I don't really see it. Ransom is a toxic, horny dudebro; Shax is comically aggressive to aliens but incredibly caring and supportive of his crewmembers.
Spoilers Star Trek: Lower Decks 1x10 - "No Small Parts"
- Thread starter Commander Richard
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I don't really see it. Ransom is a toxic, horny dudebro; Shax is comically aggressive to aliens but incredibly caring and supportive of his crewmembers.
I hope Fred Tatasciore who voiced Shaxs gets to come back and voice the new character that replaces Shaxs.
Yeah, Ransom is a Riker parody and Shaxs is a Worf parody. They both are presented as heterosexual guys who enjoy a good fight, but that's about it.
Even in that context, I don't see Shaxs acting the way Ransom did when fighting Vindor, or Ransom asking to blow up a ship because he's been a good boy this month.
Idk - First officer ransom came across to me as what everyone thought The Riker character would be at the start of TNG's first season:
"James T. Kirk in the 24th century"
And that's how he came across to me in the first season of Star Trek: Lower Decks; and that may be why he comes across as a Riker parody to some.
German-American actor Henry Brandon as the title character in Drums of Fu Manchu (1940) and out of makeup:
Greek-Canadian actor John Colicos as Kor in Star Trek: "Errand of Mercy" (1967) and later as Count Baltar in Battlestar Galactica (c. 1978-79):
The word for the makeup designs used on these white actors is "Yellowface."
The original script for "Errand of Mercy" has stage directions that, upon introducing the Klingons, explicitly state, "We see the Klingons are Orientals." (Source.).
Which is all fine and good, except that we tend to use hindsight to denigrate the efforts of those people who actually lived during those times, by being judgemental as hell while using post-modern deconstructionism as the method of criticism, which I loathe very much. Am I glad we moved away from such depictions? Certainly. But to assign some moral imperative is silly, since we were neither there nor aware that such depictions were "harmful" at that time.
And the irony is that future generations will be using the same methods to deem which aspects of "present" modern culture are "problematic", using the same methods we are using the judge the production values of Klingon make-up of the past.
10/10
Great season finale. I watched it 3 times because it moves so fast and I was sure I missed stuff. Love the Titan coming in guns blazing, the music cues, Mariner taking command and not messing it up. Even when they warp into the debris field and Ransom immediately orders shields and a red alert, which is what is supposed to happen, it all just clicked. These showrunners get Trek. Promote them to DSC and PIC asap.
Great season finale. I watched it 3 times because it moves so fast and I was sure I missed stuff. Love the Titan coming in guns blazing, the music cues, Mariner taking command and not messing it up. Even when they warp into the debris field and Ransom immediately orders shields and a red alert, which is what is supposed to happen, it all just clicked. These showrunners get Trek. Promote them to DSC and PIC asap.
Acknowledging that something from the past is racist is not the same thing as saying that the people doing it were monsters without virtues or merit. I love John Colicos's performances as Kor; the man was an amazing actor! Look at his work in "Once More Unto the Breech" -- he's great!
But he was, like the vast majority of white people in North America in the 1960s, some degree of racist in his ideas on how to develop the Klingon makeup.
The two things do not nullify each other.
The purpose of history is not to empathize or venerate people who lived in the past. The purpose of the study of history is to accurately understand it and learn from it; one of the things that stems from that is that we can't be afraid to understand that something was racist whether or not people at the time understood it as such.
Who's "we?" White people? Why do you assume I'm white?
Do you think that maybe there were people who objected to such depictions at the time? Do you think that maybe there were people who were active in trying to persuade others that those depictions were harmful? (I promise you: there were.)
Good! There's a lot of fucked-up shit in our modern culture today. We can't improve society if we're never willing to acknowledge the fucked-up bullshit of people in the past.
ETA:
In any event, how we feel about acknowledging that the Klingon design of TOS is racist, is an entirely different question from the original topic: "Is the Klingon makeup design of TOS a Yellow Peril racial stereotype?"
The answer is, yes, it absolutely was.
Anyone at the time who saw John Wayne play Genghis Khan (The Conqueror) or Mickey Rooney play Mr. Yunioshi (Breakfast at Tiffany's) should've been able to figure out just how wrong it was.
Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi is the gold standard for yellowface clearly. John Wayne in The Conquer is interesting. It's a famous example, but since John Wayne is just playing himself like he does in every movie, and as he's not wearing any ethnic makeup, other than a tiny moustache, I'm not sure it technically qualifies as yellowface, regardless of how bad an idea it was in the first place.
^^^
And who didn't love seeing Genghis Khan speak with a distinctly Western U.S. cowboy accent with lines like: "Yes, my mother..." ?
I’ve always liked the Duke, but yeah, that was some horrible shit-casting for that movie that should NEVER have happened! 
Perfect 10.
TOS, Titan, TATV reference, and above all else PACKEDS. That episode was clearly written by someone on this forum
TOS, Titan, TATV reference, and above all else PACKEDS. That episode was clearly written by someone on this forum
Not sure "exploring sci-fi concepts" was ever high on the list of things Star Trek was out to do.
The fact that you used the term "White people" makes your argument itself "racist". I was speaking in general terms, thinking, as a student of history, modern people should use context when learning from the past. Your response proved my point, when you did assign a moral imperative. Personally? I chuck it up as nothing more than ignorance.
Then you should travel back in time, and show the way- oh, you can't. Because, as you and I both know, hindsight is 20/20.
1) To be clear, I am not in the habit of capitalizing "white" in the context of referring to the racial group unless I have placed the word at the beginning of a sentence. While some mainstream news outlets have begun capitalizing "white" in concert with the decision to begin capitalizing "Black," I object to the practice of capitalizing "white" because the entire concept of "whiteness" is a political construct that was created to justify the oppression of Africans and Native Americans. Indeed, the idea that the peoples of Europe constitute a "race" called "white" did not exist before 1500 CE.
2) Pointing out that racism exists or existed is not itself racist.
3) Racism is a system of power designed to oppress people on the basis of a perceived, attributed, or asserted "race." There currently exist no systems of power designed to so oppress the various ethnicities that are commonly considered to be "white."
1) Again, who were you thinking of when you said "... we were neither there nor aware that such depictions were 'harmful' at that time?" Who's "we" in that statement?
2) In general terms as a student of history, you should be aware that there have always been people protesting against things like Yellowface and Blackface, and there have always been people trying to educate others on the harmful effects of such stereotypes. That too is the context of the past.
3) Pointing out that something is racist is not itself actually a value judgment. If we, for instance, read about ancient Romans' stereotypes of peoples of Germanic peoples, we can objectively recognize that the Romans were racist against Germanics without this meaning we're condemning the Romans per se.
4) However, I do make a value judgment about the racism in TOS, since we are talking about a television series that we all still watch and care about. And I make no qualms about my assertion that the racism in TOS is unacceptable to a modern audience. We can recognize racism in TOS while still appreciating that the creators were not monsters and even fought against racism in other contexts, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't acknowledge the racism that was there. You cannot avoid the mistakes of the past if you refuse to a) make objective evaluations about the practices of the past no matter how those evaluations make us feel, and b) to take moral stances on the basis of those objective evaluations.
5) Why did you use quotation marks around the word "harmful?"
Ignorance is often an excuse used for racist behavior, but it never holds water. If it were just ignorance, why didn't Hollywood creators hire actual Asian people to play Asian characters in the mid-20th Century? It makes more sense to hire people from the community you're portraying if you don't know much about that community.
It also doesn't pass the smell test. People in Hollywood knew full well that Blackface was racist -- there were activists telling them that all the time; the history of Blackface's use in minstrel shows was well-documented. You gonna tell me Selznik knew Blackface was offensive but didn't know Yellowface was? C'mon. Hollywood knew what was up. They just chose to embrace racist depictions of marginalized groups because those depictions sold well -- because racism was widespread.
Again, this is not about "hindsight." Anti-racist activism has a very long history. There were, for instance, a hell of a lot of people protesting against Gone With the Wind and Song of the South in the 1940s for perpetuating racist stereotypes and tropes.
Shax I think is also "what if [TNG] Worf was not a jobber?"
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