Orci talks about Star Trek 3
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Huh?
Fans? you mean a loud minority of female fans?
Do people really dance around the idea of people seeing kirk and spock in a sexual relationship?
Do people really dance around the idea of people seeing gay-relationship in Star Trek movies?
"Oh, please, make Sulu a gay! What? Demora? Oh, no problem, she is an adopted child."
"Oh, please, make McCoy a gay. Married? Oh, well... Maybe he is bi? And... that divorce... Yup! He is the best candidate for gay character!"
What a nonsense!
There are NO gay-characters in the TOS-crew (original one).
Why do we need gay-character in nuTrek?
I seriously don't understand it. Someone, help me.
We don't "need" gay characters in nuTrek, but if the filmmakers wanted to introduce a gay character, I wouldn't be against it. Trek has always been notable for its progressive perespective, so far, gay/bi characters have been featured in DS9.
Need? Not sure that we need one. I'm sure we didn't need an outsider as a science officer or an Asian helmsman or an black woman as a communications officer or a Russian navigator or a blind flight controller or a former enemy as security chief or a former terrorist as a first officer.
Star Trek (and many of its fans) looks flat-footed and scared when it comes to the issue of Gay folks. It has become the conservative establishment entertainment that folks like Roddenberry, Justman, Coon and Fontana were up against in the 1960's.
Star Trek used to dare to be different, now it largely relies on an aging fanbase to sell movie tickets and trinkets to because it is happy with what it is.
It is time to shake up the status quo.
Huh?
Fans? you mean a loud minority of female fans?
Do people really dance around the idea of people seeing kirk and spock in a sexual relationship?
Do people really dance around the idea of people seeing gay-relationship in Star Trek movies?
"Oh, please, make Sulu a gay! What? Demora? Oh, no problem, she is an adopted child."
"Oh, please, make McCoy a gay. Married? Oh, well... Maybe he is bi? And... that divorce... Yup! He is the best candidate for gay character!"
What a nonsense!
There are NO gay-characters in the TOS-crew (original one).
Why do we need gay-character in nuTrek?
I seriously don't understand it. Someone, help me.
A gay relationship is not the issue. there is no need to turn straight characters who are already in love with women into gays. This is not about a gay relationship and you know it, this is about trying to make your fanfics canon but it is called fanfics for a reason.
Carol is in star trek 3. It is clear that she and jim would have something. maybe david would be a girl in this reality called Dana.
Spock and Uhura are together and why I dislike their relationship in star trek into darkness, I still think they make one of the best and original star trek couples of all time if you judge the romance only on star trek 2009.
Watching spock and uhura from star trek 2009 is like watching a JRR Tolkien sci-fi romance on screen. It is far superior to any of the Kirk and Spock fanfics that girls have written...sorry.
(JRR Tolkien is the author of Lord of the Rings).
Why should a romance like that just randomly get destroyed just to push two characters into a gay relationship?
That is the real nonsense to me.
I also cringe when I hear its about a gay couple. its like fans seems to select their social issues and ignore other obvious social issue.
Spock is with Uhura , they are an interracial and interspecies couple. In addition to this Spock and Uhura are minorities (He is half vulcan and half human and she is black).
This is already a bold and fresh thing to do and quite unexpected considering how the norm and political correct thing will be for uhura and kirk to get together or at least have sex but that never happened. The hero did not get the girl.
Both characters at some point will experience prejudice even in the 24th century. So Spock/Uhura being together makes them have a lot more in common than just the pretty boy and pretty girl getting together syndrome.
Sorry but I do not feel comfortable in breaking an interracial couple of two minority characters just to push a gay couple when the characters are not actually gay.
Kirk is a ladies magnet and Spock is constantly attracted to women. Zaraeth, Leia etc.
All that can not just be ignored just to push kirk and spock in a gay affair when they have called eachother friends. It is plain silly. Majority of trek fans have never agree with this theory only a loud minority of female fans would.
So it will be best it stays in female slash fan fictions.
Gay characters should be in trek for the sake of the plot and not for the sake of making a statement.
This is why TOS Uhura was so groundbreaking in the 60s.
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Huh?
Fans? you mean a loud minority of female fans?
Do people really dance around the idea of people seeing kirk and spock in a sexual relationship?
Do people really dance around the idea of people seeing gay-relationship in Star Trek movies?
"Oh, please, make Sulu a gay! What? Demora? Oh, no problem, she is an adopted child."
"Oh, please, make McCoy a gay. Married? Oh, well... Maybe he is bi? And... that divorce... Yup! He is the best candidate for gay character!"
What a nonsense!
There are NO gay-characters in the TOS-crew (original one).
Why do we need gay-character in nuTrek?
I seriously don't understand it. Someone, help me.
We don't "need" gay characters in nuTrek, but if the filmmakers wanted to introduce a gay character, I wouldn't be against it. Trek has always been notable for its progressive perespective, so far, gay/bi characters have been featured in DS9.
Except there's nothing progressive about it. If anything, I would think it would evoke a reaction of, "Well, finally!" Now, if it had been done on TOS, or even with a regular character from day one in TNG, the former would've been progressive, and the latter would've been at least keeping up with more open-minded TV shows of the day.
Wait a minute. You're saying Uhura, whose claim to fame is "hailing frequencies open", was there for the plot? What plot was served by there being a black female comm officer that couldn't be served by any other actor or actress of any ethnicity?
The bullshit is getting mighty deep in here.
Why does she have to be adopted? There are ways around that problem in 2014.And there is no onscreen evidence that supports Sulu was ever in a relationship with a woman.
Again. That sort of thing happens in 2014. It's not even all that uncommon.
How do you know?
Also. This isn't the original one.
I think people get the character of uhura confused. Her character for that time was groundbreaking.
Uhura was not a maid or a mammy or a slave. these where the only roles for black actresses in the 60s. So for her to just be a woman in a tv series were she was not in this low class role was groundbreaking.
Her most famous scenes in trek including her interacting confidently with two white male leads. the kiss she had with kirk and that song she sings about spock having devil ears...charlie x... I think?
Uhura was still held back in the 60s but she was quite memorable and this helped a lot of black actresses.
Whoopi Goldberg went into acting because she was inspired by Uhura, Halle Berry sites uhura as one of her inspirations as well.
So yes, Uhura was groundbreaking for the 60s. I stand by that statement.
Nice try at backpeddling. You say that there shouldn't be gay characters "for the sake of making a statement" then go on to laud Uhura, who was there to make a statement (and to sell dish soap to black families).
But she wasn't uniquely so. Networks and advertisers in the '60s had figured out a lesson that they seemed to have forgotten again until the past couple of years: That minorities spend money on products too, and so diverse casting is profitable. There were a number of contemporaries of TOS that also had strong, prominent black leads who got a lot more to do than Uhura did -- most notably Bill Cosby on I Spy, which predated TOS, and Greg Morris on Mission: Impossible, which premiered in the same year, as well as Diahann Carroll as the title character in the sitcom Julia, which premiered only 2 years after TOS. Plus others like Ivan Dixon in Hogan's Heroes, Don Marshall in Land of the Giants, Clarence Williams III in The Mod Squad, etc.
So the real groundbreaking role for African-Americans was Cosby's role in I Spy. Uhura may have been groundbreaking for black women, but she was severely underutilized compared to other black series leads at the same time -- actors who actually were series leads rather than just recurring guest stars who spent most of their time in the background. Indeed, there were plenty of shows whose female stars got a lot more to do than Uhura as well. The progressiveness of TOS relative to its television context has been greatly exaggerated, as part of the self-generated myth of Gene Roddenberry as a prophet transforming the television landscape and defying the ignorance and pettiness of the evil network executives. The fact is, the executives asked him to give the Enterprise an ethnically diverse cast, he responded with an all-white cast in "The Cage," and they made him go back and get it right the second time. Roddenberry talked a good game about racial and gender equality, but he didn't really live up to his own hype.
This looks like an interesting article on the TV landscape for black characters in the late '60s, though I haven't had time to do more than skim it:
http://jfredmacdonald.com/bawtv/bawtv10.htm
No no.I am not backpeddling, I think you have misunderstood me. Uhura was not there to make a statement in the sense of her saying..hey , I am black look at me. she was just a starfleet officer doing her job. her race was never usually talked about unless that episode were Lincoln visited trek and called her a word I may not be allowed to type here.
its the same with a gay character. we do not need a gay character to say....hey look at me, I am gay.
a gay character should just be there to do his star fleet job, his sexuality should never be brought up all the time or be the focus point, like uhura's race was never brought up all the time or a focus point.
Uhura was a black, female, commissioned officer respected by her captain and peers. For 60's television, especially in the climate of the 60's, that was indeed grounbreaking.
And if I recall correctly, she even had to assume command of the Enterprise temporarily in TAS.
And if I recall correctly, she even had to assume command of the Enterprise temporarily in TAS.
See... this is the tricky part. How do you know that they're gay then? Unlike different races, there are no distinguishing features that say "hey, I'm gay!"
So either you have to show them in a romantic relationship or have them make an off-hand remark about their same sex partner.
No, it wasn't as Christopher pointed out several posts ago.
I think what made Uhura inspirational was not that she was a black woman on TV, it was that in the future black women would be among the astronauts exploring the galaxy. It was a very important statement to the black community at the time, so much that MLK persuaded Nichols to not leave the show because it was inspiring young black women like Whoopi. We shouldn't exaggerate how important the role was, but let's not marginalize how important it was in the eyes of the black community.
Really not. The point where people get frothing at the mouth about interracial couples on tv is a decade or two behind us already. There's absolutely nothing 'bold' or 'fresh' about Spock/uhura (except for the fact that it's the first time time the character of spock has actually been shown in a real relationship). There's also no reason whatsoever why it would be 'politically correct' for kirk and Uhura to be together. And there is, in fact, no conclusive evidence for any of the TOS characters that proves they have no interest at all in the same sex (although Kirk certainly does have an extremely strong interest in the opposite sex).
Worth repeating.
Meh. The King story is true, but its true importance beyond Nichols staying on the show has probably been exaggerated. (And if she left, how do we know she wouldn't have been replaced by another black actor?)
Even the PBS "Pioneers of Television" link I give below says she was the first African-American woman in a lead role on television, which is not accurate.
In the TV show "Room 222", a contemporary of TOS, Denise Nicholas's character was a lead. She played a black female teacher at a predominantly white (though mixed race) California high school. The lead in the show, Lloyd Haynes, was also black. The rest of the main cast was white except for one male student. To apply the TOS logic, who knows how many African Americans were inspired into roles as teachers by watching that show? Why not?
After being mostly shut out of TV in the 1950s, by the mid and late 1960s, African-Americans were showing up on TV in larger and larger numbers. Bill Cosby had his own show by 1969. Flip Wilson got a show in 1970. Besides Diahann Carroll (mentioned in Christopher's post), Leslie Uggams got her own show in 1969.
The entire Nichelle Nichols story is only a part of the slow leak in the dam holding back black actors on TV that more or less burst by the early 1970s. Nichols was part of an early group of black actors on TV who landed good "race neutral" roles in the 1960s, but she was not alone as a groundbreaker.
Here's the link to the PBS write-up I mentioned above:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/pioneers-of-television/pioneering-people/nichelle-nichols/
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My point was that having a black woman be one of the astronauts in the future was inspiring, not they there was merely a black woman in the cast. Uhura was never a lead, but her part was inspiring to many people. It showed we finally got past all the problems of the 1960s, that it never had to be addressed speaks how much we've moved on. Sure, other programs would have black actors, but they were in contemporary settings, they tell you what we should be at that time, but then you have Trek saying what we really could be. Combine her with all the other character types like Chekov and and Sulu not playing up an accent, it's a pretty cool thing to see. Doesn't matter whether Roddenberry actually planned that or not, it inspired a lot of people that things can be better.
I think only a minority can really understand how much the crumbs of representation can mean.
When I heard Whoppi tell the story of how excited she was to see a black lady on television who wasn't a maid, I completely understood, because I'd had similar reactions to the once rare appearance of gay people on television. It was an event, because it wasn't something you'd take for granted. It is important to see people like yourself in the media, because when you don't, that sends a message that you're invisible, you don't belong.
When I heard Whoppi tell the story of how excited she was to see a black lady on television who wasn't a maid, I completely understood, because I'd had similar reactions to the once rare appearance of gay people on television. It was an event, because it wasn't something you'd take for granted. It is important to see people like yourself in the media, because when you don't, that sends a message that you're invisible, you don't belong.
My whole point is that her inclusion wasn't driven by plot considerations. So I think it is disingenuous for some to claim that a gay character should only be there if he/she serves the plot.
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