Excerpt from ‘Star Trek: The Official Guide to the Animated Series’
If the point of this is to draw the false conclusion that TOS was checking boxes as much as modern Trek, it’s simpleminded and wrong. TOS was acknowledging social issues back in the pre-metrics era, before the media industry even drew up the checklist. Back In the '60s it was Roddenberry and a few others wanting the show to do some responsible things. Today the “thought” process aims to identify social cohorts that generate enough buzz among consumers to be worth pandering to.
If I’m understanding your post correctly, you’re saying that ‘60s Trek had representation because it was the right thing to do, while modern Trek has it because it believes it is more profitable. That leaves me with two death-of-the-author type questions:
- How do you know the motivations behind these decisions?
- If representation is a good thing for the show to have, why does the motivation behind its inclusion matter?
- Roddenberry’s desire to include social commentary in TOS has been discussed for decades and is well known.
- Representation that cares about the issues tends to be more honest and true than the tokenism and hand-puppet waving that more typically come from targeting a consumer audience.
Representation is not pandering.
And yet for some reason the word “tokenism” exists.
Thank God they returned as Uhura and Sulu respectively. Just imagine if they cross cast and had Takei do Uhura.
Malicious compliands would likely not have worked there ;)
You got me – Nimoy probably
If AI wasn’t so horrible for the environment, this would have been a pretty funny thing to have it simulate.
