Infographic: 15 Things You (Probably) Knew About Star Trek May 12, 2010
by Anthony Pascale , Filed under: Great Links , trackback
There is a cool new ‘infographic’ all about Star Trek that has gone viral in the last couple of days. It is a guide to interesting Star Trek trivia, that can be quite educational for those new to the franchise, and maybe even has some tidbits for some regulars. Check it out below.
15 Things About Star Trek You Probably Do Know About
Artist Ricky Linn likes to create interesting infographics, which can be seen on Flickr. His recently recreated ‘15 things you didn’t know about Star Trek’ has been getting a lot of notice and climbing up the DIGG listings this week, but I am sure all you TrekMovie readers know them all. Regardless it is pretty cool, check it out.
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I sadly did know all of that before I read this.
The only thing I didn’t know was the Lake Tahoe thing.
Is it sad that i knew all those facts already?
The reference to the White House booklet is new info to me.
I only knew about half of that stuff…does that make me a bad Trekkie?
Interesting stuff, though.
Me too…I didn’t know the Lake Tahoe thing. All the rest, yeah.
Majel Barrett Roddenberry had a guest-starring role in “Enterprise?”
Split infinitives aren’t really incorrect. The idea came from Latinists (I am one) who didn’t like the idea of splitting an infinitive because it can’t be done in Latin. English has no such rules on its own.
And #7: She was the Defiant Computer in “In a Mirror Darkly,” I think.
7 and 9….She was the Defiant Computer in “In a Mirror Darkly,” ENT.
I didn’t know the Lake Tahoe, White House booklet or spit infiitive symbol fun facts. I knew everything else though.
I learned 3 pieces of Trek trivia today. It is a good day.
8 — Nor should English forbid intentional bending/breaking of rules. It’s a living language. Last I checked, Latinians weren’t smellin’ too fresh.
I thought the Defiant computer was voiced by a male actor like the MU Enterprise. Guess not.
The split infinitive doesn’t bother me as much as: “…had one of the largest impacts on popular culture and science than any other franchise in history…”
#13
No, the Defiant had a female voice since it came from “our” universe where most Federation ships had a female computer voice. I believe the mirror NX-01 had a male voice, just like the mirror 1701.
BTW nice graphics for those fact – and yup i knew all of them lol!
15: You are absolutely right. I remember now.
I knew all of this…but that doesn’t make it any less awesome!!!
#12 – I can find you some fresh hot LATINAS… ;-)
I’ve been following this site for years. How’d I miss ZQ’s glued fingers?
- Harry
#20
You probably just forgot. We get so much information from Anthony and his staff we’re all bound to forget some things. :-)
Did not know about Zacks glued fingers. But knew everything else. Yes. Im a Trek Geek. Kool Site.
I knew vulcan and klingon had been porperly compiled (as languages) and were taught, but I didn’t realise ‘tribbles’ had an ‘official’ language. I imagine must be near-impenetrably difficult, with gender, tense and declension all determined by the length, pressure and tone of ‘purring’ (probably split into particles… otherwise the vocabulary would be too limited).
Olsen was Chief Engineer? I missed that.
One of the things in that list is wrong.
Number One wasn’t dumped from TOS because NBC found a female first officer “unbelievable.” She was dumped because NBC didn’t want Majel Barrett (Gene Roddenberry’s mistress) in the role. The “sexist network” thing was just Gene Roddenberry’s cover story to avoid telling Majel the truth.
This & many other TOS myths are debunked in the book Inside Star Trek: The Real Story by Herb Solow & Robert Justman. I highly recommend it.
Zach’s tried to dispel that rumour from the Post, saying it was a myth.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/40211#?t=22501597001&l=1380400303
I’m pretty sure there’s another interview out there where he specifically says that the gluing his fingers together during filming is untrue, but I don’t remember which one it is. I guess he could be lying, but… why? Especially when J.J. or someone other than an anonymous source could call him out on it really easily.
@25: “Number One wasn’t dumped from TOS because NBC found a female first officer “unbelievable.””
Than why didn’t they call for a simple cast replacement?
I think it was Enertainment Weekly that said he taped his fingers for weeks before filming so he could get used to the Vulcan salute. But who cares as long as he can do it!
Woah dude! I didn’t know we were in the dictionary!!!
I love how people claim to be Star Trek races lol. I heard about elections where Mickey Mouse almost won and stuff like that too. Immaturity rules.
I also didn’t know that Quinto glued his fingers…ok, not meaning to be rude but its not THAT hard to do the Vulcan salute (wimp)…..well never mind I guess if you’re born that way.
@Polly: It depends on the person. Some people actually can’t do it naturally. I, for instance, can do it easily with my left hand, but had to train the muscles in my right hand in order to be able to do it. I think Zach had a similar situation, and he definitely taped/rubberbanded the fingers of his right hand together while preparing for the role in order to train his muscles (there’s an EW article as well as a GQ article that confirm that), but I’m fairly certain the gluing them together during filming is a myth.
#29,30
Yeah, well, I got the both of you beat! I can do the with both hands! :-D
I meant “I can do the salute with both hands!” :-D
Yeah only things I didn’t know were Zach’s glued fingers and the Xenolinguistics course. That’s kinda weird that we now have a Spock that can’t do the Vulcan salute on his own.
The “first interracial kiss” thing isn’t exactly true — there’s a discussion at Memory-Alpha.com on the ‘Plato’s Stepchildren” page. Nancy Sinatra kissed Sammy Davis Jr. on a special the previous year, though it wasn’t a “romantic” kiss. Even in previous Trek episodes Kirk kissed non-European characters: Elaan (played half-Vietnamese France Nuyen) and Miramanee (character Native American, don’t know about the actress). And later in the season, Marta may have been played by a white actress, but she sure wasn’t white in “Whom Gods Destroy”.
Maybe they should have called it the first televised white/black couple frenching?
And wow @ the glue. When I was 7 I trained my hands to do the salute in a matter of days.
That wasn’t the uniform worn by Number One- she wore pants.
Okay, I was going to say I was an uber geek as I knew all about two the Tahoe thing and the reference to the government memo, but I defer the uber geek title to 36. for typical Trekkie anal retentiveness. ; )
Love the references. Yay! No bloody Wikipedia! I love Wikipedia for a quick check, but to me it is a sign of supreme laziness when people use it as a reference for facts (given some of the problems that have resulted in “factuality” in the Wiki). I teach English at a top university in China and it drives me nuts when students rely on this (Encyclopedias shouldn’t be used for academic essays anyway, but I cut them some slack on this as long as they use from sources with professional editors). But the Wikipedia laziness makes me “triply” crazy when I see it used by journalists. So, kudos to the artist for referencing his sources and not resorting to Wikpedia.
After that rant I think I need to reclaim the uber geek title. ; )
14. With you on the “impacts” thing. Blech!
As for Latinists, you can all but smell the mildew. I kid, I kid…
25. Mistress? Was Roddenberry married before he married Majel Barrett?
Didn’t know about the glue.
Didn’t know about the community college.
I disagree that the split infinitive is “grammatically incorrect.” Poor style for certain stuffier parties, sure, but post #8 has it right.
And now I know that this infographic is Freaking Awesome.
Didn’t know the Lake Tahoe college courses. But hey, there won’t be many people around this here site who don’t know most of the facts on the sheet.
I like the design of the sheets, great job!
Split infinitives: my former girlfriend who was studying English literature at the time told me that split infinitives are acceptable in American English, but incorrect in British English. True?
Yes, Roddenberry was married to someone else. Don’t remember her name, would need to look it up in my sources. I am debating though whether it was an on screen kiss. Kirk turns his head toward the camera along with Uhura’s. You can see that his face is very close to hers, but it doesn’t look like he actually kissed her. It’s questionable. For all intended purposes, it’s supposed to LOOK like he did, but did he really do it? Did he really manage to keep from kissing her because he was forced into it by Plato’s Step Children.
I would pay to have a poster of this to put in a frame.
I just checked my Mac OS X dictionary which is based on the Oxford. True enough ‘Trekkies’ is there and for the uptight among us “Trekker” is there too.
Didn’t know about Zach’s glue, but knew the rest.
It reminds me of the difficulties Celia Lovsky had when doing the Vulcan Salute for “Amok Time” and McCoy’s “that hurts worse than the uniform” line from Journey to Babel”.
I’ve always been able to do the Salute easily with both hands, but it might be really interesting to have a poll taken to see what percentage of people have trouble with it, just out of curiosity…
@25 – That was my thought, too. Personally I found Inside Star Trek to be really interesting. Though as you say it pokes holes in some of the mythology surrounding Roddenberry.
A lot of fans resent that, but I thought it was interesting to see a bit of the network’s side of things. And it is consistent with what I’ve read in some of the other Star Trek memoirs about Roddenberry.
Also, its not like Solow is someone who would’ve been biased toward the network; like Gene he worked for the studio, so if anything I’d have expected him to be biased towards Gene if the network really did screw him around.
Inside Star Trek also took a poke at another of these. The famed interracial cast. According to that book, if I recall correctly, the interracial cast wasn’t Gene’s idea, it was part of the network feedback from the casting of the original pilot. If you recall “The Cage” pretty much the entire main cast is white. And other than Majel (and the stereotypical blonde airhead yeoman) they’re all males. Majel was pretty much the only diversity in the main cast. :)
He said the network at the time was looking for more racial diversity in their programming, and it seemed to fit well with Star Trek. That’s a big part of why the whole show had to be recast.
@27 – According to Solow, the network never said they had to recast the role as a male, they did just say they had to recast the role. They didn’t like her acting, and they didn’t like the fact that she was his mistress.
Obviously, if Gene told her the network made them recast because they objected to a woman first officer, because he didn’t want her to know that it was her specifically they objected to, he’d have to recast the first officer role as male to make his story work.
Solow also mentions in that book that when Gene snuck her back into the series as Chapel, the network was NOT happy, again because they specifically objected to her. (But at least she was a minor character.)
So the famous voice over line should read “To go boldly, where no man has gone before?”
Doesn’t sound as dramatic does it? Of course, after 44 years, I may just be used to the “incorrect” expression.
The Lake Tahoe course was hardly the only or the first.
Grad students from MIT and Harvard’s Linguistics group had a Klingon language class in-class, and by-mail course long long ago, soon after the Klingon Dictionary came out. I taught Auburn University’s Continuing Education in class Klingon Conversation course back around 1990 and 1991. There are many other examples.
And Star Trek began filming on November 27, 1964. 1966 is just when it began airing. :)
Also, the White House document was from the March 1958 “Introduction to Outer Space”:
“…the compelling urge of man to explore and to discover, the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before.”
Funny how TNG went back to “no one has gone before”, yet Gene wrote “no man has gone before”. (Or as we wagged with TMP: “where Nomad has gone before!” and again with Data: “where Norman has gone before!” Can we have a Travelocity commercial some day please with the tag line “where gnome-man has gone before?”)
“To boldly go” has better rhythm than “to go boldly”, I guess.
The first is sort of da-DAH-da-da, the second is just like da-da-DAH.
Knew them all!!!!
I’ve always used the “to boldly go” to teach my students about split infinitives.
One of my colleagues says that English teachers shouldn’t give a “rat’s ass” (her colorful metaphor) about split infinitives anymore, but I’m glad to see that this “infographic” (ugh! what a hideous neologism!) states it is still grammatically incorrect to use them.
Also, ending sentences in prepositions, as Winston Churchill pointed out, is something up with which we should not put. ; )
Facinating!
How about 15 things i (probably) never knew about star trek ?
I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen a graph that provided any breakdown of death-by-uniform color. That’s got to be new to everybody.
@27 – Bobby got it right in Comment #48 above. Gene Roddenberry didn’t want to have to tell Majel that her role was being recast with another actress, so he said that the “sexist network” demanded a male first officer. Still a bitter pill for Majel to swallow, but it allowed GR to save face with his girlfriend AND get his show on the air.
#48 is also right on NBC being a big proponent of interracial casting. They made Bill Cosby an equal costar on I SPY the year before TOS hit the air.
@40 – Yes, Roddenberry was married to another woman when TOS began. He married Majel in 1969 (IIRC) somewhere around the time that TOS ended. Nichelle Nichols was also an ex-girlfriend of GR’s, although their relationship ended well before he cast her in TOS. GR also reportedly only cast Andrea Dromm as Yeoman Smith in TOS’s 2nd pilot because he wanted to hit on her.
Really, I can’t recommend INSIDE STAR TREK: THE REAL STORY enough for anyone who is interested in behind-the-scenes tidbits on TOS like these.
#56
I’d like to see a graph that provides a breakdown of death-by-uniform colors for the TNG era. I reckon that a significant number would be the yellow shirts since yellow became the color for security and engineering for TNG.
#43: “Split infinitives: my former girlfriend who was studying English literature at the time told me that split infinitives are acceptable in American English, but incorrect in British English. True?”
Split infinitives are grammatically correct in any version of English (post #8 is absolutely right about the taboo/misconception being a holdover from Latin), which is a separate question from being “acceptable.” Stuffy sorts on both sides of the pond consider them ENTIRELY unacceptable, and thus earn our ridicule.
Except for the Lake Tahoe thing I kinda knew all that.
And I’m technically new to the fandom.
But was Shatner’s kidney stone 25K? I remember reading somewhere that it was really 75K. (I think it’s the blurb from Up Till Now)
@ 58: I second that!
59: Ah! By “acceptable” I meant just “grammatically acceptable”. But my former girl probably meant something like “acceptable style”.
The holdover from Latin is something they should put on a “15 things you didn’t know about English language” chart.
58: I’ll immediately start skimming through all 7 seasons and 4 movies of TNG and I’ll chart the casualties according to uniform color… oh wait! Damn, I’ve already got an appointment this evening :-)
The split infinitive rule is one of the sillier English rules, and also a rule easily ignored. It’s a very old rule which has its root in Latin. When the rules of English were being codified in the 17th century, this rule was decided upon because in Latin you never split infinitives. What makes that rule silly is that Latin verb infinitive roots are one word and in English they are two, as in “to go”, “to jump”, or “to warp”.
To impose that linguistic rule on English is silly. Why can’t you split an infinitive? What does a Latin root have to do with English? English, at it’s heart, isn’t even a Romance language: it’s Germanic (with heavy French, Latin and Greek influences).
So you boldly go Kirk! Do not go boldly!
-Ian (Yep, I’m an English teacher)
#8 is correct. There is no such rule in English. “To boldy go where no man has gone before” is acceptable.
-Tracy, Professor of Communicative Arts
Star Trek fact #16: Provided with any detail about Star Trek, fans can argue over the accuracy of said fact until the cows come home.
To # 34 and all about the interracial kiss:
Apparently the Brits beat Kirk and Uhura to the kiss:
http://www.tv-ark.org.uk/mivana/mediaplayer.php?id=d55eb35c2054e3b428376b3bca05f5b8&media=emergencywardten1960s&type=mp4
A British soap, Emergency Ward 10, claims TV’s first interracial kiss in the early 1960’s.
65 – Oh yeah? Prove it!
I think it’s ridiculous that anyone actually cares about split infinitives. English is a living language, constantly evolving. The idea that a language has rules and conventions that every speaker or writer must conform to is a product of 18th century Latinist thinking. Before that, there was hardly even a concept of correct spelling, let alone correct grammar. Rules are artificially imposed and have little basis in the reality of a living language. Language rules should be DEscriptive, not PREscriptive.
I think it is the duty of every good man and woman to boldly split infinitives where no infinitives have been split before.