Imagine the uproar if Abrams had said some of the things Meyer said about Trek - eg that TOS was all about racist gunboat diplomacy, with Kirk going around imposing American values on "lesser breeds".
Funny,
this was the same thing said by
this left-wing British magazine about
TOS back in 1991 (not that I agree with said magazine's view of
Star Trek.)
Like, how earth’s moon could move fast enough to visit multiple solar systems a month? I’m re-watching 1999 right now, and “scientific plausibility” isn’t one of its strong points.
A remake of that show will only work if it's like
this concept that somebody came up with at deviantArt:
Ah hell, as early as TOS season 3 you could see the writers were taking note of the show's reputation for progressiveness and purposefully injecting it into the episodes. The stuff about inclusiveness and acceptance in Plato's Stepchildren or Let That Be Your Last Battlefield are perfect examples of the show starting to enjoy the smell of its own flatulence.
As I said previously,
Plato's Stepchildren really isn't about The Kiss between Kirk/Shatner and Uhura/Nichols, but about the acknowledgement that dwarfs are people too, and can accomplish anything despite their size.
Yeah, I already know Trek is historically more progressive than most other one-hour dramatic series. I don't need fans saying it every five or ten minutes as if the content of "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield(TOS)" or myriad other episodes and films throughout the history of the franchise have been a mystery until now and didn't contain forward-thinking themes. That's fine if reminding yourself every day makes you enjoy it that much more but anyone who's been watching Trek long enough doesn't need the constant drum banging of "TREK IS WOKE AND I'M GLAD."
Which seems to be backfiring with some fans due to how much focus there was on Burnham & Georgiou on
Discovery (and their calling said focus 'white genocide'.
) Of course, I think said fans are full of crap, and were probably never really 'liberal' to begin with. But yeah, that kind of thing by fans
does get tiresome.
I dunno. I think a lot it's contemporaries and predecessors were doing the same thing. Westerns, legal shows and even the occasional sitcom. Some even had better representation than Trek.
The first TV show that had said better representation for a minority was
this one,
which starred Cicely Tyson (second-billed after George C. Scott) as a secretary for a privately-run social welfare agency who helped out Scott's social worker character in a few episodes ('I Before E Except After C', 'Who Do You Kill?', and 'My Child On Monday Morning') and who, if Scott had got his way, would've fallen in love with Scott's character.
I think “a lot” is probably stretching it. Sure, you had Western morality tales where a white lead took on white baddies bullying a Chinese, Mexican or Native American character (often one-off guest stars, sometimes played by white people). And there were other progressive programs like I Spy. But TOS was pretty darn progressive in terms of representation for its time. Not only are Sulu and Uhura regulars, in positions of importance, but their depictions aren’t defined by their races (unlike even well-intentioned characters like Tonto). And this egalitarian view of the future extends to guest stars like William Marshall, whose race is entirely irrelevant to the fact that Daystrom is a genius in his field. The fact that Trek treats this type of thing so nonchalantly is exactly what makes it notable for its era. In retrospect, there’s way more power in that than in sledgehammer stuff like Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.
I don’t think we need to sell Trek short just because some fans want to overstate its influence. It certainly helped lead a dramatic change in American television that was taking place in the period.
There's acknowledgement and then there's overstating, the latter of which has been going on too long and which is annoying some fans as mentioned above.
Make the person of color an alien and you've got Star Trek.
"Regulars" might be a stretch. Their importance was often just flipping a switch and reciting a line about phasers, helm or hailing frequencies. Shows like Hogan's Heroes, Mission: Impossible and the aforementioned I Spy did better by their POC characters. None of those characters were defined by their race, either.
Tonto was a product of the previous generation.
I think it was part of a general movement.
Mission: Impossible and
I Spy's POC characters made sense; Hogan's Heroes' POC actually didn't (the U.S.'s armed forces wasn't desegregated
until 1948.) At least
Combat! and
12 O'Clock High made sense by having no people of color on both shows, although both could've at least had an episode featuring an appearance by an all black outfit like
The Red Ball Express,
the 761st Tank Battalion (aka
the Black Panthers), on an episode of
Combat!, and
the 332rd Expeditionary Operations Group and the 477th Bombardment Group on an episode of
12 O'Clock High.
How many POC characters did those shows have? How many were women? “Had a black character” was progressive for the time, but Star Trek envisioned something more. And that’s what, three shows? That’s not what I’d call “a lot,” and it doesn’t change the fact that the vast majority of programs of the era were lily white.
You’re right that there was improving representation in the late ‘60's. (“Julia,” from 1968, is a good example, though largely forgotten.) But, again, Trek can be notable without being “the only” or even “the first.”
As I said above, there's acknowledgement and then there's overstating, the other going on too long.
Star Trek didn't really "envision" anything in that regard since the inclusion of POC characters was in fact a network mandate, the thinking being that including people of color in the show would encourage people of color to watch the show and buy products being advertised in the commercial breaks. The franchise has just been spending the past five decades patting itself on the back for doing something the Network Suits wanted them to do anyway.
And which was done already in 1963-1964 on the show I mentioned above.
In fairness, though, it was the early fans that saw something special about Trek, including its seeming inclusiveness and political awareness. There were no I Spy or Julia conventions in the years after those shows were cancelled. No outpouring of fan mail prevented East Side/West Side from being canceled.* Did Roddenberry in particular take advantage of this synergy to further his career as a barnstorming philosopher after his pilots kept getting rejected? Of course he did. And in the years since, have Trek’s corporate masters build on the sometimes naive love of the show in order to sell more stuff? By all means.
Whatever strange alchemy gave power to the phrase “Star Trek Lives!”, however symbiotic the relationship was between fandom and rights-holders, the fans have a share in that. Trek has done more good than harm for many people, myself included, whatever the cause of its continued viability.
*The fan mail drive was a fortuitous publicity stunt given that the third season was probably already ordered. It’s simply another example of the suits (whoever they were at the moment), using the genuine affection multitudes had for this particular commercial property for purposes that benefited both producer and fan.
A TV show that has a ton of fans who wrote to its network to save it does not make that show automatically more special than others that were on the air at the time, especially if others had accomplished more than it did in a particular aspect.
My point is they did better with their characters than Star Trek did. They weren't just filling seats like Uhura and Sulu. Cosby was the co-lead in I Spy. Morris and Dixon were in the opening credits of their respective shows not listed under "featuring" at the close of the show.
My "a lot" was in reference to the exploration of things like racism, prejudice and other social justice themes not about the number of shows with POC as characters.
^Exactly.
In the category of characters who weren't defined by the actor's race, my go-to example would be Sammy Davis Jr.'s guest appearances on The Rifleman, several years before Trek. He played two different renowned gunslingers, and--unrealistic as it was for the setting--the characters' skin color never came up.
Never knew about that one.
I would never deny that the diversity displayed on Trek meant something and was inspirational in its time...it's just that decades of building up the myth of Trek Exceptionalism has resulted in it being given credit for lots of things that it didn't do first or best. It was part of the zeitgeist of its time, but it wasn't the trailblazer that it's been retroactively built up to have been.
^Again, exactly that.
