Ah, the TOS Sledgehammer. I think I miss that more than anything else...
Didn't TNG end up basically doing both ideas?
German TV boldly shows 'Nazi' Star Trek episode
- Thread starter Vulagr
- Start date
Didn't TNG end up basically doing both ideas?
"Lebhaftlange und erweitern."
Thank goodness that Babel Fish can help me with the translation.
Actually: "Lebe lang und in Frieden" (live long and in peace)
Ugh! Patterns of Force was like watching every World War II Hollywood propaganda film, one after the other. This episode was almost as bad as watching Tom Cruise play a one-eyed German officer.
Fontana says the script was too on-the-nose and thus dropped.
He's eminently right, tho, as it was a non sequitur on a whole lot of levels.
I'm not up on the current state of this, but there are/were post-WWII restrictions on the use/display of the swastika in Germany, especially in things considered children's programming and toys. Since "Patterns of Force" is swastika central, it's possible it wasn't aired partly for this reason.
We promise we will not proceed with sterilization your evident imperfection notwithstanding.Two posters talking like Nomad in one thread.
Patterns of Force is a terrific ep. I love the idea that some 23rd century historian, separated by centuries from the Nazi atrocities, gets it in his mind to try and introduce "kinder, gentler" National Socialism to those people. It doesn't seem strange at all that a megalomaniac like Melakon, upon learning the truth about the Nazi's, would want to reproduce their culture in detail. Completely sells the ep for me. Of course, I have a soft spot for "cultural interference" eps like this one, "Omega Glory", "Who Watches the Watchers", etc.
I'm not sure that was the intent. I think the idea was that the very nature of the Nazi system was such that it fostered the rise of megalomaniacs, racists, and fearmongers to positions of power, and thus history would inevitably repeat itself whether anyone "learned the truth" about what had happened the first time or not. So it's not like Melakon was deliberately trying to imitate what Hitler did, it's that there was no way you could have a Nazi-style state that didn't end up ruled by people like that. Nazism was intrinsically defined by being against things -- anti-Marxism, anti-Semitism, etc. It was about capitalizing on people's resentments and frustrations and feeding them rabid nationalism as a remedy, stirring up their pride in their own people at the expense of others. And of course as a totalitarian system, it lacked checks and balances on governmental power.
Gill was so focused on the "efficiency" of the Nazi system, and on unifying a "fragmented, divided" planet, that he failed to consider the downsides. Presumably he brought the fragmented Ekosians together by playing up Ekosian nationalism, but Nazi-style nationalism is defined in opposition to the outsider, so it led to persecution of Zeons. Maybe Gill tried to find a substitute for the racist foundation of Nazism, but anti-Zeon racists like Melakon were easily able to exploit the Nazi philosophical structures to feed their xenophobia, since that's what they were designed to do in the first place. And so Gill's attempt to "reform" them failed. Melakon ended up displacing him because the system was intrinsically more conducive to Melakon's type of rule than Gill's. And that's where the downside of the "efficiency" came from, because that efficiency (if it really existed -- I have my doubts) resulted from the strong centralized authority of the state, which made it easier for Melakon to seize absolute power.
We promise we will not proceed with sterilization your evident imperfection notwithstanding.Two posters talking like Nomad in one thread.
I should have known...you two were both red shirts. Nomad! Execute your prime function and sterilize them, please. Thank you Nomad!
A younger viewer used to countless cheap tacky Nazi stories could respond as if this episode is more of the same-- unless, of course, he/she has the basic sense to realize that this came out in 1967 or so, only 22 years after WW2 ended. They weren't dropping Nazis into TV series right and left. Some viewers would have been men who actually fought in the war. They didn't do this lightly.
I'm tired of people finding some flaw in an underlying concept of an episode and dismissing the whole episode as obvious trash, because of it. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater... In the last half of season 2, every third episode was a parallel-Earth type story. Sure, it's a problematic idea. Give them a lot of credit, though, for working inside these story restrictions dictated by the limited budget, and coming up with the most interesting and challenging story premises that they could.
If you just notice the Nazis, you can groan and assume it's some melodramatic cliche-- that is, if you think in terms of cliches. Viewers who don't notice the ideas in the episode, and just say "Oh no, Nazis" are themselves the ones thinking in cliches, not the makers of ST. Historians do come up with pet theories, and usually only academics have to deal with them. What if an historian like this was given all the blocks to play with that he wanted, a whole culture? I believe Marx was an intellectual who thought he could fix the world's problems, whose ideas were put into practice, with things going hideously wrong... Someone like Gill isn't as improbable as he seems.
I'm tired of people finding some flaw in an underlying concept of an episode and dismissing the whole episode as obvious trash, because of it. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater... In the last half of season 2, every third episode was a parallel-Earth type story. Sure, it's a problematic idea. Give them a lot of credit, though, for working inside these story restrictions dictated by the limited budget, and coming up with the most interesting and challenging story premises that they could.
If you just notice the Nazis, you can groan and assume it's some melodramatic cliche-- that is, if you think in terms of cliches. Viewers who don't notice the ideas in the episode, and just say "Oh no, Nazis" are themselves the ones thinking in cliches, not the makers of ST. Historians do come up with pet theories, and usually only academics have to deal with them. What if an historian like this was given all the blocks to play with that he wanted, a whole culture? I believe Marx was an intellectual who thought he could fix the world's problems, whose ideas were put into practice, with things going hideously wrong... Someone like Gill isn't as improbable as he seems.
Combat was on the air from 1962-1967 and the emphasis on that series was the Allies versus the Nazis every week. And Hollywood films were still transfixed on fighting World War 2, from such war epics as The Longest Day to The Dirty Dozen.
That's what the Trek forum is all about. To dissect and discuss every aspect of every ST episode to the point of absurdity.
It's a good point that the impact would've been different to viewers for whom WWII was a more immediate reality, but it's not as if stories about Nazis were rare in '60s TV. Hogan's Heroes, which debuted in 1965, featured Nazis on a weekly basis for 6 years and 168 episodes, while Combat! (1962-67) and various more short-lived drama or action series covered WWII more seriously. The Twilight Zone did a number of episodes about Nazis: "Judgment Night," "Deaths-head Revisited," "He's Alive," and "No Time Like the Past" (not to mention other WWII-related episodes like "The Purple Testament," "The Howling Man," and The Quality of Mercy," and various fictional totalitarian states that were Nazi allegories). Mission: Impossible did two Nazi-themed episodes per year in its first two seasons ("The Legacy," "The Legend," "The Bank," and "Echo of Yesterday"), plus one episode each dealing with Nazi war criminals in seasons 4 ("Submarine") and 5 ("The Merchant"); Martin Landau ended up impersonating both Martin Bormann and Adolf Hitler himself in the course of his tenure on the show. And of course Mel Brooks's The Producers came out in theaters in 1968. WWII and the Nazis were a very common subject matter for TV at the time.
Interesting comparison.
Sure, but it would make more sense in the context of alternate timelines or altered histories. Having some planet elsewhere in space just happen to duplicate our history may have been an acceptable way to make a 1960s SFTV show affordable, but it wasn't really a good idea per se.
On a side note, the one show that managed to get around the ban on showing swastikas on German television was "Hogan's Heroes", because they were blatantly lampooning the Nazis.
number6
Vice Admiral
That would be me.
I like Patterns of Force. I probably haven't seen it in a decade though.