One of the pieces I get the most correspondence on is “5 Messed Up Things You Never Noticed About Star Trek”. People really seemed to like it, so I decided to do a follow up post with more Trek talk. It is one of my favorite things to write about, so this works out nicely.
#1 William Shatner didn’t just agree to perform TV’s first interracial kiss, he insisted.
Any Trekker worth his balls knows Star Trek is one of the most progressive anthologies in all of literature. It engages its fans on a level usually reserved for religion and mythos. It was one of the first scifi franchises that painted an optimistic view of the future, in which human kind has grown beyond their capacity for self destruction, transcended most of their bigoted and violent ways, and acts as a beacon of moral righteousness to a turbulent galaxy. The Original Series was the first television show to portray members of all races and nationalities working together as equals. It was the first to feature an Asian American actor (George Takei) as anything but a cartoon of Asian languages and culture (People didn’t know it at the time, but he was also gay). Roddenberry attributed head script writer, Dorothy Catherine Fontana, as “D.C. Fontana” to fool the studios, who wouldn’t hire female writers. It was the first show to portray a black actor doing anything but carrying trays and dancing for nickels, the first to openly criticize racism (TOS: S03E15 “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”), and it was the setting for TV’s first interracial kiss.
Many people know this, not many know that it was originally supposed to be Spock who kissed Uhura. When William Shatner read the script, he insisted that if anyone was going to perform the first interracial kiss in TV history, it was going to be him. Keep in mind, this wasn’t the 21st century. Racial tolerance wasn’t something that would help his career, being a civil rights pioneer wasn’t as attractive in the 1960’s zeitgeist as it is today, so in volunteering, he was making a pretty serious statement, and taking a real risk.
2. Gene Roddenberry once unknowingly shushed Isaac Asimov for talking during an episode.
When Gene Roddenberry screened the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” at the World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland, he was a nervous wreck. He’d already had the first Pilot scrapped by the networks for being too sexy, he was still trying to get the series picked up, and he was in a room filled with fans and science fiction legends alike. He’d be a nervous wreck until he could see their reaction.
When the episode started, some asshole could be heard loudly criticizing the scientific feasibility of the plot. Roddenberry, in an uncharacteristic outburst of anger , quickly and harshly shushed them. Understandable. What he didn’t know was that asshole was legendary SciFi novelist Isaac Asimov. Asimov later had a change of heart and became an outspoken fan and occasional contributor for the show. Roddenberry, by all accounts, felt like an idiot and apologized as soon as he realized who he’d told to shut up.
3. Nobody anticipated the tremendous audience affection for Spock.
In the 60’s it wasn’t uncommon for networks to add characters to shows specifically to be the “Fonzie”. Every show at the time had to have the beloved character that all the boys wanted to emulate and all the girls wanted to fornicate. Spock was NOT meant to be one of those characters. Kirk was.
When the series first started, NBC officials hated the very idea of Spock. He was originally meant to have bright red skin, but the network said hell no:
They even demanded Spock’s pointy eyebrows and ears be airbrushed and diminished slightly in publicity photography because they were afraid people might think he too closely resembles the Devil.
To their surprise and horror, Spock quickly became adored by the series’ fans, and a no-shit sex symbol among the female viewers. Women, it seems, found Spock’s stoic strength and casual brilliance to be a turn on. This actually led to trouble, since by becoming the fan favorite, Nimoy had inadvertently upstaged the intended Fonzie, William Shatner, causing some on-set tension between the actors. This may also have been the real reason Shatner insisted on being the first interracial smoocher on television, despite the possible backlash. He didn’t want to be upstaged.
Long after the series had run its course, long after the movies had moved on, even to this day, people love Spock. They brought Nimoy back in the Next Generation. They brought him back for all the TOS era movies, and even the new Abrams movies, despite already having recast the entire crew INCLUDING Spock with younger actors.
Nimoy was the only person, it seems, who didn’t like Spock. He tried to get Spock killed in Wrath of Khan, but the test audience backlash was so severe, the news leaked, fans took out full page ads in trade magazines urging the studios to reconsider, and Nimoy got death threats. It got so bad, the studio re-shot the ending to make it slightly more uplifting, and immediately started writing his resurrection into the next film.
The When Leonard Nimoy died last year I was so emotionally devastated I literally had to leave work in the middle of the day. I‘ve watched friends die AT AND DURING WORK and not had the same reaction. The outpouring of love from the fans is something all Star Trek actors notice and often remark on, but none of them come close to the genuine love the audience always had for this pointy eared demon-man.
4. Nichelle Nichols wanted to quit after the first season, until a very special fan asked her nicely to stay.
As I mentioned earlier, Star Trek was the very first TV series to feature a black actor in an ordinary role. She wasn’t a whore, or a criminal, or a servant or a slave. Not only was she on a starship, she was an officer. A BRIDGE officer. Nobody even seemed to notice her skin color. (Except Abraham Lincoln, who called her a “Charming Negress” but he gets a pass, because emancipation. Also, 3rd season, yuck.)
It was a minor role in the show, but a major leap forward for black people. Still, the show was plagued with hardship from the beginning, the network was making their lives hard, and at the end of the first season, Nichelle Nichols told Gene Roddenberry she wouldn’t be returning for a second, because she wanted to return to her first love: Musical Theater.
Shortly thereafter, she was asked to meet a huge fan at an NAACP fundraiser at UCLA. He told her very simply that she inspired him and that she was the reason Star Trek was one of the few shows his children were allowed to watch. When she informed him she was leaving, he said “Please, you can’t. Don’t you understand that for the first time, we’re seen as we should be seen? You don’t have a black role. You have an equal role.”
She immediately contacted Gene and told him she’d be staying. The man’s words probably wouldn’t have had the same impact if he hadn’t been Dr. Martin Luther King himself.
5. One of Pixar’s first projects was a scene in Wrath of Khan
This scene from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan includes the first fully CGI sequence ever used in a major motion picture. It was put together by a small production house that later formed the basis of Pixar.
BONUS…
Star Trek: Into Darkness turned an obscure joke Walter Koenig made 3 decades ago into a major plot point. (and possibly killed a man as a result?)
Walter Koenig wasn’t in the Episode “Space Seed”, in which Khan Noonien Singh, the character that was to become the villain in the second motion picture, makes his only appearance in the series. Yet years later, in 1982, when the Wrath of Khan was released, and Chekov meets Khan on screen for the first time ever, he immediately recognizes him and seems familiar with the events that transpired in the episode.
After the release of Khan in 1982, when asked by a particularly vigilant fan (as Trekkers tend to be) how Chekov could have known Khan if he weren’t on the Enterprise at the time of the incident, Koenig joked “He was there, he was just in engineering the whole time.”
31 years later, Into Darkness was released, and to pay homage to this legend, Scotty was temporarily fired as Chief Engineer and replaced with Chekov while Khan was aboard. Kirk even added the cryptic line “Go put on a red shirt” and the shot hung on a slightly worried expression on Chekov’s face.
Every Trekker knows the curse of the red shirt. If you’re on the Enterprise, your shirt is red and your name isn’t Scotty, your days are numbered. So it wasn’t long after Anton Yelchin’s untimely death at the age of 27 that people started blaming the curse of the red shirt.
