Yes, but then you'd have those weird moments where the helmsman of the Enterprise gets tapped for odd black ops jobs by a senior member of Starfleet Intelligence. Along with Mr. Spock, who turns out to be pretty good at being a master of disguise.

You know, that might be pretty awesome.

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

It seems to me that if Mr. Zulu was at the helm, Nichelle Nichols would be replaced by an Asian woman.

Peter Eng
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Insert humorous comment here.

You know, I read and thought "Huh, that's probably right" and then "God dammit, I really want to see Lucy Liu in a Star Trek series."

(She's already playing a doctor who solves crimes! Playing a space-doctor who solves space-crimes isn't that great a stretch!)

-Merc
Keep Rat

Hey, why not? She's already been replaced by a Dominican...

(Seriously, kids, what is going on with Zoë Saldaña? Just off the top of my head I can think of two roles in which she's been weirdly miscast. In The Losers she played a character who was originally from Afghanistan before being inexplicably rewritten as a Bolivian, and of course in Star Trek and its sequels she's playing someone who's supposed to be Bantu. I mean, I'm not hating on her, she does good work, but wha?)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

"OK, Sean, everyone in this movie is Scottish."

"That'sh good."

"Except you. You're a 3,000-year-old Egyptian, lately part of the Spanish court, by way of medieval Japan."

"Hm. I'll have tae practish tha'."

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I don't know, I'm having a hard time picturing Sidney Poitier as willing to play a character called "Mr. Zulu", even if the absence of later series' "here is the costume embellishment of my people" thing does mean he probably wouldn't actually have been carrying a hide shield on the bridge.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Except carrying the Sulu parallel, he would probably be an expert in some south american martial art or something, since Sulu was Asian, but practiced western fencing.

(Admittedly, he was far from alone in that. Claudia Christian and Michael Dorn weren't really all that Russian either, although Worf at least had the excuse of deliberately constructing a non-Russian identity for himself after reaching adulthood.)

-Merc
Keep Rat

Interestingly, for all that one often hears about the studio and/or network having been leery of the multiethnic main cast, they seem to have had few problems with that aspect of the overall setting. Off the top of my head, I can think of three other black characters on the original Star Trek apart from Lt. Uhura, and they're all highly trained, well-regarded professionals. They weren't series regulars, which may be why the producers got away with it, but Commodore Stone was a Starfleet flag officer; Dr. M'benga a physician shown treating white folks without comment; and Richard Daystrom, for all that he was a rather tragic figure in that episode, was nonetheless a Nobel laureate and a widely admired man.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

You know, I'd never really thought about that. It is weird, isn't it? Paramount freaking out about the composition of the guys on the bridge every week and an on-screen interracial kiss and suchly is well-documented, but other stuff you'd think they'd have had issues with ("You can't have a black flag officer, he outranks the white captain") are things I can't recall hearing anything about.

Yeah. Weird.

-Merc
Keep Rat

There was also the ersatz crewman that the "salt monster" appeared as to Uhura -- a tall, handsome black fellow who addressed her in Swahili.

-- Bob
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My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.