• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

The First Interracial Kiss on (American) Television

DS9Sega said:
Not half a million by a long shot. The first season campaign was small, and the second season (and largest) campaign apparently yielded 114,667 letters (click for an article about some myths about Star Trek's run on NBC, including discussion about demographics).
Click to expand...
I can only tell you that my brother and mother both wrote letters. We had gotten a "how to" package with instructions for contacting NBC (I was fairly young and, sadly, not nearly capable of penning a convincing letter). In '73 we began attending conventions though, one or more of which featured personal appearances by the Trimbles and others who helped organize the various "Save Star Trek" campaigns which, if memory serves, actually began during the second season and resulted in the network agreeing to the production of a third after having received some 450,000 letters. It was the third season campaign which, of course, failed.
 
DS9Sega said:
^^^Where are you getting these numbers?
Click to expand...
Only from my memory (so it's entirely possible that they could be off). I do recall pretty clearly though that back during those early conventions there were wild over-exaggerations of the numbers - some folks claiming that a million letters had gone out. If you scour the Web you can still find some sites that make reference to that hugely exaggerated number.

BJo Trimble participated in a panel discussion at one of my earliest cons and I remember her quashing the rumors that a million letters were sent. She indicated that the 2nd season "Save Star Trek" campaign had actually produced somewhere in the neighborhood of 450,000 letters. I opted to use the phrase "more than half a million" in my earlier post to describe the sum total of letters from that campaign and the failed 3rd season campaign.

Please understand though, even when I was younger and had a better memory I was still only human. Now, I'm more human than ever!! LOL! So I could be getting it wrong. I was really only using it as an example that the extraordinary devotion shown by fans is part of what made TOS revolutionary.
 
DS9Sega said:
Not half a million by a long shot. The first season campaign was small, and the second season (and largest) campaign apparently yielded 114,667 letters (click for an article about some myths about Star Trek's run on NBC, including discussion about demographics).
Click to expand...

Inside Star Trek: The Real Story quotes an even smaller figure than that one -- 12,000 pieces of mail -- although it also points out that those numbers were not insignificant (they were just far below the "one million" figure that Roddenberry stuck with for the rest of his life).
 
lurok said:
... Still, even in this day and age, race/racism/xenophobia/etc, etc could be regarded as a major issue...
Click to expand...

While racism IS a major issue in the US, it's more often conflagrated with a bigger issue: classism.

Merky said:
beforeafter31.jpg
Click to expand...

This is depressing. The top pic is so much sexier.

indranee said:
...I'm not sure what Shatner's ethnicity is....
Click to expand...

Canadian? :p
 
Who said anything about critics? I was discussing the factuality of some Trek myths. Ergo your reply was a non-sequitur to what you quoted.
 
DS9Sega said:
Who said anything about critics? I was discussing the factuality of some Trek myths. Ergo your reply was a non-sequitur to what you quoted.
Click to expand...
I think DS9Sega has touched on something important though. Since the common theme throughout this thread has been the "revolutionary" nature of Star Trek (or lack there of) - doesn't the fact that there are so many myths surrounding it support the idea that it was, indeed, revolutionary?

Some of the myths about ST may be just that, while others may be true. But, in many cases, they've gone beyond the realm of Trek and become part of popular culture. A perfect example being the interracial kiss.
 
I think that's more a factor of an active and vocal fan-base that is eager to embrace stories that make the thing they love to seem better or more meaningful. I don't mean to knock anyone's accomplishments, but I'd rather those being lauded for being groundbreaking actually had earned the accolades.
 
To give credit where it's due, and without overstating it, just look at most of the science fiction produced before and since. Uhura and Sulu may have been "tokens" by modern standards, but at least they were there in the future--which is more than than you can say for most of the classic sf films and tv series of the fifties, sixties, and even the seventies. Look at Forbidden Planet, The Thing from Another World, IT! The Terror from Beyond Space, Lost in Space, Logan's Run, and even the original Star Wars. There's nary a non-white face to be seen in any of them, let along respected Starfleet officers exploring the universe of the twenty-third century.

As I mentioned recently in another thread, not too long ago I was watching THE GREEN SLIME, a "futuristic" scifi movie, set on a space station, made a few years after Star Trek debuted--and, ohmigod, it clearly never occurred to anyone involved in the production that the future would not be run by rugged, white American males--and that women would be anything but secretaries and nurses who screamed and panicked at the first sign of danger. Trust me, STAR TREK looked positively "revolutionary" by comparison.

Trek's efforts at diversity may have been sometimes been a case of two steps forward, one step back, but at least the show was consciously making an effort to present a future that didn't look like Mad Men in space.

I was watching "Court Martial" again the other day, and couldn't help noticing that, beyond Commodore Stone, there's also appears to be an Indian officer on the tribunal and an Asian woman, identified as the head of the Enterprise's personnel department, among the witnesses, all of which goes without comment. Not bad for a sci-fi show in 1966!
 
Last edited:
Points to ponder:

By definition, something revolutionary must bring about major or fundamental changes or, at the very least, be innovative. So given those criteria, was Star Trek revolutionary? It would seem so.

The "active and vocal" fan base referenced above went just a bit beyond what the world of television (or the world at large for that matter) had experienced up to that time. People's lives were changed. There are more examples than I can count of individuals who were positively affected by Star Trek - some who pursued careers they never thought they could, some who crossed color/gender barriers they never thought they could, some who were near suicide and reconsidered, some who were learning disabled and suddenly showed signs of improvement, and so on. NASA expanded their astronaut recruiting to include women and minorities as a direct result of Nichele Nichols' involvement. Need I go on?

I think the trouble is, when something is so very revolutionary as Star Trek obviously was, we feel like we need to credit one individual or a group who was involved in the making of it. So arguments spring up about who deserves the accolades...and there is no one correct answer to that. Who knows if the creators (Roddenberry, et al) had any conscious thoughts of doing something revolutionary? The bottom line is they did it - whether it was intentional or accidental seems secondary at this point.

“Come quick! There’s a black lady on television and she ain’t no maid!” – Whoopi Goldberg at 9 years old, watching Star Trek.
 
There is no question that Star Trek TOS was a revolutionary series, but it is also true that it's fans in their overzealousness to sing its praises, have made claims for it being the first show to do this or that - claims that just ain't so.
One example of this, I've seen several different sources on the web cire the claim that "The City on the Edge of Forever" was the first time the word "hell" was used on an American TV show - a claim that is completely, utterly, and demonstrably false. Hell, I can name ten American TV episode TITLES which used the word "hell", as well as at least a dozen instances of dialogue previous to 1967.
 
^ It's not a matter of just using the word "hell," it's the way it was used, i.e., it was the first time on a prime time American network television show, someone said, "Let's get the hell out of here." Not the standard "heck" or "blazes" or "the devil", but flat out, non-euphemized, "let's get the hell out of here."
 
That may be true (and I have no idea if it is), but that particular nuance seems to be lost on most sites that opt for the myth. Of course, Star Trek had already used the word "hell" in an episode during the first season -- "The Alternative Factor" -- though the context was, as you indicate, different.
 
Captain Robert April said:
^ It's not a matter of just using the word "hell," it's the way it was used, i.e., it was the first time on a prime time American network television show, someone said, "Let's get the hell out of here." Not the standard "heck" or "blazes" or "the devil", but flat out, non-euphemized, "let's get the hell out of here."
Click to expand...
But where's the proof of that? Who claimed it was so and how did they back it up?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top