Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth: Watch the Six-Part Series with Bill Moyers (1988)

in Religion, Television | August 25th, 2022

The twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry encour­ages us to regard our­selves as hav­ing evolved beyond heroes, to say noth­ing of myths. Such things were only use­ful in the pre-mod­ern world, as yet unblessed by the con­ve­niences, plea­sures, and cer­tain­ties of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy. What, then, explains how devot­ed peo­ple are to Star Wars? For schol­ar of mythol­o­gy Joseph Camp­bell, author of The Hero with a Thou­sand Faces, George Lucas’ block­buster space opera — and the tril­o­gy it began — demon­strat­ed mod­ern man’s undi­min­ished need for myth. Lucas returned the com­pli­ment, say­ing that could nev­er have made it with­out the knowl­edge of arche­typ­al heroes and their jour­neys he drew from Camp­bel­l’s work.

Camp­bell him­self lays out this knowl­edge in the six inter­views with jour­nal­ist Bill Moy­ers that con­sti­tute The Pow­er of Myth. That doc­u­men­tary series has just come avail­able free to watch on the Youtube chan­nel of dis­trib­u­tor Kino Lor­ber, 34 years after its orig­i­nal broad­cast on PBS in 1988.

At that time, Moy­ers says in an updat­ed intro­duc­tion, “when mil­lions of peo­ple were yearn­ing for a way of talk­ing about reli­gious expe­ri­ence with­out regard to a reli­gious belief sys­tem, Camp­bell gave them the lan­guage for it.” For decades — for cen­turies, real­ly — once-invi­o­lable nar­ra­tives of the world and man’s place in it had been break­ing down. The inabil­i­ty to trace a mytho­log­i­cal arc in their own lives has dri­ven peo­ple in var­i­ous direc­tions: toward cults, toward health fads, toward ther­a­py, toward pop cul­ture.

In the mid-to-late twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, this cre­at­ed the most oppor­tune of con­di­tions for Camp­bel­l’s rise as a pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al. Though formed by the Depres­sion rather than the Age of Aquar­ius, he could adapt his teach­ings about ancient myth, as if by instinct, for lis­ten­ers hop­ing to raise their con­scious­ness. “Fol­low your bliss,” he said, think­ing of the Hin­du Upan­ishads, and the New Age made into a cliché. But the Camp­bell of The Pow­er of Myth has much still-rel­e­vant wis­dom to offer, even for those who feel plunged into a despair unique to our moment. “The world is a waste­land,” he admits. “Peo­ple have the notion of sav­ing the world by shift­ing it around and chang­ing the rules and so forth.” But “the way to bring it to life is to find, in your own case, where your life is, and be alive your­self.” A hero’s jour­ney awaits each of us, but nev­er has there been so much to dis­tract us from mak­ing it.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Hear 48 Hours of Lec­tures by Joseph Camp­bell on Com­par­a­tive Mythol­o­gy and the Hero’s Jour­ney

How Led Zeppelin’s “Stair­way to Heav­en” Recre­ates the Epic Hero’s Jour­ney Described by Joseph Camp­bell

Updat­ing Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Jour­ney” to Cov­er Female Action Heroes–Pretty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast #33

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Pink Lady and Jeff: Japan’s Biggest Pop Musicians Star in One of America’s Worst-Reviewed TV Shows (1980)

in History, Music, Television | August 23rd, 2022

In 1963, Kyu Sakamo­to’s “Sukiya­ki” proved that a song sung in Japan­ese could top the charts in the Unit­ed States. Not that the Amer­i­can record­ing indus­try was quick to inter­nal­ize it: anoth­er Japan­ese sin­gle would­n’t break the Bill­board Top 40 for six­teen years, and even then it did so in Eng­lish. The song was “Kiss in the Dark” by Pink Lady, a pop duo con­sist­ing of Mit­suyo Nemo­to and Keiko Masu­da, bet­ter known as Mie and Kei. In 1978 they’d been the biggest pop-cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non in their native coun­try, but the fol­low­ing year their star had begun unmis­tak­ably to fall. And so, like many passé West­ern acts who become “big in Japan,” Pink Lady attempt­ed to cross the Pacif­ic.

Mie and Kei made their Amer­i­can tele­vi­sion debut per­form­ing “Kiss in the Dark” on Leif Gar­ret­t’s CBS spe­cial in May 1979. Accounts dif­fer about what hap­pened next, but less than a year lat­er they had their own prime­time vari­ety show on NBC. Offi­cial­ly titled Pink Lady, it tends to be referred to these four decades lat­er as Pink Lady and Jeff. This owes to the role of its host, ris­ing (and NBC-con­tract­ed) young come­di­an Jeff Alt­man, who brought to the table not just his com­ic tim­ing and skill with impres­sions, but also his com­mand of the Eng­lish lan­guage. That last hap­pened not to be pos­sessed to any sig­nif­i­cant degree by Mie or Kei, who had to deliv­er both their songs and their jokes pho­net­i­cal­ly.

In the video at the top of the post, you can see a com­pi­la­tion of the high­lights of Pink Lady and Jeff’s entire run. Then again, “high­lights” may not be quite the word for a TV show now remem­bered as one of the worst ever aired. “Pink Lady and Jeff rep­re­sents an unpalat­able com­bi­na­tion of insti­tu­tions that were on their way out, like vari­ety shows, dis­co, and the tele­vi­sion empire of cre­ators and pup­peteers Sid and Mar­ty Krofft,” writes the AV Club’s Nathan Rabin. The Krofft broth­ers, cre­ators of H.R. Pufn­stuf and Land of the Lost, tell of hav­ing been tapped to devel­op a pro­gram around Mie and Kei by NBC pres­i­dent Fred Sil­ver­man, who’d hap­pened to see footage of one of their sta­di­um-fill­ing Tokyo con­certs on the news.

Sid Krofft remem­bers declar­ing his ambi­tion to make Pink Lady “the strangest thing that’s ever been on tele­vi­sion.” The star­tled Sil­ver­man’s response: “Let’s do Don­ny and Marie.” Don­ny Osmond him­self end­ed up being one of the show’s high-pro­file guest stars, a line­up that also includ­ed Blondie, Alice Coop­er, Sid Cae­sar, Ted­dy Pen­der­grass, Roy Orbi­son, Jer­ry Lewis, and even Lar­ry Hag­man just a week before the epochal shoot­ing of his char­ac­ter on Dal­las. None of them helped Pink Lady find enough of an audi­ence to sur­vive beyond its ini­tial six episodes (all avail­able to watch on Youtube), a dis­com­fit­ing mélange of gener­ic com­e­dy sketch­es, unsuit­able musi­cal per­for­mances (with pre­cious few excep­tions, Mie and Kei weren’t per­mit­ted to sing their own Japan­ese songs), and broad ref­er­ences to sushi, samu­rai, and sumo.

The main prob­lem, Alt­man said in a more recent inter­view, was that “the vari­ety show had run the gaunt­let already, and real­ly was not a for­mat that was going to live in the hearts and homes of peo­ple across Amer­i­ca any­more.” Not only had that long and earnest tele­vi­sion tra­di­tion come to its igno­min­ious end, it would soon be replaced by the iron­ic, ultra-satir­i­cal sen­si­bil­i­ty of Alt­man’s col­league in com­e­dy David Let­ter­man. But here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, Alt­man guess­es, the time may be ripe “for a vari­ety-type show to come back.” We live in an era, after all, when a piece of for­got­ten eight­ies Japan­ese pop can become a glob­al phe­nom­e­non. And how­ev­er dim the prospects of the vari­ety show as a form, Mie and Kie them­selves have since man­aged more come­backs than all but their most die-hard fans can count.

Relat­ed con­tent:

David Bowie and Cher Sing Duet of “Young Amer­i­cans” and Oth­er Songs on 1975 Vari­ety Show

Famed Art Crit­ic Robert Hugh­es Hosts the Pre­miere of 20/20, Where Tabloid TV News Began (1978)

Andy Warhol’s 15 Min­utes: Dis­cov­er the Post­mod­ern MTV Vari­ety Show That Made Warhol a Star in the Tele­vi­sion Age (1985–87)

How Youtube’s Algo­rithm Turned an Obscure 1980s Japan­ese Song Into an Enor­mous­ly Pop­u­lar Hit: Dis­cov­er Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plas­tic Love”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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How Salman Rushdie Has Lived and Written Under the Threat of Death: a Free Documentary

in Current Affairs, Literature, Television | August 22nd, 2022

Alfred Hitch­cock spe­cial­ized in films about marked men: inno­cents, more or less, who sud­den­ly find them­selves pur­sued by sin­is­ter forces to the ends of the Earth. Lit­tle won­der, then, that Salman Rushdie would count him­self a Hitch­cock fan. The nov­el­ist ref­er­ences the film­mak­er more than once in Salman Rushdie: Writ­ing Under Death Threats, the DW tele­vi­sion doc­u­men­tary above. He remem­bers a sequence from The Birds that cuts between stu­dents in a class­room and the play­ground out­side: in one shot a black­bird comes to sit on the jun­gle gym, and just a few shots lat­er it’s been joined by 500 more. “The case of what hap­pened to The Satan­ic Vers­es was, it was some­thing like the first black­bird.”

Rushdie refers, of course, to the fat­wa called down upon him in response to that nov­el­’s sup­posed blas­phemies against Islam by Aya­tol­lah Khome­i­ni. As a result he had to spend most of the sub­se­quent decade in hid­ing, under the pro­tec­tion of the British gov­ern­ment. By the time of this doc­u­men­tary, which came out in 2018, the dan­ger seemed to have passed.

“What’s hap­pen­ing now, as the scan­dal goes away,” he says of The Satan­ic Vers­es, “is that peo­ple are able to read it as a book, rather than as some kind of scan­dalous text.” But the dan­ger had not passed, as we learned ear­li­er this month when Rushdie was stabbed onstage at a lit­er­ary event in upstate New York, avoid­ing death by what’s been report­ed as a nar­row mar­gin indeed.

This sto­ry has its ironies, not least that Rushdie’s attack­er was born in Cal­i­for­nia a decade after the Iran­ian gov­ern­men­t’s dis­avow­al of the fat­wa. But for Rushdie him­self, the attempt on his life can’t have come entire­ly as a sur­prise: he saw the gath­er­ing black­birds of vio­lent fanati­cism as well as those of met­ro­pol­i­tan com­pla­cen­cy. Reflect­ing on the 2015 attack on French satir­i­cal mag­a­zine Char­lie Heb­do, he laments that “even peo­ple who are on the lib­er­al, pro­gres­sive, left­ist end of the spec­trum now find ‘prob­lem­at­ic’ the idea of sup­port­ing peo­ple who make fun of reli­gion.” Always and every­where, writ­ing has been done under the threat of one kind of pun­ish­ment or anoth­er; more than 30 years after The Satan­ic Vers­es, Rushdie’s case remains the most har­row­ing­ly extreme illus­tra­tion of the writer’s con­di­tion.

Relat­ed con­tent:

When Christo­pher Hitchens Vig­i­lant­ly Defend­ed Salman Rushdie After the Fat­wah: “It Was a Mat­ter of Every­thing I Hat­ed Ver­sus Every­thing I Loved”

Hear Salman Rushdie Read Don­ald Barthelme’s “Con­cern­ing the Body­guard” 

Jeff Koons and Salman Rushdie Teach New Cours­es on Art, Cre­ativ­i­ty & Sto­ry­telling for Mas­ter­Class

Salman Rushdie: Machiavelli’s Bad Rap

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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What Made Better Call Saul a Master Class in Visual Storytelling: A Video Essay

in Television | August 19th, 2022

A decade ago, nobody inter­est­ed in pres­tige dra­mat­ic tele­vi­sion could have ignored Break­ing Bad, Vince Gilli­gan’s AMC series about a down­trod­den high-school chem­istry teacher who becomes a cal­cu­lat­ing and sav­age crys­tal-meth deal­er. Such was the crit­i­cal and pop­u­lar suc­cess of the show that, less than two years after it end­ed, it was resumed in the form of Bet­ter Call Saul. The title char­ac­ter Saul Good­man had been the afore­men­tioned teacher-turned-deal­er’s lawyer in Break­ing Bad, and the lat­er series, a pre­quel, traces the half-decade jour­ney that brought him to that point: a jour­ney that began when he was a Chica­go con man named Jim­my McGill.

Bet­ter Call Saul’s six-sea­son run (one episode longer than Break­ing Bad) came to an end this week. Dur­ing that time, the show has received even stronger acco­lades than the one that spun it off. To get a sense of what makes it such an achieve­ment in a field crowd­ed with some of the most ambi­tious cre­ators of pop­u­lar cul­ture today, watch the video essay above by Youtu­ber Thomas Flight.

Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured his visu­al analy­ses of auteurs like Wes Ander­son and Bong Joon-ho as well as shows like The Wire and Cher­nobyl. Five years ago, he uploaded a video explain­ing “why Bet­ter Call Saul is bril­liant”; now he argues that it’s a “mas­ter class in visu­al sto­ry­telling.”

“ ‘Show, don’t tell’ is such com­mon advice in film­mak­ing and screen­writ­ing that it’s basi­cal­ly a cliché at this point,” says Flight, “but it’s also much eas­i­er said than done.” He goes on to draw from Bet­ter Call Saul a host of prime exam­ples of show­ing-not-telling, orga­nized into four cat­e­gories of its spe­cial strengths: “props as sym­bol­ic objects,” “visu­al per­for­mances,” “char­ac­ters in process,” and “sto­ry­telling with cin­e­matog­ra­phy.” Bet­ter Call Saul’s cre­ators make rich use of objects, ges­tures, expres­sions, places, angles, and much else besides to tell — or rather, show — the sto­ry of Jimmy/Saul’s trans­for­ma­tion, as well as the trans­for­ma­tions of those around him. But which of those char­ac­ters will star in Gilli­gan’s next, sure­ly even more ambi­tious series?

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Break­ing Bad Craft­ed the Per­fect TV Pilot: A Video Essay

Watch the Pilot of Break­ing Bad with a Chem­istry Pro­fes­sor: How Sound Was the Sci­ence?

The Sci­ence of Break­ing Bad: Pro­fes­sor Don­na Nel­son Explains How the Show Gets it Right

Watch the Orig­i­nal Audi­tion Tapes for Break­ing Bad Before the Final Sea­son Debuts

Break­ing Bad Illus­trat­ed by Gonzo Artist Ralph Stead­man

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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All the Music Played on MTV’s 120 Minutes: A 2,500-Video Youtube Playlist

in Music, Television | August 11th, 2022

The mid-nine­teen-nineties was not a time with­out irony. You may recall that, back then, “alter­na­tive” rock had not only gone main­stream, but, in cer­tain regions, had even become the most pop­u­lar genre of music on the radio. That was cer­tain­ly true in the Seat­tle area, where I grew up. And if you want­ed to start a rock band there, as writer Adam Cadre remem­bers, you knew what steps you had to take: “get a record deal, make a video, get it on 120 Min­utes, have it become a Buzz Clip, won­der why mas­sive suc­cess does­n’t ease the aching void inside.”

If you got into bands like 10,000 Mani­acs, Smash­ing Pump­kins, R.E.M., The Replace­ments, the Pix­ies, the Off­spring, or Son­ic Youth in the mid-nineties (to say noth­ing of a cer­tain trio called Nir­vana), chances are — sta­tis­ti­cal­ly speak­ing, at least — that you first saw them on 120 Min­utes.

At the peak of its pop­u­lar­i­ty on MTV, the show defined the alter­na­tive-rock zeit­geist, intro­duc­ing new bands as well as bring­ing new waves of lis­ten­ers to exist­ing ones. Though most strong­ly asso­ci­at­ed with the nineties, it pre­miered in 1986, host­ed by three of the first MTV VJs, J. J. Jack­son, Martha Quinn, and Alan Hunter. 36 years lat­er, you can relive the entire­ty of 120 Min­utes’ sev­en­teen-year run (with a brief revival in the twen­ty-tens) on Youtube.

A user named Chris Reynolds has cre­at­ed a playlist that appears to con­tain every song ever aired on 120 Min­utes. (Those have been doc­u­ment­ed by The 120 Min­utes Archive, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.) Among the playlist’s more than 2,500 videos are songs — Vio­lent Femmes’ “Kiss Off,” The Psy­che­del­ic Furs’ “Love My Way,” Pearl Jam’s “Alive,” Fish­bone’s “Every­day Sun­shine,” R.E.M.‘s “Stand” — that will take you back to the pop-cul­tur­al eras 120 Min­utes spanned. But there are even more — Man­u­fac­ture’s “As the End Draws Near,” Lloyd Cole and the Com­mo­tions’ “Jen­nifer She Said,” Hel­met’s “Mil­que­toast,” Cause and Effec­t’s “You Think You Know Her” — that you may well have missed, even if you rocked your way through the eight­ies and nineties.

via Brook­lyn Veg­an

Relat­ed con­tent:

The 120 Min­utes Archive Com­piles Clips & Playlists from 956 Episodes of MTV’s Alter­na­tive Music Show (1986–2013)

Watch the First Two Hours of MTV’s Inau­gur­al Broad­cast (August 1, 1981)

Watch Nir­vana Go Through Rehearsals for Their Famous MTV Unplugged Ses­sions: “Pol­ly,” “The Man Who Sold the World” & More (1993)

Nir­vana Refus­es to Mime Along to “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” on Top of the Pops (1991)

William S. Bur­roughs — Alter­na­tive Rock Star — Sings with Kurt Cobain, Tom Waits, REM & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Last Cigarette Commercial Ever Aired on American TV (1971)

in History, Television | August 2nd, 2022

The slo­gan “You’ve come a long way, baby” still has some pop-cul­tur­al cur­ren­cy. But how many Amer­i­cans under the age of six­ty remem­ber what it adver­tised? The line was first rolled out in 1968 to pro­mote Vir­ginia Slims, the then-new brand of cig­a­rettes mar­ket­ed explic­it­ly to women. “Every ad in the cam­paign put a woman front and cen­ter, equat­ing smok­ing Vir­ginia Slims with being inde­pen­dent, styl­ish, con­fi­dent and lib­er­at­ed,” says the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion of Adver­tis­ing Agen­cies. “The slo­gan itself spoke direct­ly about the progress women all over Amer­i­ca were fight­ing for.”

Such was the zeit­geist pow­er of Vir­ginia Slims that they became the very last cig­a­rette brand ever adver­tised on Amer­i­can TV, at 11:59 p.m on Jan­u­ary 2, 1971, dur­ing The Tonight Show Star­ring John­ny Car­son. Richard Nixon had signed the Pub­lic Health Cig­a­rette Smok­ing Act, which banned cig­a­rette adver­tise­ments on broad­cast media, on April 1, 1970. But it did­n’t take effect imme­di­ate­ly, the tobac­co indus­try hav­ing man­aged to nego­ti­ate for itself one last chance to air com­mer­cials dur­ing the col­lege foot­ball games of New Year’s Day 1971.

“The Philip Mor­ris com­pa­ny has bought all com­mer­cial time on the first half hour of all the net­work talk shows tonight,” says ABC’s Har­ry Rea­son­er on a news­cast from that same day. “That is, the last half hour on which it is legal to sell cig­a­rettes on radio or tele­vi­sion in the Unit­ed States. This marks, as we like to say, the end of an era.” In trib­ute, ABC put togeth­er an assem­blage of past cig­a­rette com­mer­cials. That some will feel odd­ly famil­iar even to those of us who would­n’t be born for a decade or two speaks to the pow­er of mass media in post­war Amer­i­ca. More than half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, now that cig­a­rettes are sel­dom glimpsed even on dra­mat­ic tele­vi­sion, all this feels almost sur­re­al­is­ti­cal­ly dis­tant in his­to­ry.

Equal­ly strik­ing, cer­tain­ly by con­trast to the man­ner of news anchors in the twen­ty-twen­ties, is the poet­ry of Rea­son­er’s reflec­tion on the just-closed chap­ter of tele­vi­sion his­to­ry. “It isn’t like say­ing good­bye to an old friend, I guess, because the doc­tors have con­vinced us they aren’t old friends,” he admits. “But we may be par­doned, I think, on dim win­ter nights in the future, sit­ting by the fire and nod­ding and say­ing, ‘Remem­ber L.S./M.F.T.? Remem­ber Glen Gray play­ing smoke rings for the Camel car­a­van? Remem­ber ‘Nature in the raw is sel­dom mild’? Remem­ber all those girls who who had it all togeth­er?’ ”

Relat­ed con­tent:

When the Flint­stones Ped­dled Cig­a­rettes

Cig­a­rette Com­mer­cials from David Lynch, the Coen Broth­ers and Jean Luc Godard

Two Short Films on Cof­fee and Cig­a­rettes from Jim Jar­musch & Paul Thomas Ander­son

Glo­ri­ous Ear­ly 20th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902–1954)

How Edward Munch Sig­naled His Bohemi­an Rebel­lion with Cig­a­rettes (1895): A Video Essay

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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As Star Trek’s Lieutenant Uhura, Nichelle Nichols (RIP) Starred in “TV’s First Interracial Kiss” in 1968

in History, Television | August 1st, 2022

The orig­i­nal Star Trek ran for only three sea­sons, but in that short time it had, to put it mild­ly, an out­sized cul­tur­al impact. That part­ly had to do with the series hav­ing aired in the late nine­teen-six­ties, an era when a host of long-stand­ing norms in Amer­i­can soci­ety (as well as in oth­er soci­eties across the world) seemed to have come up for re-nego­ti­a­tion. Through its sci­ence-fic­tion­al premis­es and twen­ty-third-cen­tu­ry set­ting, Star Trek could deal with the present in ways that would have been dif­fi­cult for oth­er, osten­si­bly more real­is­tic pro­grams.

In “Pla­to’s Stepchil­dren,” an episode from 1968, sev­er­al mem­bers of the Enter­prise’s crew find them­selves cap­tive on a plan­et of tele­ki­net­ic, ancient-Greece-wor­ship­ping sadists. It was there that Star Trek staged one of its most mem­o­rable moments, a kiss between William Shat­ner’s Cap­tain Kirk and the late Nichelle Nichols’ Lieu­tenant Uhu­ra. It aris­es not out of a rela­tion­ship that has devel­oped organ­i­cal­ly between the char­ac­ters, but out of com­pul­sion by the pow­ers of their “Pla­ton­ian” cap­tors, who force the humans to per­form for their enter­tain­ment.

Despite that nar­ra­tive loop­hole, the scene nev­er­the­less wor­ried the man­age­ment at NBC. They imag­ined that, giv­en that Shat­ner was white and Nichols black, to show them kiss­ing would pro­voke a neg­a­tive reac­tion among view­ers in parts of the coun­try his­tor­i­cal­ly hos­tile to the idea of roman­tic rela­tions between those races. Ensur­ing that the scene made it to the air as writ­ten (Nichols lat­er remem­bered in her auto­bi­og­ra­phy) neces­si­tat­ed such tac­tics as sab­o­tag­ing the alter­nate takes shot with­out the kiss: “Bill shook me and hissed men­ac­ing­ly in his best ham-fist­ed Kirkian stac­ca­to deliv­ery, ‘I! WON’T! KISS! YOU! I! WON’T! KISS! YOU!’ ”

The Kirk-Uhu­ra kiss did occa­sion a great many respons­es, prac­ti­cal­ly all of them pos­i­tive. That Nichols and Shat­ner — not to men­tion Star Trek cre­ator Gene Rod­den­ber­ry, and all their oth­er col­lab­o­ra­tors – pulled it off in the right way at the right moment is evi­denced by its being remem­bered more than 50 years lat­er as “TV’s First Inter­ra­cial Kiss.” In fact there had been inter­ra­cial kiss­es on tele­vi­sion for at least a decade (one, on a 1958 Ed Sul­li­van Show, involved Shat­ner him­self), but none had made quite such a con­vinc­ing state­ment, even to skep­tics. “I am total­ly opposed to the mix­ing of the races,” as Nichols remem­bered one view­er writ­ing in. “How­ev­er, any time a red-blood­ed Amer­i­can boy like Cap­tain Kirk gets a beau­ti­ful dame in his arms that looks like Uhu­ra, he ain’t gonna fight it.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Nichelle Nichols Explains How Mar­tin Luther King Con­vinced Her to Stay on Star Trek

Star Trek‘s Nichelle Nichols Cre­ates a Short Film for NASA to Recruit New Astro­nauts (1977)

Watch the First-Ever Kiss on Film Between Two Black Actors, Just Hon­ored by the Library of Con­gress (1898)

Watch Edith+Eddie, an Intense, Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed Short Film About America’s Old­est Inter­ra­cial New­ly­weds

William Shat­ner in Tears After Becom­ing the Old­est Per­son in Space: ‘I’m So Filled with Emo­tion … I Hope I Nev­er Recov­er from This”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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“Downton Abbey” and the Allure of Historical Drama — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #127

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | July 14th, 2022

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We dis­cuss the appeal of this Julian-Fel­lowes-penned British his­tor­i­cal dra­ma in light of the new film. Is this real­ly “a new era” or just more of the same, and is that bad?

Your Pret­ty Much Pop host Mark Lin­sen­may­er is joined by return­ing guest Jon Lam­ore­aux (host of The Hus­tle music pod­cast), plus a cou­ple: for­mer news­cast­er Cor­rinne MacLeod (whom Mark SCANDOLOUSLY went on one date with at age 12) and her hus­band, the pho­tog­ra­ph­er Michael MacLeod.

We talk about the excel­lent cast­ing and how such a big cast gets jug­gled, the appeal of this par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal set­ting, rev­o­lu­tions against the class sys­tem in the show, and the soapy plots. How can a film give us enough of such a big cast? We also touch on The Gild­ed Age, Bridger­ton, Howard’s End, Gos­ford Park, The Great, Poldark, and more.

A few rel­e­vant arti­cles we looked at include:

Hear more Pret­ty Much Pop, includ­ing recent episodes on Jack­ass, This Is Us, and The Expanse. Sup­port the show at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choos­ing a paid sub­scrip­tion through Apple Pod­casts. This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

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