"Basically, Starfleet were always pure violent assholes to the Klingons. Leonard Nimoy took that specific hatred to its logical conclusion in the script to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. And good, even-numbered Trek movie or not, it's not just fans who were outraged at the idea that the Enterprise crew carried deep-down racism and prejudice within them. It caused an uproar with much of the cast and a bunch of the original producers. And despite the fact that I think Nimoy was too humorless for his own good, he had value because he recognized what was going on on The Original Series, even if the rest of fandom was in pure denial about it."
I lightly checked out this post early this morning and was very intrigued, as I've never actually seen Star Trek: Discovery myself when it first launched, though my friend Erin has. Since I was so tired from work this week, I haven't gotten a chance to fully read this in-depth review fully. But while I was touching up a new page for Curse of Creation, I remembered this point you made about Star Trek, Klingons, and Star Trek IV: The Undiscovered Country, and I just had to say something about it as The Undiscovered Country touched on a lot of themes that were uncomfortable both to the actors and the characters they played... for the exact reasons you presented in your quote here. I'll read the whole thing in detail once the opportunity presents itself.
I always had this feeling as soon as I saw Star Trek III: The Search for Spock for the first time in 9th grade (Seriously - I saw it on a marathon of the first six films on Sci-Fi channel during my Christmas break) that the Klingon race was meant to evoke the most obvious traits of "savage animals", from their dark skin and unsettling features (like the elongated heads with the signature ridges) to their uniforms (which early on seemed to loosely harken towards Native Americans, as did their long black hair), to their use of seemingly primitive melee weapons (assortment of blades and daggers). Looking back, I'm actually kind of bummed that I didn't fully make the connection until I found a two-disc collector's edition DVD of Star Trek VI at a local Barnes & Noble and bought it out of curiosity (and the dirt-cheap price) during my time in college. After watching it fully (and another time with my dad when he was home sick), I could see many parallels to the real world -- especially how nations would go to war, but their leaders somehow saw kindred spirits in each other and conspired to "negotiate" while their armies spilled their blood under the impression they were fighting the enemy. It exposed the hypocrisy in warring cultures steeped in racism; though some warring nations saw profit and personal/political gain in conspiring together while their troops wasted their lives, their leaders would also demonize the citizens of each other's nations. Basically, one leader would deem the RACE of Nation One as "vicious animals" but get along just fine with Nation One's leader, and vice versa.
The racial resentment undertones were blatantly obvious in Star Trek VI, especially with Captain Kirk's character arc. Refusing peace with the very people responsible for his son's murder three films ago was a no-brainer, but the way Kirk saw Klingons -- from literally wishing death on all of them in front of a visibly shocked Spock after a tense Starfleet meeting to making a thinly-veiled insult at General Chang by taking his "we need breathing room" statement and linking it to Hitler's use of the same words to suggest Klingons are no better than Nazi Germany -- and what it took for him to face his own prejudice towards Klingons (watching a fatally wounded Chancellor Gorkon die right in front of him, as well as the last hope for any kind of peace with the Klingon Empire) laid bare the human cost of racism in the real world.
I had a feeling that fans were unsettled by Starfleet's racial hostility to Klingons in Star Trek VI, but I never knew about Nimoy's feelings behind the film. That's an interesting perspective, even if I haven't seen every episode of The Original Series. And oh, yes - I've read about how the cast was outraged over Star Trek VI's themes of racism; for example, I read in some magazine (or a blog, I don't fully remember) that Nichelle Nichols had a particular beef with the script: just before the scene in which Gorkon's diplomatic envoys prepared to beam aboard Enterprise for a joint repast "as guests of the United Federation of Planets on [their] way to their summit on Earth", Pavel Chekhov is in the captain's chair muttering, "Guess who's coming to dinner?"
That particular line was originally assigned to Lt. Nyota Uhura's character, but Nichols was so outraged that she demanded that line either be scrapped or reassigned because it was a reference to a Sindey Poitier film actually titled Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which itself was the subject of a lot of controversy, specifically around racism and interracial marriage. Given that this line was in the script for an obviously racism-centered film, I can understand why Nichols felt so offended at it; being a Black woman at the time likely made it all the more unbearable. I also read somewhere that the dinner scene was very different from the final cut of the film, with the Klingons and the Enterprise crew actually ready to physically go to blows with each other instead of the dead silence followed by Gorkon's "I see we have a long way to go" in the version I currently have. Pretty sure that if they left that scene in, it would've added gas to the fire of outrage already burning amongst the fans/actors.
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I lightly checked out this post early this morning and was very intrigued, as I've never actually seen Star Trek: Discovery myself when it first launched, though my friend Erin has. Since I was so tired from work this week, I haven't gotten a chance to fully read this in-depth review fully. But while I was touching up a new page for Curse of Creation, I remembered this point you made about Star Trek, Klingons, and Star Trek IV: The Undiscovered Country, and I just had to say something about it as The Undiscovered Country touched on a lot of themes that were uncomfortable both to the actors and the characters they played... for the exact reasons you presented in your quote here. I'll read the whole thing in detail once the opportunity presents itself.
I always had this feeling as soon as I saw Star Trek III: The Search for Spock for the first time in 9th grade (Seriously - I saw it on a marathon of the first six films on Sci-Fi channel during my Christmas break) that the Klingon race was meant to evoke the most obvious traits of "savage animals", from their dark skin and unsettling features (like the elongated heads with the signature ridges) to their uniforms (which early on seemed to loosely harken towards Native Americans, as did their long black hair), to their use of seemingly primitive melee weapons (assortment of blades and daggers). Looking back, I'm actually kind of bummed that I didn't fully make the connection until I found a two-disc collector's edition DVD of Star Trek VI at a local Barnes & Noble and bought it out of curiosity (and the dirt-cheap price) during my time in college. After watching it fully (and another time with my dad when he was home sick), I could see many parallels to the real world -- especially how nations would go to war, but their leaders somehow saw kindred spirits in each other and conspired to "negotiate" while their armies spilled their blood under the impression they were fighting the enemy. It exposed the hypocrisy in warring cultures steeped in racism; though some warring nations saw profit and personal/political gain in conspiring together while their troops wasted their lives, their leaders would also demonize the citizens of each other's nations. Basically, one leader would deem the RACE of Nation One as "vicious animals" but get along just fine with Nation One's leader, and vice versa.
The racial resentment undertones were blatantly obvious in Star Trek VI, especially with Captain Kirk's character arc. Refusing peace with the very people responsible for his son's murder three films ago was a no-brainer, but the way Kirk saw Klingons -- from literally wishing death on all of them in front of a visibly shocked Spock after a tense Starfleet meeting to making a thinly-veiled insult at General Chang by taking his "we need breathing room" statement and linking it to Hitler's use of the same words to suggest Klingons are no better than Nazi Germany -- and what it took for him to face his own prejudice towards Klingons (watching a fatally wounded Chancellor Gorkon die right in front of him, as well as the last hope for any kind of peace with the Klingon Empire) laid bare the human cost of racism in the real world.
I had a feeling that fans were unsettled by Starfleet's racial hostility to Klingons in Star Trek VI, but I never knew about Nimoy's feelings behind the film. That's an interesting perspective, even if I haven't seen every episode of The Original Series. And oh, yes - I've read about how the cast was outraged over Star Trek VI's themes of racism; for example, I read in some magazine (or a blog, I don't fully remember) that Nichelle Nichols had a particular beef with the script: just before the scene in which Gorkon's diplomatic envoys prepared to beam aboard Enterprise for a joint repast "as guests of the United Federation of Planets on [their] way to their summit on Earth", Pavel Chekhov is in the captain's chair muttering, "Guess who's coming to dinner?"
That particular line was originally assigned to Lt. Nyota Uhura's character, but Nichols was so outraged that she demanded that line either be scrapped or reassigned because it was a reference to a Sindey Poitier film actually titled Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which itself was the subject of a lot of controversy, specifically around racism and interracial marriage. Given that this line was in the script for an obviously racism-centered film, I can understand why Nichols felt so offended at it; being a Black woman at the time likely made it all the more unbearable. I also read somewhere that the dinner scene was very different from the final cut of the film, with the Klingons and the Enterprise crew actually ready to physically go to blows with each other instead of the dead silence followed by Gorkon's "I see we have a long way to go" in the version I currently have. Pretty sure that if they left that scene in, it would've added gas to the fire of outrage already burning amongst the fans/actors.