Excerpt from 'Star Trek: The Official Guide to the Animated Series'

Never heard that. Thanks for posting.

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.

Arf arf

Well said

I do agree with you that the modern iterations of Trek are not nearly as progressive relative to our time as TOS was in the 60s.

It’s only logical.

Representation is not pandering.

imo the best thing that modern trek has going for it is the fact that it's continued in the spirit of the original and sought to represent people otherwise largely ignored on the mainstream cultural landscape. berman-era trek actors would have supported lgbt+ story lines except it had a berman-shaped problem: berman. one of the reasons ds9 is so beloved is because it found creative ways to get around this. i fear with the takeover of skydance this may be wittled away and we'll be left with nothing but shitty action-adventure copraganda à la paramount but put it in space.

Thank God they returned as Uhura and Sulu respectively. Just imagine if they cross cast and had Takei do Uhura.

ohh myyy

I took it more as demonstrating to the weirdos that have recently been up in arms that Star Trek became too "woke" that they're idiots who've been missing what's right in front of them the whole time. I don't even like Star Trek (No knock to those who do, but I grew up around a fair number of committed Trekkies, and none of their "Oh, you'll see if you watch this episode!" worked. Not saying it's bad, just not for me.), and I've known for ages it had plenty of progressive elements. I read this the same as people poking fun at Republicans who listen to Rage Against the Machine and unironically think they aren't parts of the machine being raged against.

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:

1. How do you know the motivations behind these decisions?
2. If representation is a good thing for the show to have, why does the motivation behind its inclusion matter?

Leonard Nimoy was by all accounts a real one. Just a hell of a mensch.

1. Roddenberry's desire to include social commentary in TOS has been discussed for decades and is well known.
2. 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.

The "weirdos" (which include Patrick Stewart and other alums) aren't objecting to the content but to the preachy, heavy-handed delivery. Roddenberry commented on the ridiculousness of racism with two characters hating each other for being the wrong color on the wrong side. The Picard s2 writers had characters walk around present-day LA saying things like, "There's so much the social injustice!" The complaint about modern Trek is that it tries too hard to be "woke" and not hard enough to be good science fiction.

And yet for some reason the word "tokenism" exists.

That's a potentially valid complaint, I was thinking more of people just complaining that Star Trek is bad just because it's become too woke and liberal, though. People like my father will just moan, "I don't know why they have to make it political with this stuff, Star Trek never used to do that." if he sees an episode with more than one black character in it. There are some real idiots out there.

There are idiots out there, but also a lot of people we assume are idiots because for some reason we want to draw the worst possible conclusion and define them as The Enemy.

I read that a couple times trying to figure out what was wrong with Morn.