeing that other Star Trek was on par for it's time at all, but rather a far bit worse in terms of science fiction drama. They aired concurrently with say, StarGate, Neon Genesis Evangelion, FarScape, Earth Final Conflict, Dragon Ball, and, The Tribe, which didn't fall into similar trappings and also, at least to a far lesser level, did not fall into the irksome idea of aliens having human cultures and genders that Star Trek is so known for though FarScape was certainly full of that.
I'd also point out that before television, literary classics very often were not unduly centred around the country the auctor resided in when this would be narratively implausible.

 

It was never mentioned in TOS. We never know where Sulu is from.

Or that there is a "standard" common accent in Star Trek time, like Mid-Atlantic American but broader, and that's the default. Folks with non-default accents have reasons for it.

Sort of like in my Kitra books, the characters are speaking French, but the books are in English. "Should" the books be written in French (a French of 800 years from now?) Maybe. But I don't speak French, certainly not French of the year 2800.

Ditto, if you read a translation of Lady Murasaki, I guarantee the characters aren't supposed to be speaking English. Even though the words are in English. And performances in English based on the book? The actors may speak in a Norh American English accent. But the characters are still supposed to be speaking Japanese.

Mixing anime with American live action is apples and pine cones. Japan has often been better at representation (and also worse, at the same time).

I don't know that this is true. And in any event, I'm not sure what this has to do with Star Trek.

 

Hm. IMDB lists it as one of her appearances.

 

That must be a reference to the frozen crew, seen as a still frame when Flint presents a desktop holographic image of the captured Enterprise:
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/3x19hd/requiemformethuselahhd1153.jpg
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/3x19hd/requiemformethuselahhd1166.jpg

Edit: Also, it doesn't appear to be Lt. Rahda in "Requiem" at all. This was her:
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/3x17hd/thatwhichsurviveshd0246.jpg