One's who've been hit by a lorry, sure...I'm sure there are Cockneys who sound like Dick Van Dyke, too.
Is Scotty's accent actually bad?
- Thread starter Dr Helen Noel
- Start date
Two (possibly three) out of the main seven cast members is too many?
KIRK - Says he was born on Earth in "The Gamesters of Triskelion," and he tells Dr. Gillian Taylor "I'm from Iowa, I only work in outer space" in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Although Riverside, Iowa is widely regarded as Kirk's birthplace, AFAIK that's never been officially confirmed onscreen. (If I'm wrong on this, someone please correct me.)
SPOCK - Born on Vulcan.
MCCOY - The TOS Writers' Guide says "He was born in Georgia in the United States and can be something of a gallant Southern Gentleman in social life, particularly with females. When the moment is right, a trace of his Southern accent will be heard."
SCOTTY - Calls himself "An old Aberdeen pub crawler" in "Wolf in the Fold." The TOS Writers' Guide says he has "an accent that drips of heather and the Highlands."
SULU - Mixed heritage, predominately Japanese. Possibly American (see below). He doesn't have a Japanese surname, which I'd attribute to the "As Long As it Sounds Foreign" era in which TOS was made.
UHURA - Described as being "born in the United States of Africa" in the TOS Writers' Guide.
CHEKOV - Obviously he was a Russian Inwention.
You could make a case for recurring characters Chapel and Rand being included in the list of Americans, I suppose, but if you're going to include them, you should also count Mr. Kyle, played by the English actor John Winston (who's apparently described as Australian in some tie-in material - I guess some folks couldn't place Winston's accent). He appeared in 11 episodes of TOS, which is more than Rand (8), but less than Chapel (25). That would leave us with four (possibly five) Americans out of ten regular and recurring characters, so half at best.
EDIT: I momentarily forgot about Eddie Paskey as Mr. Leslie. Since he appeared in 58 episodes of TOS and had dialogue in at least one ("This Side of Paradise"), I suppose he should be included on the list of presumptive Americans, too. So that brings it to 6 Americans out of 11 if you're counting recurring characters. (No, I'm not going count Billy Blackburn. Although Memory Alpha says he's seen in 63 episodes, he didn't have any dialogue as Hadley AFAIK, and I have to draw the line somewhere.)
And really, the only reason that they even established San Francisco as Sulu's birthplace in STIV was to set up a scene of Sulu meeting his great-great-grandfather as a child in 1986. (The scene was axed when the child actor they hired froze up on camera and they ran out of time at the shooting location.) So Sulu is American by happenstance more than anything.
Before that, Sulu could've been American or Japanese by birth. The third revision of the TOS Writers' Guide says Sulu is "Mixed oriental in ancestry, Japanese predominating, Sulu is contemporary American in speech and manner." (I'm not going to type out the next line, as it's NOT aged well.) But I doubt that anybody on TOS thought about Sulu's background any more than that.
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Yes, there are many countries more populous than the U.S.A.
Consider how something such as Pacific Rim did it, for a far better effect.
Of course, it wasn't simply the issue that too many of the characters were nominally from the U.S.A., but that even those that weren't spoke with North-American accents. Why does Uhura not have one of the accents common to Africa for instance?
Of course, Picard must be the most English Frenchman to have ever walked the Earth, given the mild linguistic annoyance France as a culture has with the English language and the fact that it has largely replaced French as a language of European diplomacy, I'm sure many a Frenchman did not take too kindly to it.
You're comparing a movie made in 2013 with a TV series which ran from 1966-1969? Considering when the original series was made, you're lucky they actually cast an Asian as Sulu instead of just hiring a white guy and adding eye prosthetics , yellow face paint and a thin mustache.
I still cringe when I see Mexican born Ricardo Montalban as a Japanese crime boss on Hawaii Five-O.
I wonder if there was some amount of overcompensation with the apparent cultural "Americanness" of Uhura and Chekov, to get away from stereotypical portrayals in past movies and television. This was only a few years after regrettable portrayals such as Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's, and there was also a history of racist portrayals of native African characters in jungle/treasure-hunting/adventure type movies, and whatnot.
We do see African art in Uhura's quarters, and it shown very briefly that she speaks Swahili, and there's Sulu facing off against the illusory Samurai, but those were the only cultural nods that come to mind for those two characters.
On the other hand, the foreign Caucasian characters (Scotty and Chekov) are often stereotypical, even cartoonish and bordering on caricature for comedic value. There's Scotty's constant drinking... Scotch, in particular. And he likes kilts and Claymore swords. And we find it amusing and endearing that Chekov talks the way he does and claims that everything is a Russian invention. But I think it would be a different matter if Sulu spoke with a thick accent and was constantly claiming that everything was a Japanese invention.
Kor
We do see African art in Uhura's quarters, and it shown very briefly that she speaks Swahili, and there's Sulu facing off against the illusory Samurai, but those were the only cultural nods that come to mind for those two characters.
On the other hand, the foreign Caucasian characters (Scotty and Chekov) are often stereotypical, even cartoonish and bordering on caricature for comedic value. There's Scotty's constant drinking... Scotch, in particular. And he likes kilts and Claymore swords. And we find it amusing and endearing that Chekov talks the way he does and claims that everything is a Russian invention. But I think it would be a different matter if Sulu spoke with a thick accent and was constantly claiming that everything was a Japanese invention.
Kor
In this case, time is a particularly poor excuse. The post you quoted pointed out that T.O.S. was actually one of the least offenders and all that came after it was even more America-centric, much of which produced after Pacific Rim.
I do not particularly swallow this when quite a bit of fiction written in the 1800s already did it better. Have we forgotten that for instance, the crew of the Nautilus was quite global as well?
This is hardly an issue of Zeitgeist, which is all to often used as an excuse where contemporaries were not bound by it; this is simply an issue of a a worldview that does not extend outside of one's backyard, that some have, and some have not, regardless of the time that bore them.
I very much find myself agreeing and I also wonder whether these so-called “races” played a factor indeed. It's a bit too coincidental perhaps that the two characters who breathed their ethnicity to comical degrees were both Indigenous European in appearance.
It is obviously a small sample size, so it could be coincidental, but it feels as though perhaps they thought that they would “need it” to “look foreign" and that it so often happens, a man is treated as a “foreigner” though is born and raised a brother, for nothing but the color of his skin.
I find that, say, Tom Paris and Julian Bashir hit a particular sweet spot where there ethnicity is visible, but not to an extreme degree that becomes implausible. — On the issue of skin color, I have read that Bashir was the first English character on U.S.A. television who does not look entirely indigenously European but I'm not sure how true that would be.
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Or browned-down to play a Sikh? Just as bad.
That doesn't link directly to anything specific.
- China
- India
- United States
- Indonesia
- Brazil
- Pakistan
- Nigeria
- Bangladesh
- Russia
- Mexico
- Japan
You and I both know the number is two, both having about three times the population of the U.S.A., neither having a single cast member in T.O.S..
Lt. Rahda, a female character of Indian descent, occupied the helm in "That Which Survives" and "Requiem for Methuselah."
Also a Mister Singh and a Captain Chandra.
Chandra's actor was an Afghan in the 10-03-66 episode of A Family Affair (rerun this week)!
Sulu was conceived as a "pan-Asian" (which, at the time, would be East Asian) so that "covers" Japan/China/Korea. That he is played by an actor of Japanese descent, or that he later became a character of primarily Japanese descent is immaterial in the '66-69 context.
For television of the time, Trek's casting was extremely progressive. Compared to contemporary litSF, it was about par.
They show ISS which is possibly one of the greatest Russian/US/European/Canadian/Japanese space achievements. They even show a slightly better version of ISS than the one we actually got. Gagarin's achievement was great, but there was not room to put that in there, and frankly Apollo was a lot more important. Most viewers would not have known who Gagarin was just from an image of him , spacesuit or not, anyway. And if you're going to representative on that, you have to really include a V-2 and who wants to go that far?
Who got represented:
Micronesian crabclaw sail raft (may be Polynesian, don't sue me)
British warship Enterprise. GB
Hydrogen balloon. Never explicitly stated but probably supposed to be the Piccard/Kipfer first journey to the stratosphere. Swiss (with Belgian funding).
Mercury Redstone. USA.
Spirit of St. Louis. USA.
OV-101 Enterprise. USA.
Lockheed Electra with Earhart. USA.
Wright Brothers biplane. USA.
Bell X-1. USA.
Personal submarine. MA says its Deepflight 1. I am not sure about that. Unk.
Apollo 11: USA
Apollo 14: USA
OV-103 Discovery (most likely). USA.
Pathfinder/Sojourner USA
OV-104 Atlantis USA.
ISS: USA, Russia, Canada, Japan, ESA
OV-165 "Venturestar" looking shuttle. Unk but
according to PIC, NASA
SS Emmette. Unk
NX-1: United Earth.
One of us knew it, at any rate. The other should probably have taken time to check their figures before making a rash assertion.
I'm sure Mickey Rooney would fit the budget.
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