Holy Shit, Uhura!

The woman in the above photo is Nichelle Nichols, in character as Lieutenant Nyota Uhura on the set of Star Trek. It's easy to forget (which is encouraging to me) how groundbreaking this character was for American fiction, and particularly for network television. She debuted with series opening episode, "The Man Trap," which aired in 1966.

Uhura was Chief Communications Officer aboard the Enterprise. That makes her the fourth link in the chain of command. So,..a black woman, in 1966, held a position of considerable power in a network television show. That's a mere two years after the Civil Rights Act. Deep-seated institutional racism doesn't just taper off that quickly. Uhura wouldn't have existed if Gene Roddenberry hadn't held downright shockingly progressive views for a man of his generation from Texas.

You wouldn't have known it by his face.

As a matter of fact, Roddenberry's original pilot featured a female First Officer, who was the intensely logical and level-headed presence on the bridge. The female character. In 1965. It goes beyond that, even. He stubbornly refused to allow any reference to organized religion as a going concern on the show. While working on The Next Generation, he told writer/producer Ronald D. Moore that he believed Earth's religions would taper out by the 23rd Century, to be replaced by personal spirituality.

But back to Uhura. At the end of the first season, Nichelle Nichols considered leaving to pursue a career on Broadway. One weekend, she went to a Civil Rights and met a big fan of the show who changed her mind. You may have heard of him, because he was Martin Luther King.

Junior.

Yeah. That Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dr. King told Nichols that Star Trek was the only show he and his wife allowed their kids to watch. He begged her not to leave, because he knew how important it was for black people in America, and in particular black women, to have a role model like Uhura. Someone who was not a servant of the heroes, but their peer. "Once that door is opened by someone," he said, "no one else can close it again.

So she stayed on for the duration of the series. It turns out, Dr. King was right on the money. Among those who called Nyota Uhura a major influence were Dr. Sally Ride, the first female astronaut, and Dr. Mae Jamison, the first black woman astronaut. Whoopi Goldberg, who played Guinan in The Next Generation, also looked up to Uhura. When she first saw Star Trek, she ran to her parents and shouted, "I just saw a black woman on television; and she ain't no maid!"

People make a big deal out of Star Trek, and we like to call those people nerds. But you can't deny the impact. It goes beyond launching a renewed interest in science fiction (and science in general). Star Trek played a crucial role in tearing down racist and sexist taboos, and it did so deliberately. Because Uhura's name? Comes from the Swahili, uhuru. Which means "freedom."

Holy shit.


"Gene roddenberry 1976" by Larry D. Moore. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gene_roddenberry_1976.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Gene_roddenberry_1976.jpg

Holy Shit, It's That Guy! (The Hobbit Edition)

We're gonna do another one of these things, because it's fun and it's my blog and I'll cry if I want to. But I don't want to cry. I want to point out relatively obscure actors in high profile roles that you probably missed. Speaking of which, I missed one last time. Tywin Lannister, as it turns out, also makes a great movie-within-a-movie villain. Here he is being ridiculously evil in Last Action Hero:

That glass eye doubles as a bomb. If that doesn't make you want to watch this masterpiece, you are dead inside.

Like last time, I'm going to ignore the bigger, more obvious ones. Yes, Martin Freeman was Arthur Dent, Ian McKellen was Magneto, Benedict Cumberbatch is a Benedict Sexybitch. Obviously.

I really am straight, I just call 'em like I see 'em

But what about humble Radagast the Hippie Brown?

Seen here making a mockery of his character

Did you notice that he's a freaking Time Lord?

I'm not saying all the Istari are Time Lords, I'm just saying Gandalf kind of regenerated

How about this handsome fellow? Does he look familiar?

And no, believe it or not, it's not your mom.

No?

What if you saw him with no prosthetics and no CGI...as you could when he played Marc Antony on Xena: Warrior Princess?

He's not the only Xena alum in the cast. See if you can find the others!

Finally, one of my personal favorites. This guy, who sparked a bizarre sub-fandom when he first appeared in The Fellowship of the Ring:

His official name is "Lindir," which is Elvish for "Singer."

...is none other than Bret McKenzie, the musician responsible for the rebooted Muppet Movie soundtrack. He's also one half of Flight of the Conchords, New Zealand's third most popular folk parody duo.

He's on the left. The other half is in the middle.

Holy shit, right? 

Let me know if I missed any good ones.

Holy Shit, It's That Guy! (Game of Thrones Edition)

I'm gonna take a different approach today. I'm going to go all pop culture and throw educational value to the four winds. See, I've been watching Game of Thrones lately, and it keeps occurring to me that I've seen a lot of the characters before, often in surprising roles. Sometimes, the moment of anagnorisis makes me utter the sacred words of this blog, so I've decided to dedicate this post to those actors.

Here's the rules: It has to be a smallish role in something that was a pretty big deal back in its day. These rules are loosely defined and subjective. I just want everyone to know that I'm aware of that. Anyway...

What started me on this track was actually Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which I just recently started marathoning for the first time. Turns out it was way overdue. So, in the first episode of the fourth season, this awkward college freshman turns up, is promptly turned into a vampire, and is subsequently slain by the eponymous heroine:

This is what handsome looked like in the late '90s

He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't quite place him. Not three days later, Pedro Pascal did an AMA on Reddit wherein he mentioned that he had made an appearance on Buffy. If you're not sure who that is, just think of the sexiest Game of Thrones character you know. Whether you are male or female, gay or straight, the correct answer is:

Speaks for itself.

Next up is Maester Pycelle, or "that perverted old prick in King's Landing." Here he is in the show:

Look at his stupid, smug little face.

And here he is piloting an AT-AT walker in the Battle of Hoth for The Empire Strikes Back:

Gotta hand it to him. He survived serving under Darth Vader. Few officers did.

And here he is choosing poorly in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade:

"A cup for the King of Kings." Dumbass.

How about this guy:

Essence of brooding distilled to a human face. After it's been set on fire, of course.

Surely he hasn't been in anything too big, right? He's such a memorable character, you'd know for certain if you'd seen him before. Right? Well, all I can say to that is, "Narp."

Yarp

That's him as the simple grocery boy Michael from Hot Fuzz. Maybe you would have recognized him if he had said more than one mangled word in the film.

This is fun. How about this guy? Joffrey Baratheon, First of his Name, spoiled little shit of a king, played by the only actor who has successfully made me want to stab a child in the face:

Ugh. Just look at that face. It's begging to be knifed.

Well, here he is with Rachel Dawes during R'as al Ghul's attack on Gotham City in Batman Begins:

The fact that I don't even want to kick him a little bit is a testament to his acting chops.

I could go on and on like this. Catelyn Stark, for example, was Hermione's mom in the second-to-last
Harry Potter film. Jorah Mormont (aka General Friendzone) was in an episode of Doctor Who. There are so many characters in the series, you'd be hard pressed to not find one with a surprising career history. Let me know if I missed your favorite.

Holy shit. This was fun. I'll do more for other shows with big casts.

Holy Shit, Tommy Westphall!

What if I told you that almost all of your favorite television shows and most of your least favorite ones take place in the mind of an autistic teenager? I suspect you'd call bullshit and tell me that's just lazy writing. It sort of is, which the "in his head all along" plot twist isn't used very often anymore.

But when St. Elsewhere ended its six year run in 1988, it was groundbreaking. The whole series, as it turned out, was a day dream of Tommy Westphall, the autistic son of one of the main characters. Instead of everything taking place in a hospital, we find out that it was actually in a construction worker's apartment, in his son's mysterious imagination.



Here's where it gets weird. Weirder.

Fourteen years after the series ended, a writer named Dwayne McDuffie publicly wondered what the implications of that bizarro ending where for the greater TV universe. Any show worth its salt, after all, has a crossover with another show worth a comparable amount of salt.

Ever think about the troubling socioeconomic implications of this?

St. Elsewhere had one of these with Homicide: Life on the Street. Two doctors from the former appeared in episodes of the latter. McDuffie's theory holds that this crossover means both shows are figments of Tommy Westphall's imagination. Do you know what other shows had crossovers with Homicide?

Lots of them.

Like this one.

Homicide turns out to be something of a nexus for little Tommy's mind. Through it, literally hundreds of other television shows are connected in degrees that would make Kevin Bacon blush. According to one of the St. Elsewhere writers, "Someone did the math once... and something like 90 percent of all television took place in Tommy Westphall's mind. God love him."

Here's my personal favorite: through Homicide, Tommy imagined The X-Files, which leads to Veronica Mars, then Lost, Diagnosis: Murder, Mission: Impossible, The Jeffersons, The Fresh Prince of Bel goddamn Air, Diff'rent Strokes, the legendarily bad Hello, Larry, then Hi Honey, I'm Home, The Brady Bunch (!!!), Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, Hogan's Heroes, and finally....

Booya. Or bat-ya. Whatever.

Fucking BATMAN.

That's right. Batman. The Dark Knight was invented by an autistic kid staring at a snow globe.

Holy Shit.