I had always assumed an early/late dichotomy to this, but then I read (IIRC, in an interview with Carl Reiner) that for the second season (the first season had a different opener) they filmed both beginnings , and spliced one or the other randomly for the rest of the run, giving the viewing audience an attention-getting “will he or won’t he” moment right at the top of the half hour.
I won’t retype my entry right now, but a quick check to see whether I’m full of it or not uncovered the show’s Wikipedia article third paragraph)
Yes, I believe the distinction is that Shatner was white, Nichols was black, thus two different races, not ethnicities. For that matter, the distinction is that it was male/female. Early in the first season (1966) of Trek, Nichelle Nichols and Majel Barret exchanged a “kiss of sisterhood,” for lack of a better term, when Barrett’s Nurse Chapel discovered her fiance was still alive (he wasn’t, really, but that is a Trekkie topic).
For that matter, Shatner kissed France Nuyen (nee Nguyen), who has Vietnamese ancestry, iirc, but again, I think people are making a race vs. ethnicity distinction. Others more knowledgeable than I can explain the technicalities. All I can say is, Shatner was one lucky dude all around!
In 2004, it all seesm a bit silly, doesn’t it?
Thank God, as Dylan said, “the times, they are a changin’.”
While not what E-Sabbath was talking about, it could still be argued that wasn’t the first interracial kiss as Shatner denies it was a real kiss but was, instead, all camer angles. Nichols says it was real though.
Huh. Shatners “Star Trek Memories” goes into great detail about how the network refused to let them actually kiss. He says the camera angle was such that it appeared they were kissing, but their lips never touched.
Been a long time since I saw the episode, but I do remember you can’t actually see them kissing like in the linked photo.
Hmmm…maybe that pic’s from a rehearsal or something?
The only racial element of the MNF promo that I heard about was from Tony Dungee (a black head football coach.)
I thought that outroar was mostly about sex.
I was proud of myself. I must be rather enlightened, because it never occured to me to think of that spot in terms of race until Dungee reminded me that I must for some reason.
Elvis Presley had to be filmed from the waist up when he first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Not true. It wasn’t until his third appearance there when this rule was placed on him.
I have watched that entire episode repeatedly and never seen that kiss. Admittedly, I saw it on network television, before DVD. Eh. Go fig. Probably censored out for commercials.
I think the reason that Shatner claims they’re not kissing is ‘cuz they arent’ kissing so much as touching mouths. If you notice, Kirk’s lips are pulled tight because he is straining to go against the mind control they are forcing on him. So it’s not really a mutual kiss, per se.
Hmm, since it has always been realized that the first kiss between a white person and a black person on TV was forced on them by aliens, what is the first mutually intentional black/white television kiss?
Thank goodness Jeremy Brett, as Sherlock Holmes, never said the patronizing “Elementary, dear Watson” during his run, especially since Sir Arthur Conan doyle *never wrote that phrase.
I remember an episode of Bonanza where the Ponderossa’s Chinese cook falls in love with a white woman. I don’t recall if they were shown kissing on screen.
Yes, I know that’s Asian/ White not Black/White. Same principle, though.
Most (not all) people in the US , whether they approve of it or not, are pretty inured to multi racial coupling at this point. I think that was less of a racial issue and more of an inappropriateness re the towel dropping. It was a lot more about her being naked than him being a Negro.
That’s pretty much the way I understood it as well. I read plenty of complaints about her dropping the towel. But the only one I recall saying anything about the interracial element was some Jesse Jackson/Al Sharpton type who claimed that the clip perpetuated the “black male as a mindless sexual animal” stereotype or some such garbage.
