Vital Viewing (Hex and Violence Edition)

 

Halloween is not too far off, and what better symbol of the holiday than a witch? Here's one of cinema's scariest. If fact, she just might be the gold (or mold) standard for cinematic scary witches:

Did you notice how the Tin Man put out the fire with his oil can hat? That's because a fire needs oxygen or else it's likely to die out. Nice to know that even in a land of witches and talking scarecrows, the basic laws of science still apply. 

By the time she died at age 82 in 1985, Cleveland native Margaret Hamilton had lived through decades of TV showings of 1939's The Wizard of Oz, and was well-aware that her Wicked Witch of the West character had become a cultural icon. It didn't seem to bother her any. Also, cultural icons often attract the attention of other cultural icons, which seems to be the case in this clip that pairs Hamilton with a man who was considered anything but wicked: 

  

Mister Rogers seems positively gleeful at the prospect of this sweet old lady transforming herself into a wicked witch. Walk on the wild side, Fred!

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood wasn't the only 1970s TV instance of Margaret Hamilton donning the pointy black hat and the rest of the black ensemble. Here she is alongside a man with a wit so wicked it could have turned Dorothy's face as red as her ruby slippers:

Nice place for the clip to end, huh? I take what YouTube gives me, folks. I did see this special when I was in high school, but I've long since forgotten what kind of truck driver Paul Lynde turned into. Since I don't want you to feel deprived, let's just say this came next:

Betty White, bless her soul, got her wish.  

..............................................................................................................................................

 Now, let's look at a different witch. Well, I thought she was a witch at first because there's a black cat, and the lady herself is dressed in black, but that's where the similarity ends:

And I don't care if she's a witch or not. She's still magical.

Mitzi Gaynor 1931-2024

Awesome Audio (All's Wells That Ends Welles Edition)

 

Huh? As if things weren't bad enough in the Ukraine and the Middle East, now we have to worry about the Thames Valley as well?

Now we're getting somewhere. First published in serialized form in a pair of U.K. and U.S. magazines in 1887, and then as a hardcovered novel in 1888, Wells' tale of an extraterrestrial invasion of England, if it didn't invent (there were earlier examples here and there) then certainly popularized the idea that there were races of beings on other planets, and it was only a matter of time before we'd find them or they'd find us. And no matter who found who, we Earthlings better be careful, because it went without saying (for no other reason than Wells had so convincingly said it first) that the otherworldly peeps resided in a much more technologically advanced society than our own. Now, why exactly should that be? Why couldn't Mars or any other planet have little green hunter-gatherers? Wells never said, but some scholars have theorized that, despite War of the Worlds straight-faced prose, his intent may have been satirical. In other words, Wells wanted to take us humans down a notch or two, probably figuring we had gotten pretty cocky in the last few decades of the Victorian era as the technology of this planet was becoming increasingly advanced, what with such inventions as Edison's light bulb, Bell's telephone, and...  

...Marconi's radio. Now, the above photo is not from the Victorian era, as attested by that young woman's hemline. It just that from the time something is invented, 1901 in the case of radio, to the time it becomes commonplace may take a while. By the 1930s, radio had become commonplace, the internet of its era. And like the internet, content sometimes went viral. 

 

Which brings us to this fellow. A Midwestern child prodigy whose father made a fortune inventing a bicycle lamp, Orson Welles had become a leading light of Broadway and the Manhattan theatrical scene as a whole when he was barely out of his teens, first as an actor and then increasingly as a writer, director, and producer. In 1937, Welles and fellow Federal Theatre Project director John Houseman founded their own repertory company The Mercury Theatre, the success of which attracted the attention of the Columbia Broadcast System. At the age of 23 Welles was already a relatively old hand at radio, having played the title character on the popular series The Shadow, when CBS asked him and Houseman to come up with something, which turned out to be Mercury Theatre of the Air. The format was that every week would be a radio adaptation of a well-known literary work--Treasure Island, The Count of Monte Cristo, etc.--with Welles playing the lead. Some months into doing this show, Welles got an idea. Along with The Shadow, he had also done quite of bit of acting on the popular program The March of Time, which often depicted historical events in the form of a radio news broadcast. Why not do the same thing with a classic work of fiction? The War of the Worlds was chosen, its setting changed and updated from Victorian England to New Deal USA. 

Airing on the day before Halloween on October 30, 1938, what listeners would have heard first was the announcer welcoming you to another edition of Mercury Theatre on the Air and that this week's episode would be a dramatization of the H.G. Wells classic. This was followed by Orson Welles himself reading an updated version of the first few paragraphs of the Wells novel, which then gives way to "Ricky Ricardo Ramon Raquello and His Orchestra" supposedly broadcast live from a NYC hotel. Unfortunately for poor Mr. Raquello, his orchestrations kept getting interrupted by breaking news reports of objects falling from the sky. Here's one such interruption: 

After that news reports start coming fast and furious and regular broadcasting is permanently preempted for the night and maybe forever as the seriousness of the threat to the nation soon becomes clear. And I do mean soon. According to Houseman: "Our actual broadcasting time, from the first mention of the meteorites to the fall of New York City, was less than forty minutes. During that time, men travelled long distances, large bodies of troops were mobilized, cabinet meetings were held, savage battles fought on land and in the air. And millions of people accepted it—emotionally if not logically." As civilization falls, so too does the "Inter-Continental Radio News." The last thing one hears before the station break, the real station break, is a lone ham radio operator asking if anyone is out there. After the commercial, and another reminder from the announcer that this is just fiction, the final twenty minutes of the play reverts back to Orson Welles' first-person narration, as his character wanders the ruins of civilization, encountering a right-wing whack job along the way, in much the same way as the novel's narrator did, albeit this time in a much more abbreviated fashion. The story ends relatively happily when Welles character, as did his counterpart in the novel, discovers all the Martians have dropped dead (I'll get to why in a moment.) At this point, Welles the survivor of an apocalypse gives way to Welles the radio personality as he cheerfully delivers his goodbyes for the night:

Then all hell broke loose:

Really? The entire nation panicked? Well, that's what everyone thought at the time...until you try and find the person willing to go on record and admit that they panicked. It's always the other fellow who think it's real, while you know better. Actually, more people that night were listening to radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergan (just try and catch him moving his lips) and knew nothing of it...until they read the next day's papers. Still the idea that there was a mass panic must have come from somewhere. Academics far and wide have spent the last 85 years trying to answer that question. The consensus seems to be that in every major radio market the broadcast aired, there were a few people here and there who took it to be real, of maybe merely wondered if it was real, and called up their local police department, their local fire department, and most significantly, their local newspaper, to find out just what the hell was going on. So it made headlines, the newsworthiness of the event, some have alleged, exacerbated by the fact that print media had been losing advertising revenue to the radio upstart. Payback time may have been a motive on the part of the press. As stories of people committing suicide rather than be captives of the Martians swirled about, Orson Welles himself thought at first it was end of his career. Both the suicides and end of his career proved to be false. Already a public figure, Welles became even more of a public figure. A star in fact. Hollywood came calling. He produced, directed, co-wrote and starred in a major motion picture, Citizen Kane, the theme of which was...

...media manipulation.

As for H.G. Wells, he was still alive during all of this. Three years after the radio broadcast, Wells and Welles finally met, in San Antonio, Texas. Orson was there for a town hall meeting, and H.G. to address a gathering of the United States Brewers Association (science fiction and alcohol--both has its effects on the imagination.) Here they both are on--where else?--the radio:

H.G. Wells died at the age of 79 in 1946, by which time atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. War of the Worlds minus the Martians. As for Orson Welles, his next movie after Citizen Kane was The Magnificent Ambersons. He produced, directed, wrote, and, though not seen on screen this time around, provided his signature narration. At least he did all those things until the film was taken out of his hands by an impatient RKO. From then on in the word "sporadic" best describes the rest of Welles' career. To be sure there were acting-directing highs, such as The Lady from Shanghai and A Touch of Evil. Solely as an actor, he turned in a memorable performance as the likably unscrupulousness Harry Lime in The Third Man. But Welles just couldn't abide the studio system, even as a combination of antitrust rulings and television was gradually tearing that system apart. During the 1960s and '70, Welles' self-directed movies were independent productions. I've seen a few of these and they certainly held my attention, but such arty fare as an adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Trial or the Shakespearean amalgamation Chimes at Midnight, in which Welles played Falstaff, were hardly commercial crowd-pleasers. And these films could be few and far between as Welles was aways scrambling to find someone to financially back them. That's when he wasn't scrambling to pay back the IRS, a not uncommon celebrity chore. An endless appetite for food and drink led to enormous weight gain, though facially at least a certain handsomeness always remained. As did his sense of humor. The final decade-and-half of his life saw him involved with such disparate undertakings as narrating a Bugs Bunny documentary; appearances on the Dean Martin Celebrity Roasts, where he once hilariously upbraided Dino for his debauched lifestyle; Paul Masson commercials ("we will sell no wine before its time"); guesting on, and even guest-hosting, Johhny Carson's and Merv Griffin's talk shows; a cameo in a Muppets movie; a bravura performance as an exasperated judge in Butterfly, the film that made Pia Zadora, however briefly, a household name; and the very last time his distinctive voice was ever heard on film, in this case film animation, as Unicron in The Transformers: The Movie. The man who had once so memorably manipulated the media in the end was manipulated by the media himself, which he seemed to find amusing. Orson Welles died in 1985 at the age of 70.

Now I'd like to return briefly to War of the Worlds. Remember me telling you the Martians were all dead at the story's conclusion? So how did they die? Infectious diseases. The extraterrestrial's immune systems couldn't handle all the pathogens found here on Earth.

This past July Congress held hearings on the question of Unidentified Flying Objects, or UFOs for short. While NASA officials conceded they could not identify many of these flying objects, there was no reason to believe they were visitors from another planet. Well, that's one denial that went over like a lead weather balloon. If anything, it increased suspicions that this world is being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than ours.  And if so, how do we know their intentions are benign? That they won't stir up as much trouble as the extraterrestrials did in H.G. Wells' novel? What can we do to stop them?

 Maybe this fellow can persuade the outer space invaders not to take their shots. After all, he and his ilk have already convinced enough earthbound humans not to.  

 

Preschool Confidential

 

You think this guy is scary? Aw, come on, he's got nothing on...

...THE KILLER!

I wrote about Jerry Lee Lewis (1935-2022) here.

Quips and Quotations (Haunted Wanted Edition)

 

Why are people afraid of ghosts? "Ooh, no, I wouldn’t want to see one! I’d be too scared"– accompanied by a tremolo of fear in the voice – is the common reaction. This puzzles me. I’d think anyone would welcome the opportunity. I’ve never heard of a ghost hurting anybody.

--Dick Cavett

Where other people see monsters, I guess I see hope.

--Fox Mulder

Mulder doesn't believe outright. He wants to believe. That sums up Mulder for me.

--Chris Carter, creator and producer of The X-Files.

Sherman Duffy of the New York Herald once said, a newspaperman is the loneliest guy on earth. Socially he ranks somewhere between a hooker and a bartender. Spiritually he stands with Galileo, because he knows the world is round...

...not that it matters much when his editor knows it's flat.

--Carl Kolchak, hero of the 1972 made-for TV movie The Night Stalker, from which was spun off the regrettably short-lived series Kolchak: The Night Stalker.

 

The Slight Spark of Life

 

The above is a excerpt from a diary kept by the late 18th century-early 19th century English  intellectual radical William Godwin, covering the last few days of August and the first few days of September in the year 1797. The fourth entry down on the left-hand side describes what was going on in Godwin's life on the 30th, exactly 223 years ago today. It reads:

Mary, p. 116. Barnes R Fell & Dyson calls: dine at Reveley's: Fenwicks & M. sup: Blenkinsop. Birth  of Mary, 20 minutes after 11 at night. From 7 to 10, Evesham Buildings.

So what's all that mean? Well, scholars who have looked into the matter believe Mary, p.116  refers to a 1788 novel Godwin was reading titled Mary: A Fiction, written by the 18th century radical feminist (by the standards of the day) writer Mary Wollstonecraft, whom Godwin had in fact married only five months earlier. Barnes is crossed out so we won't worry about that individual (if it is indeed an individual.) Fell, Dyson, Reveley, Fenwick and M. were all friends or acquaintances of Godwin's. Scholars can't identify Blenkinsop, but Godwin apparently ate supper with him (or her.) Skipping the second sentence for just a moment, Evesham Buildings refers to Godwin's residence, where he was at from 7 to 10. AM or PM? Assuming this diary entry is chronological in nature, I'm thinking it's AM (in which case it's now the 31st.) I say that because Mary is born 20 minutes after 11 at night, hence PM, and we all know 11 comes after 7 (and, for that matter, 10.) So who is Mary? Obviously not Wollstonecraft, who was by then 38. In fact, it's Wollstonecraft's and Godfrey's daughter, the reason the two tied the knot in the first place (though if you do the math, you'll see it's a somewhat belated knot.)

I'd like to report that Godwin's, Wollstonecraft's, and little Mary's story from that point on was one of familial bliss, but, unfortunately, I can't, for 11 days later there was this entry:

                 20 minutes before 8. _________________________ 

 Godwin was now a widower with one daughter and and one stepdaughter (Fanny, Wollstonecraft's daughter from a previous relationship.) He soon remarried a woman with two children of her own, though young Mary was said to have had an uneasy relationship with her stepmother. Hey, it's not always the Brady Bunch.

Godwin for his part doted on Mary, plied her with books, and raised her to be a radical intellectual like himself. He did such a thorough job that she fell in love with an up-and-coming radical intellectual...

 

….Percy Shelley, who set forth his radical views in rhyme. Mary and Percy actually met through Godwin, for whom the young poet had a great deal of admiration. Godwin seems to have been less than flattered, as he opposed Mary and Percy's eventual marriage. Part of it was that Shelley, a scion of a wealthy family, had promised to pay off Godwin's many debts, only to renege after his parents cut off his purse strings. The other part was that Shelly was already married, a marriage that only ended when his wife drown herself in the Serpentine, a recreational lake in London's Hyde Park.

And so Percy and Mary tied the knot. It was said to be an open marriage, though biographers agree that  he was more enthusiastic about free love than her. Whoever they were sleeping with, when together they enjoyed each other's company. One moment of togetherness had them holed up in a Swiss chalet with Percy's good friend Lord Byron and a Doctor Polidori during a spell of particularly nasty weather. To kill time they decided each would write a horror story. Though Percy and Byron were both published writers at that point, Mary was the only one to actually finish a story. Percy liked it so much that he encouraged her to expand it into a novel. And so she did. A horror novel with an intellectual bent, though for those who haven't read it but recognize the title, it may be more resonant of black-and-white Hollywood and Halloween costumes:

These days, Mary Shelley is more well-known than either William Godwin or Mary Wollstonecraft. Still, she needed their genes. Writers are born, not made.

 

 

 .

Quips and Quotations (What--Me Scary Edition)

See the awful monster.
See the bolts in his head.
See how he kills people.
Kill, kill, kill.
The monster likes to kill.
Poor, poor monster.
The monster is sick.
Sick, sick, sick.
He wants to be cured.
The doctor cannot cure the monster.
The monster does not belong to Blue Cross.

--Larry Siegel, Mad magazine

1925-2019

Quips and Quotations (Hungarian in Hollywood Edition)

 

He always said that if he hadn't had an accent, he wouldn't have been typecast in pictures. But if he hadn't had an accent, he wouldn't have become a star by being cast as Dracula!

--Basil Rathbone

Strange New World Just Ahead, or: How to Make a Vulcan Feel at Home (Part 2 of 15)

2. The Evolution of Gene Roddenberry

I watched the 1960s on my parents television

--Ann Beattie

Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek, and was involved in some way in its various TV and movie incarnations right up to his death in 1991 at the age of 70. During that time, he or his creation was often described in the press as "optimistic", a view I'm not sure jibes with his own output on the show. Determining who did what on a TV show can be a bit tricky. Scripts are constantly re-written, and when you have a "producer", an "executive producer", and an "associate producer", as well as a "story editor", anyone of them can have a say on the finished product. Still, going by the names in the credits, I have some idea of who did what.  Roddenberry was the line-producer, or as it's called in the trade, the "showrunner", meaning he made the day-to-day decisions, for the first two pilots and ten subsequent episodes, after which he promoted himself to executive producer, which he remained for the rest series' three-year run. As a writer, his name appears on 11 episodes, including the first pilot, though in some cases he only contributed the story whereas someone else wrote the actual script. Let's see what we have:

Pretty scary stuff, for starters. The first two Star Trek episodes the public-at-large got to see were "The Man Trap" and "Charlie X", the second of which Gene Roddenberry provided the story. These are essentially little horror films. Extremely effective horror, but since when do we look toward that genre for optimism? "The Man Trap" concerns a beautiful woman who is in fact a hideous monster who sucks salt out of humans, the first in a long line of aliens on the show and in future movies that can change their appearance. Doctors looking to encourage their patients to limit their salt intake should prescribe this episode. "Charlie X", like the show's second pilot "Where No Man has Gone Before", again features a human endowed with God-like powers, this time a moody teenager named Charlie who'd been marooned on a planet since age 3. Rescued by the Antares, the crew members of that starship seem all to eager to transfer the lad to the Enterprise, speaking highly of him as they do so. The praise is to no avail, as the Antares blows up soon after. It takes awhile for Kirk and Co. to discover that it's more than hormones bothering this kid. Actually, hormones do play a part, as the teen becomes smitten with Yeoman Janice Rand (Grace Lee Whitney, the show's resident sex symbol for the first half of the first season, until it was decided that a different scantily clad female a week might work better.) He even turns another girl--one closer to his age that Kirk had fixed him up with--into a lizard as a gift for Rand. Possibly expecting flowers and candy instead, she spurns Charlie's advances, and is immediately disintegrated. An angry Charlie then goes on a rampage through the Enterprise, making more people disappear, turning others old, and--this still sends shivers down my spine--completely wiping out a young woman's face! Kirk, meanwhile, is at a loss of what to do, and Spock's no help, as Charlie's got him quoting poetry. The Thalians to the rescue! The ancient alien race had endowed Charlie with the powers as a survival skill. Now they undue all the damage (including re-materializing Rand) and decide to take Charlie back home with them, much to Kirk's protestations, as he still feels the unruly adolescent can be rehabilitated. Good luck finding a social worker willing to take that one on, not if they want to hang on to their eyes, nose, and mouth. Still, it hard not to feel sorry for Charlie as he gradually vanishes, crying out as he leaves:

"Oh, please, don't let them take me. I can't even touch them! Janice, they can't feel. Not like you! They don't love! Please, I..want..to..stay!"

From one kind of horror to another.

The remaining eight episodes Roddenberry directly oversaw in that first season aren't quite that chilling, but only the aforementioned "The Cobermite Maneuver" (not aired, perhaps tellingly, until another line producer took over) treats the Unknown as anything other than a nasty surprise. It's not for nothing you have to boldly go where no man has gone before. Monsters, the criminally insane ('Dagger of the Mind"), mad scientists ("What Are Little Girls Made Of?"), enemy aliens ("Balance of Terror"), and pimps lurk around every asteroid. Actually, "Mudd's Women", the one with the pimp, ends rather sweetly, but as it deals with prostitution, assumes outer space has a seamy as well as a scary side. As for future technology, the transporter malfunctions and we get a good (but wimpy) and evil (but macho) Captain Kirk! All Roddenberry's fatalism, as exciting as it was to watch in the comfort of one's own living room, couldn't help but have a negative impact on the way the character of Spock was written. If aliens couldn't be trusted, why trust him?

Before he became a TV writer, Roddenberry (above, center) was a cop. He worked for the Los Angeles Police Department from 1949 to 1956, around the same time another TV writer-producer (as well as actor) Jack Webb was extolling it as the very finest law enforcement had to offer in the radio and TV versions of Dragnet. Roddenberry, at first a motorcycle cop, was promoted to sergeant in 1951, and eventually became a speech writer for LAPD Chief William H. Parker. A policeman can have a skewed perspective. They deal with criminals much more than the average person (assuming the average person doesn't live in a crime-ridden neighborhood.) As Robert Ryan tells Ida Lupino in the 1951 film On Dangerous Ground: "You get so you don't trust anybody." Cops tend to be conservative in the dictionary sense of the word. Sometimes in the political sense as well.

Though it has fans across the political spectrum, Star Trek has often been described as a "liberal" show, due to such factors as women serving along side men on the Enterprise, a multicultural crew, and that Earth in the future, when it's mentioned at all, is now at peace. I think this is basically true, but it's a highly qualified liberalism.

13 years before Star Trek first went on the air.

Six years before Star Trek first went on the air.

 Three years before Star Trek first went on the air.

Roddenberry indeed may have had an enlightened view toward women. A former secretary of his, D. C. (Dorothy Catherine) Fontana, wrote many episodes, served as story editor for the second season, and was involved with several later Star Trek incarnations, including a Saturday morning animated version. That was behind the scenes. On-screen, the show's famous opening informed us that the Enterprise gang was going "...where no MAN has gone before". Now, you can chalk that up to the times (the same times that led Fontana to use initials and sometimes male aliases, such as Michael Richards), except that Star Trek is often lauded for being ahead of its time. Less than 21 years ahead. That's when Star Trek: The Next Generation changed "man" to "one". It is true that on the original series women were allowed to serve alongside men on the Enterprise, as long as they were beautiful, had great figures, and wore thigh-hugging mini-skirts. You may have objected to me referring to Susan Oliver as a "hot chick" when describing "The Cage" in Part 1 but the show pushed female pulchritude wherever it could, the various women Kirk and crew encountered on alien planets tending to dress like they came right out of a Victoria's Secret catalog. I don't want to make too much a big deal about this. The entertainment industry has always excelled at providing us with an endless parade of beautiful females, and, with less fanfare, handsome males. If we're honest with ourselves, it's one reason why we go to movies and watch TV. And, lest we forget...

...there was a Sexual Revolution going on at the time. A revolution that Star Trek couldn't help but reflect, even if the only thing NBC's Standards and Practices would allow was not the picture immediately above but merely the suggestion that Captain Kirk got some needed satisfaction on a regular basis, and especially during sweeps. I myself think the Sexual Revolution was a good thing, even a progressive thing. However, if you're not careful, the gains of one progressive movement...

 ...can sometimes interfere with those of another. How careful was Star Trek? Read on.

The last original Star Trek episode to air had an arguably anti-feminist slant as well as a "story by Gene Roddenberry" in the credits. Answering a distress signal from an archaeological planet that's been devastated by disease, Kirk beams down and finds that one of three survivors is an old flame from Starfleet Academy days, Dr. Janice Lester. Seems they split up when Kirk got to be a starship captain and she didn't. Trapping Kirk in an alien body-switching machine that she found as part of the dig, he becomes she and she becomes he. A rather radical response to thwarted ambition. Could it be that Lester suffers from gender dysphoria, that she's what was once known as transsexual, now defined as transgender, à la Chaz (Chastity) Bono, Caitlyn (Bruce) Jenner, or if you go far enough back in time, a Bronx youth named Christine (George) Jorgensen? That Lester's a man trapped in a woman's body, and this is a kind of high tech gender reassignment surgery, once known in the vernacular as a "sex change operation", that she's just performed on herself and an unwilling James T. Kirk? Except that throughout this episode she-as-he acts hysterically, or, in male chauvinist jargon, as "a typical woman", while he-as-she remains calm and resolute, i.e. stereotypically masculine, in the face of mascara-blush-and-lipsticked danger. So, in this episode's rather unique view, is Lester's real problem that she's a woman who wants to be a man but is trapped in a (stereotyped) woman's personality? I'm not even sure what that means. She could be merely a crossdresser, the alien machine the only way to get her hands on Kirk's clothes. Maybe we're better off with thwarted ambition, after all. Of course, an evil male who flunked out of the academy might behave in the same abominable manner. As a woman, however, Lester can always blame sexism. With some justification. The future here is portrayed as being just as disadvantageous toward women as the era in which the episode aired, which contradicts the more feminist view of Star Trek. As Roddenberry only wrote the story and not the actual script, and maybe wasn't around to oversee things, this originally could have had a feminist message, and that message itself got reassigned. The episode as a whole doesn't really tell you if a subservient role for women is a good or  bad thing. Once he's a man's man again, Kirk states, "Her life could have been as rich as any woman's. If only... if only..." If only what? If only Starfleet had been less sexist? Or she had stayed in the kitchen? That's not a force-field but a glass ceiling that's got hold of the Enterprise.

12 years before Star Trek first went on the air.

Three years before Star Trek first went on the air.

 

The show's on firmer ground when it comes to multiculturalism. On board the Enterprise you had a black female communications officer (Lieutenant Uhuru, played by Nichelle Nichols), an Asian senior helmsman (Sulu/George Takei), a Scottish engineer (appropriately named Scotty/James Doohan), starting in the second season, a Russian navigator (Chekov/Walter Koenig), and, of course, a Vulcan First (as well as Science) Officer. That may seem to put the show ahead of its time, until you consider the times. It was the Civil Rights Era, and that was starting to effect what you saw on TV. Bill Cosby may be a controversial figure nowadays, but a year before Star Trek first went on the air, liberals applauded the comedian as the first black man to co-star (opposite Robert Culp) in a dramatic series, I Spy. And while Hogan's Heroes may seem a couple notches below Star Trek on the profundity scale, it premiered the same year as I Spy with its own multicultural cast, which included a Brit, a Frenchman, and an African-American. The last was Ivan Dixon as Kinch,who usually did more in an average episode of his series than did Nichelle Nichol's Uhura in Trek. However, Nichols did have a groundbreaking moment that may have trumped every one of Kinch's espionage missions. She and Shatner shared network television's very first interracial kiss. Not that the characters they played wanted to as they were forced into it by a bunch of telepathic voyeurs. As for a bright future where the different races, and ethnic groups now got along as one, that was true as long as they were races and ethnic groups that had originated on Earth. In outer space they showed the same fears and distrust of the aliens they encountered as a suburban cop does toward a teenager in a hoodie. Nor was the alien they encountered every day on the deck of the Enterprise immune to such xenophobia, as Spock often faced verbal abuse by one character in particular, whom I'll get to in a later installment. This abuse may have been in the interest of good drama (and occasional comedy), which I'll also get to in Part 3, but it did make the future a bit less open-minded (but maybe more believable.) New worlds, new civilizations, new prejudices.

 Four years before Star Trek first went on the air.

Two years before Star Trek first went on the air.

War and Peace. In interviews he gave in the decades after the original Star Trek went off the year, Roddenberry insisted that Starfleet (a subsidiary of the Federation) was not a military organization and the Enterprise was not a military craft, photon bombs and phasers notwithstanding. Except that in "Errand of Mercy" the Federation and the Klingon Empire are on the verge of war, a war only averted when a God-like alien species called the Organians force a peace treaty on the would-be combatants. Despite the treaty, a state of cold war exists between the two sides for the rest of the series, as it also does between the Federation and its other major foe, the Romulans. True, peace on Earth is often alluded to on the show, meaning peace between the nations of the world, but seeing as our small blue planet has given up at least part of its sovereignty to belong to this Federation, and thus its citizens always facing the possibility of some sort of military action, I'm not sure that's something we should get all sentimental over. Not unusual for a man born in the 1920s, Roddenberry had his share of war, namely World War II, flying some 89 army combat missions in the Pacific Theater. Much later, in 1964, when he got a chance to produce his first dramatic series, The Lieutenant, he had it take place in a stateside Marines Corp base. In one episode the title character, William Rice (Gary Lockwood) defend his choice of a career in the military by stating that "as long as there is a need for a cop on the beat there will be a need for what I do."  Despite his protests to the contrary, and I do take those protests seriously, you think maybe military veteran and former cop Roddenberry saw part of the Enterprise's mission as not just exploring but policing outer space, always on alert in case war were to break out? Many episodes would lead you to think so.

In "A Private Little War", (teleplay by Gene Roddenberry) the Enterprise is on a peaceful enough mission to a primitive planet where the people still live in tribes, and the most advanced weapons are bows and arrows, mostly used for hunting. Or so Kirk and co. thought. They discover that one of those tribes now have flintlock rifles, a good thousand years ahead of schedule, and that has put a rival tribe at a disadvantage. The question of how one group of natives obtained such weapons is answered when a Klingon ship is sighted within the planet's solar system. The story then takes a rather bizarre turn as Kirk is chased by a white gorilla with a scaly back and a horn on its head. The good captain eventually dispatches the beast with his phaser, but not before getting bit in the arm. Following this, a sorceress administers a treatment that's in fact a love potion that temporarily robs Kirk of his free will. Meanwhile, back on the Enterprise, Spock is in sick bay getting slapped silly by a dumbfounded Nurse Chapel, who's only following a substitute doctor's orders. Once all this nonsense is over with, Kirk finds that the Klingons have supplied the one tribe with even more advanced weaponry and he now needs to do the same with the rest of the planet's inhabitants, lest there be a flintlock gap, adding ruefully that they're "serpents for the Garden of Eden. Beam us up, Scotty, we're very tired." Should we interpret Kirk's need for a nap as a pacifist statement? Don Ingall's original story is said to have been a allegory about the Vietnam War, going so far as to describe one character as a "Ho Chi Minh-type". Roddenberry's rewrite downplayed Vietnam (though one character does refer to the 20th century brush wars that "went on year after bloody year."), but kept the emphasis on the arms race, the Klingons a stand-in for the Russians. Ultimately, the message seems to be, if the bad guys do it, then so do we. In 1967, that was a reasonable enough stance to take. It's how the government saw it back then, as well as the mainstream press. So mainstream, in fact, did the message really need to be concealed in a science-fiction allegory so as to dodge network interference, ostensibly the reason Roddenberry created Star Trek in the first place?

If "A Private Little War" is about maintaining a balance of power, then "The Omega Glory"--this time both story and script by Gene Roddenberry--is about an imbalance. Searching for a missing starship, the Enterprise comes across a parallel Earth (one of several during the show's run) in which the Communists have won the Cold War, and the Americans, the "Yangs", are now hunter-gatherers living in the jungle. The victors, the "Kohms", are little better off as they live in a village, albeit one with no electricity or any modern convenience. The Kohms, incidentally, look Asian, an indication that Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Mihn may have given Roddenberry more than a few sleepless nights. Except the Cold-War victors are now having sleepless nights themselves, as their modest village is under siege by the Yangs (Yankees). A rogue Starfleet commander (one of several during the show's run), now sides with the Kohms, causing Kirk, somewhat inadvertently, to take up with the white savages, whom are in fact freedom-fighters, except that they're totally clueless about what freedom actually means. It's just a word that's been passed down through the centuries that they unthinkingly revere. Along with an old American flag and a copy of the Declaration of Independence that they ritually brandish while mangling the words to the Pledge of Allegiance ("Ay plegli ianectu flaggen, tupep like for stahn...") Even though time has proven this bit of paranoia wrong in at least one respect--if we Americans end up living in caves in the jungle, it's obviously not the communists that are going to drive us there--I find this episode compelling nonetheless. For all his later reputation as an optimist, Roddenberry knew how to craft one helluva post-apocalyptic dystopia (not for the last time, either--Genesis and Planet Earth, two unsold pilots of his that aired as made-for-TV movies in the 1970s, both took place in the aftermath of a nuclear war.)

When talking about war and peace and Star Trek, we shouldn't overlook this fellow, Captain James Cook (1728-1779). What does a real-life historical figure from the 18th century have to do with the fictional exploits of a bunch of fictional people living in a fictional future? Just this. It's how Gene Roddenberry derived the name "James Kirk". Furthermore, Cook left this entry in his diary: "Ambition leads me not only farther than any other man has been before me, but as far as I think it possible for man to go" which Roddenberry simplified to "where no man has gone before." In 1966, and perhaps these days as well, Cook was best known as an explorer who discovered (i.e. mapped) in whole or in part the Hawaiian Islands, the Southern Sandwich Islands, Australia (the eastern half), New Zealand (he was the first Westerner to circumnavigate it), Southeastern Alaska, the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, and thousands of miles of a then-uncharted South Pacific, along the way making numerous contributions to botany, biology, and anthropology. It's easy to see why Roddenberry might want to model his fictional protagonist on Kirk. However, what Roddenberry may not have known (though I suspect he did) is Cook didn't just discover strange new lands and new peoples, but, acting as a representative of the Royal Navy, claimed them for the British Empire, claims that occasionally came at the end of a musket or cannon. In fact, Cook was killed when he attempted to hold a Hawaiian king hostage. Now, Captain James Kirk never did anything of that sort. Still, like his quasi-namesake, he rarely came across a strange new culture ("The Return of the Archons", "A Taste of Armageddon", "This Side of Paradise", "The Apple", "A Piece of the Action", "A Private Little War", "Patterns of Force", "The Omega Glory", "Spock's Brain", "The Cloud Minders") that he didn't think could use a little improvement.

Ten years before Star Trek first went on the air.

 

 Nine years before Star Trek first went on the air.

Two years before Star Trek first went on the air.

On January 14, 1967--halfway through Star Trek's first season--somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people showed up for The Human Be-In that was held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, a stone's (or stoner's) throw from the low-rent neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury. What exactly was this Be-In? A few months earlier, California had banned lysergic acid diethylamide, a psychoactive drug better known as LSD that allowed those taking it to visit strange new worlds without having to first book passage on a starship, and so this was a protest of sorts, though pictures of the event shows very few people carrying signs. Mostly they're dancing and appear to be having a very good time. Maybe that was their way of protesting. Whatever they were doing, it caught the attention of the national, and even international, media, which tentatively portrayed the event as a humorous sideshow to the serious issues of the day. There was a problem, though. What to call all these young people? Well, just calling them young people sounds OK to me, but perhaps that wasn't good enough copy. According to the writer Tom Wolfe, who kept close tabs (no pun intended; he was strictly an observer) on this scene, a good many of those young people liked to refer to themselves as acid heads. That wouldn't do for a family publication. Nor would another term they like to use, freaks. Newspaper Readers might get the mistaken impression that 20,000 Siamese twins, hermaphrodites, and bearded ladies had shown up in Golden Gate Park. A 50-years old local columnist by the name of Herb Caen came up with a suitable alternative: hippies, and the term stuck beyond a Madison Avenue copywriter's wildest ad campaign. Within a few weeks, "hippie" had become a household word, even used by those who wouldn't let a hippie in their tool shed much less their house. The only people who weren't using the term were the hippies themselves, and even they eventually had to give in rather than disappoint all those teenage runaways now arriving weekly in Haight-Ashbury by the busloads, thanks to all the publicity the low-rent neighborhood had gotten (indeed, it soon became the most famous low-rent neighborhood on the planet.) Though he certainly helped popularize it, Caen didn't actually invent the term "hippie". The words "hip" and "hep"--both meant you were in the know--had been in use in the African-American community since the early 1900s. White kids were introduced to the terms via swing music during the '30s and '40s. As a minority of those white kids got older, especially if they were artistically inclined, or maybe were just different from anybody else (otherwise, what's the point of a subculture?) they moved to places like Greenwich Village, or North Beach in San Francisco (before rents went up and they all had to relocate to the more affordable Haight-Ashbury) where, since the middle of the 19th century, they were called bohemians. Not that that's what the Bohemians called themselves, at least not in the beginning. Those who didn't like artists, or people who were just different, sarcastically compared such folks to Gypsies, in the mistaken belief that the latter group had originated in Bohemia. Yet that label had gotten old by the middle of the 20th century, and so a few Bohemians took to calling themselves hipsters ("angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection" as one young poet put it.) "Hippie" was coined around the same time, probably by some unsung beatnik. Not that the unsung beatnik would ever have called himself a "beatnik" (at least not until the teenage runaways began arriving in Greenwich Village and North Beach by the busloads.) That term, too, was coined by the enterprising Herb Caen, though a friend of Jack Kerouac's by the name of Harold Huncke had come up with the "beat" part a decade earlier. So many terms, so many ways to attract teenage runaways, so many ways to scare the hell out of Middle America.

However, it wasn't what you called them, or what they called themselves that mattered. It was the sheer visibility that was so unsettling. Sure, there had always been Bohemians, but nobody gave them much mind until their numbers all of a sudden seemed to increase a thousandfold (thanks, no doubt, to post-World War II birth rates.) Difference had never loomed so large. The mainstream media could no longer treat it as a comedy side show. It WAS the serious issue of the day. In one respect, though, it still was a sideshow. They were freaks, as least as far as the non-freaks in the (soon-to-be prefixed as "silent") majority were concerned. Long hair on men was especially frowned upon. As was facial hair. Combine the two and you have what to 1967 Mainstream America would have resembled a bearded lady. That some of these strange, new people might differ from each other went unnoticed. Eventually, the hippies, Yippies, flower children, folkies, mods, Jesus freaks, back-to-nature hedonists, campus radicals, Weathermen, fugitives, hustlers, rioters, flag burners, bra burners, draft card burners, draft dodgers, doves, panhandlers, dope peddlers, Merry Pranksters, junkies, Transcendentalist Meditationists, Marrakesh backpackers, hitchhikers, organic farmers, communal dwellers, THE END IS NEAR (or NIGH) picketers, rock stars, rock concert promoters, sitar players, groupies, dee-jays, Sunset Strip go-go dancers, exhibitionists, Satanists, underground newspaper publishers, underground cartoonists, health store owners, head shop owners, cellar cafe owners, coffeehouse (but not coffee shop) owners, street performers, Off-Off-Broadway producers, avant-garde stage directors, experimental film directors, free-form poets, cut-up novelists, pop artists, potty-mouth comedians, Marvel superheroes, graffiti artists, New Journalists, public intellectuals (unless your last name happened to be Buckley), vegetarians, American Southwest desert nomads, gay liberationists, Maoists, Che Guevara admirers, Hell's Angels, Black Panthers, Black Muslims, dune buggy drivers, Volkswagen drivers, any Oregonians not employed by the logging industry, and last, but certainly not least, teenagers, were all filed (or lumped together) under a heading fraught with sociological meaning: The Counterculture.

Though many of its adherents would find much to like about the show, Star Trek wasn't always kind to the Counterculture. Peacenik  graffiti is one sign of the insanity that's overtaken the crew in "The Naked Time". An extraterrestrial love-in is overtaken by bad vibes in "This Side of Paradise". Much more odious, though, is "The Way to Eden" in which a bunch of hippies led by a defrocked academic (think Timothy Leary) knock out the crew of the Enterprise with a supersonic blast (think "Purple Haze") and hijacks the ship to a supposedly paradisaical planet called Eden (think Haight-Ashbury) where one of the young bohemians succumbs to a poisoned apple (think bad trip.) This episode could have been written by Rush Limbaugh, but it wasn't. He was still in high school. It may not have even been written by someone who thought of themself as conservative. Actually, D.C. Fontana (b.1939) wrote the first draft, but had her name taken off when it was re-written by an older fellow by the name of Arthur Heinemann, who got his start in show business by story-boarding Disney animated features in the 1940s. Roddenberry was phoning in his executive producer duties by this time, so maybe had nothing to do with this one. But I'm not sure he would have had a problem with it, even though he considered himself a liberal.

34 years before Star Trek first went on the air.

You have to remember that in the mid-60s, an over-30 liberal was much  different than a liberal of any age in 2015. There were liberals, including the one that was then in the White House, who supported the Vietnam War. If you associate liberalism with the Democratic Party, as many do, well, it was a Democratic Convention in Chicago that Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and a host of other peace protesters converged on in 1968. And it was the Democratic mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, who sent helmeted police officers to said convention to bust heads. I don't know what Roddenberry thought of that, but many Democrats born the same year as he (1921) would have approved. These Democrats would have come of age during the Great Depression. The New Deal would have been their liberalism. Once all those long-haired, dope-smoking, draft card-burning, loud music-listening radicals showed up, there was suddenly something to fear other than fear itself. 

 Of course a person can change, their views can evolve. Take a look at this ad that appeared in the back pages of a Star Trek fan magazine. Please read the small print:

Brotherhood of Man? Union of the unlike? Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations? Are you sure this isn't love beads they're selling?

Soon after Star Trek began, Roddenberry and future wife Majel Barrett started a mail order catalog company on the side to market merchandise based on the show, such as toy phasers, toy tricorders, etc. In the case of the IDIC pendant, it's said Roddenberry dreamed that up at least a year before the above ad appeared, and used his executive producer privileges to shoehorn it and the accompanying philosophy into the third season episode "Is There No Truth in Beauty" over the objections of much of the cast and crew who saw it as crass commercialization. Aw, c'mon! A Presidents Day sale is crass. "Infinity Diversity in Infinite Combinations" has resonated with generations of Star Trek fans, and more than anything else is responsible for giving the show its liberal cred.

 Well, maybe there was some commercialism involved. Like any science-fiction series, Star Trek's small but loyal fan base skewed young, and Roddenberry must have intuited that at least some of the young fans were the long-haired types that "The Way to Eden" had warned about.  That episode itself had hedged its bets by having Spock give a closing word of encouragement to the future bohemians ("It is my sincere wish that you do not give up your search for Eden. I have no doubt but that you will find it, or make it yourselves.") With its freaky planets and freakier aliens, Star Trek may have been as close to a psychedelic experience as you could get on network television in 1968 (a psychedelic experience that led to brief recording careers for two of the series star players, neither one of whom ended up at Woodstock, but, hey, it's the mind expansion that counts) I've spent much of this post so far focusing on Trek's reactionary streak, but there was, depending on what producer was calling the shots, an idealistic,  pluralistic streak as well, one that's proved much more enduring, that survives in even the most reactionary of reboots. That idealistic streak isn't really represented in any of the scripts that Roddenberry wrote himself, but in the end he was won over by it. Read these statements he made in the years, decades, after the original series went off the air, and tell me he doesn't come across as some kind of hippie guru:


“Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms. […] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, to take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there.”

"I'm in a period of growth and expansion. I'm taking long, hard looks at the world and what's happening in it, analyzing and thinking. I'm trying to become acquainted with the universe--with the part of it I occupy--and trying to settle, for myself, what my relationship with it is."

 "Reality is incredibly larger, infinitely more exciting, than the flesh and blood vehicle we travel in here. If you read science fiction, the more you read it the more you realize that you and the universe are part of the same thing. Science knows still practically nothing about the real nature of matter, energy, dimension, or time; and even less about those remarkable things called life and thought. But whatever the meaning and purpose of this universe, you are a legitimate part of it. And since you are part of the all that is, part of its purpose, there is more to you than just this brief speck of existence. You are just a visitor here in this time and this place, a traveler through it.”

Groovy! But back in the '60s, Roddenberry blinked.

Still, I think his transformation from hard hat to flower child  was a sincere one. For one thing, he made some of the above comments during the Reagan Administration. The Star Trek franchise--as it's come to be known--still skewed young, but the young were no longer so much into peace and love. Threats to the American way of life were now to be taken seriously. Also, there was now competition for those young minds from the Star Wars franchise, and as the title indicates, those movies weren't about peace negotiations. Star Trek now had its own movies (of which Roddenberry had minimal involvement) and took note of this cultural shift by replacing  the transcendent opening theme music from the original series with John Philip Sousa-like marches, and the Enterprise crew's pullover shirts and mini-skirts exchanged for Marine Drum and Bugle Corps uniforms. In that more martial atmosphere, Roddenberry could have easily touted the '60s show--with enough episodes to back him up--as a paean to the national security state, but chose not to.

(Then again, Reagan had his own Age of Aquarius moment, didn't he?)

Roddenberry finally got a chance to put his latter day idealism into motion when Star Trek: The Next Generation came along in 1987. Though he doesn't seem to have been involved in the series on a day-to-day basis, as Executive Producer he had a large say over what happened in this new update. He decided this generation's Enterprise should be family-friendly, so he allowed children aboard (fans of TNG--ever notice how the kids disappear whenever the starship's in any real danger?) He also wanted as little violence as possible, never mind the original series rather high mortality rate ("He's dead, Jim.") In fact, Roddenberry now wanted the Federation and Starfleet to be so utopian in nature that he sent memos to showrunner Rick Berman and others forbidding any arguing on the bridge of the Enterprise, never mind that some of the most entertaining moments of the original series had Spock and another character sniping at each other like two plaintiffs standing before Judge Judy. This led to a rather bland first season that often had Captain Picard and his crew sitting around a big table as if they were Board of Directors for a company that manufactures mothballs, calmly discussing various options no matter how dire the threat. The following is a mere approximation (meaning I made it up), but should give you an idea of what I'm talking about. Imagine it's Captain Picard speaking:

"Well, it now appears that the gelatin monster is about to consume this ship whole with us in it. Data, do you have any ideas how best we can extract ourselves from this
predicament?...Hmm...Interesting...Thank you, Data. Now, let's hear from you, Worf...Hmm...That is indeed a novel solution. I will definitely take it under consideration, but first let's hear from Counselor Troi. Oh, I see La Forge has his hand up..."

(No reflection on Patrick Stewart, a wonderful actor. It's just what he had to work with early on.)

Does Star Trek even need to be utopian? Don't get me wrong. I've got nothing against utopias. I wouldn't mind living in one someday.  It's just not all that conducive to drama, that's all. Can't Star Trek have an idealistic point-of-view but at the same time show a warts-and-all future? Most who have seen it would agree the popular '70s sitcom MASH had an anti-war message. Yet it didn't take place in Switzerland, but 1950s Korea . Be it comedy or drama, a utopia shouldn't be an established fact but a goal, one that takes a bit of time to achieve. Five years, say.


Also, if you present the Federation/Starfleet as being utopian in nature, and anything bad or unsettling as coming from the outside, you may end up making a compelling argument in favor of imperialism, whether you meant to or not.

I know I've been kind of hard on Roddenberry, but I actually think he was a very talented guy. Several episodes with his name as writer--"The Cage"/"The Menagerie", "Charlie X", "Mudd's Women", "Breads and Circuses" and--dubious as I am about its politics--"The Omega Glory", as well as an episode he did not write but directly oversaw as line producer, "The Cobermite Maneuver", are among the best the series has to offer. (There's also the somewhat awkwardly constructed "Assignment: Earth", actually an unsold pilot for another series, that had Kirk and Spock along for the ride. I'll talk a little bit about that one in a future installment.)  But in trying to figure out what made Star Trek Star Trek, and, more specifically, what made Spock Spock, how did he go from the vaguely antagonistic character of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" to the more noble figure he eventually became, I feel I have to look elsewhere.  Of course, I do give Roddenberry credit for creating both Star Trek and Spock. I should have mentioned it earlier, but Spock is said to have been based on someone Roddenberry actually knew. No, he was never abducted by Vulcans. The fellow he knew was an Earthling, William H. Parker, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department from 1950 to his death in 1966. Parker was known for his taciturn style, a style that admirer Jack Webb infused into his famous Joe Friday character. Indeed, the program Friday appeared on, Dragnet, which ran first on radio from 1949 to 1957, and then on TV from 1950 to 1959 (there was also a late '60s version), and even made into a movie, was on the whole pretty logical and unemotional. Every character in it, including the guy arrested for disturbing the peace, talked in a flat monotone. Spock seemed like Jerry Lewis by comparison. As his speech writer, however, Roddenberry knew Parker better than Webb did, and seems to have had mixed feelings about him, mixed feelings that could explain his gradual shift from just-the-facts-ma'm-just-the-facts propagandist to New Age philosopher. Remember me telling you in Part 1 that it was a female character played by Majel Barrett in the first Star Trek pilot who was originally supposed to be logical and unemotional? When his time came to immortalize Parker, Roddenberry gave his old boss a sex-change operation. Freud would have had a field day.

Nine episodes into the first season, Roddenberry decided to promote himself to executive producer, relieving him of the day-to-day grind of running the show.  And it was his replacement, an ex-Marine a decade-and-counting past the age of 30, who may have been the true hippie guru of Star Trek.

Next: A Different Gene