Star Trek & politics

[Moontanman]

While watching episodes on net flix last night I realized yet another connection between politics and Star Trek. In the old show the Klingons were supposed to be the Soviet Union not so thinly veiled but i was watching Voyager and realized that the Ferengi are a satirized version of the Republican party!

 

Anyone else notice such comparisons between various races in Star Trek and our reality?

 

I have been trying to figure out who the Romulans are but so far no sure ideas. of course there are many....

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek_races

 

Of the many of course just a few are described in detail.

 

Vulcans

 

Borg

 

Andorians

 

Betaziod

 

Cardassian

 

Orion

 

The list is long but how many are really just parodies of countries or political parties we already have?

 

I know I'm bored...

[ecoli]

This is worth a read for Trekkies: Economics of Star Trek

[Moontanman]

I have to admit I am a Trekie, I'd rather a janitor on the Star Ship Enterprise than POTUS...

[swansont]

A good friend of mine from high school wrote for ST:TNG. He made several comments about the social commentary of the show. The parallels usually aren't all that subtle.

[Janus]

While watching episodes on net flix last night I realized yet another connection between politics and Star Trek. In the old show the Klingons were supposed to be the Soviet Union not so thinly veiled but i was watching Voyager and realized that the Ferengi are a satirized version of the Republican party!

 

 

I think the Ferengi was more of a case of Gene having a little fun. Back in the days of the original series, He used to have a lot of issue with standards and practices as to what he could do on the show. One of the rules at the time was that Big Business could never be portrayed as the villain. So when he got the chance in STTNG, he created an entire race of uber-capitalists and made them the bad guys.

 

He did something similar early in the first season with Data. After Star Trek, Gene made a pilot for a proposed series called "The Questor Tapes". The premise was that, in some point in our prehistory, an alien race put an android on earth live among us, watch over us and prod our civilization in the right direction when needed. When this android reached a certain point, it built its own replacement, and there have been many "generations" of androids since then. The show starts with the activation of the last android. Unfortunately, his predecessor ceased functioning before he completed the work and the new android awoke without human emotions (sound familiar?).

The show was supposed to revolve around the android helping humanity avoid various disasters etc, while the android struggled to learn emotion.

 

Okay, so in the pilot, there was a scene in which the android was trying to elicit information about his creator from a young woman. The original scene had him seducing her. (There is even a line about his being "fully functional"). The network suits threw a fit. You couldn't have a machine having sex with woman on TV if if it does happen off screen. So this was cut.

 

So what does Gene do? In only the second episode of TNG, he has Data sleep with Tasha Yar. He even keeps the line about being fully functional.

[swansont]

Kinda funny that Gene Roddenberry wrote a letter while he was still trying to pitch the original series, outlining the compromises he would not make to sell the show

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/11/maybe-its-just-catharsis-but-i-think.html

 

In other words, am wide open to criticism and suggestions but not from those who think answers lie in things like giving somewhat [sic] aboard a dog, or adding a cute eleven-year-old boy to the crew.

 

And, of course, we got Wesley Crusher in TNG.

[Janus]

Kinda funny that Gene Roddenberry wrote a letter while he was still trying to pitch the original series, outlining the compromises he would not make to sell the show

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/11/maybe-its-just-catharsis-but-i-think.html

 

 

 

And, of course, we got Wesley Crusher in TNG.

 

 

Wesley was a bit of self indulgence on Gene's part. He was based on Gene at that age. In this, Gene ran afoul of what was typically a trait of fan-fiction, essentially putting the author into the story. ( though for some inexplicable reason, a great number of these works of fan-fiction were written by females and usually involved being stranded on a planet with Spock and a sudden onset of Pon far.)

 

One of the issues that Gene simply refused to bend, even under pressure from the network, was on that of smoking in the series. This was when you could still advertise tobacco on TV, and the network felt that if you saw member of the crew light up from time to time, it would help land some sponsors. They even went as far to suggest the Spock could smoke some type of "space cigar".

[Moontanman]

In Star Trek Enterprise they even had a captains dog...