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To Boldly Go

Whose Idea Was It For Star Trek To Be More Racially Diverse, Gene Roddenberry Or NBC?

by Jill Pantozzi | 4:03 pm, May 19th, 2012


Author and film historian Mark Clark was promoting his new book, Star Trek FAQ: Everything Left to Know About the First Voyages of the Starship Enterprise, on Alpha Waves Radio. The book runs the gamut of information about Gene Roddenberry’s classic sci-fi series and is aimed at both casual and die-hard fans. But one particular bit of information that came out of Clark’s research is an alternate theory on who really pushed for the cast of the show to be racially diverse. Read on to find out what Clark believes really happened. 

Roddenberry intended on Star Trek to be a highly progressive show that would allow him to make statements about the current political and cultural environment of the world. And sure enough he did in many ways, most obviously his racially diverse cast in a 1966 television world. But the original pilot wasn’t so diverse and there’s been a lot of discussion through the years about how and why that changed.

Airlock Alpha writes, “One of those myths is what motivated Star Trek to become ethnically diverse with talent like Nichelle Nichols and George Takei helping to dump the racial typecasting evident in 1960s television and movies. If you ask fans, many will tell you that it was Roddenberry himself who championed the Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations mentality that so defines the generation now.”

But according to Clark, that’s not exactly what happened.

“The idea that Gene Roddenberry faced massive resistance from NBC into putting an African-American woman on the bridge of the Enterprise, or an Asian-Ameican man, when in fact, NBC was encouraging Roddenberry to hire minorities,” Clark told Alpha Waves Radio. “Especially at that time, NBC was the first network to become all-color. And in tandem to that, it was presenting itself as the ‘Network of Color,’ so to speak.”

We know there was a lot of playing around with different ideas in the early days. For one, Nichols read for the role of Spock when she auditioned, a role that was originally meant for a women. Roddenberry’s future wife, Majel Barrett, was meant to play “Number One,” second in command to the captain but that was changed after the pilot. And that’s something else Clark pointed to for his theory.

“Look at ‘The Cage,’ the original pilot for the series,” he said. “If you look at the crew on the bridge of that starship, it’s Majel Barrett and a bunch of white guys.”

Whether it was Roddenberry’s idea, NBC’s or a combination of them both, the diversity happened, and that’s what’s important in my mind. Does this idea change how you see Roddenberry or Star Trek at all?

(via Blastr)

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  • http://twitter.com/Deggsy Derek O’Brien

    If it’s a choice between believing the studios and believing Roddenberry, I’ll lean towards the studios. I grew up listening to the hype about The Great Bird of the Galaxy and all the struggles he had with the networks to get the show on the air and keep it there. Stories he told over the succeeding decades. So many lies. 
    This great “creator” was good at two things: gathering together genuine talent (look at the episodes he personally wrote for the Original Series, and you see the most hackneyed, sexist, illogical offerings, the worst of the bunch), and stealing from said talent – sorry, I mean acquiring the rights to their work, and taking credit for them and never acknowledging the sources, ever.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_MYC65UZW7OMSYCL4YRFH4XKKKQ Brian

    ”
    I grew up listening to the hype about The Great Bird of the Galaxy”

    There’s a great running gag on The Post Atomic Horror podcast about how no one actually called him that. It’s a good show. They’re reviewing every trek episode of every series in order, and an interesting side effect is that it’s made them very anti-Gene for the reasons you mentioned.

  • http://twitter.com/FroWillis Sarah

    I read somewhere that Nichols had to be hired as a “guest” actress and way paid per day she worked and therefore ended up being paid more than if the studio shad simply hired her. I’ll have to do some research into that. 

    Part of me is whatevs, Nichelle Nichols is a badass. 

  • http://twitter.com/FroWillis Sarah

    Yeah googling Nichelle Nichols “day worker” brings up the same blurb that she was hired as a day worker and therefore under union rules made more money. I’m skeptical that NBC was behind it, considering Martin Luther King Jr. had to encourage Nichols to stay on Star Trek.

  • Anonymous

    I am waiting patiently for someone to give Nichelle Nichols a truly great and powerful movie role, on par with the stuff Tarantino has done for actors, and let people see how good she can be.

    I have one, but I fear I’ll never be in a position to give it to her.

  • Anonymous

    In my interveiw with Airlock Alpha, I didn’t mean to imply that Roddenberry did not support diversity; clearly, he did. But the idea (fostered by Roddenberry) that he had to battle networks executives to place Nichelle Nicholes, and before her Lloyd Haynes, on the Enterprise bridge is erroneous.

    On 8/17/65, NBC VP Mort Werner sent a 2-page letter to Roddenberry and all other NBC producers encouraging them to cast minorities, especially ”negroes,” and explaining the network’s desire to reach out to minority viewers. The letter begins by noting that “one American in every eight is non-white” and that “it is reasonable to assume that this percentage also applies to the television audience.” Even prior to “Star Trek,” NBC was the first network to actively reach out to this audience with shows like “I Spy,” co-starring Bill Cosby.

    I applaud Roddenberry for presenting a post-racial vision of the future. Still, this is one of several instances where the Great Bird unfairly vilified NBC to burnish his own image.

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