Star trek Chuckov russian Jokes

Those were pretty good seek10. :lol: It's funny, growing up with that show I never really noticed that about Checkov. Thanks for that!
 
Funny stuff! I'm still amazed at how many insights into things this old 60's scifi show (that only ran for three seasons) had. And this compilation of Chekov's statements was no different. This show ran on US television at the height of the cold war, and cloaked with humor, it had a Russian character who manages to get in these wry statements that suggest that, at least sometimes, the other characters don't know everything there is to know about Russia! Even Chekov's name seems to be an reference to the great Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov. (That's only my take on it though, I could be reading a little too much into it!)

That said, here's a great article that was just posted to SOTT by Dmitry Orlov which speaks to some of this: Peculiarities of Russian national character
 
Ennio said:
Funny stuff! I'm still amazed at how many insights into things this old 60's scifi show (that only ran for three seasons) had. And this compilation of Chekov's statements was no different. This show ran on US television at the height of the cold war, and cloaked with humor, it had a Russian character who manages to get in these wry statements that suggest that, at least sometimes, the other characters don't know everything there is to know about Russia! Even Chekov's name seems to be an reference to the great Russian author and playwright Anton Chekhov. (That's only my take on it though, I could be reading a little too much into it!)
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Well, apparently due to the "science fiction" nature of the show, Gene Roddenberry was able to get away with a lot of things! Here's what his wife had to say about this:

They [NBC] wanted a television show that had to do with science fiction and Gene Roddenberry didn't know anything about science fiction. He absolutely knew nothing. But he knew people and he was head writer for Have Gun - Will Travel (1957), and if you took those early Star Treks that we did and put us in a Western wardrobe and put us on wagon train going west, we can say the same lines. So he didn't bother to do science fiction, because he didn't know anything about it. Everybody accepted it.

You put funny people in funny costumes and paint them green and we could talk about anything we wanted to, because that was the only thing that fascinated Gene about this particular genre. Censorship was so bad in those days, you couldn't talk about war, black-white situation, you couldn't even talk about mother love. We took Frank Gorshin and painted him half-black and half-white and his adversary [Lou Antonio] was half-white and half-black and put the two of them at each other and it got through the censors. They never realised that that was what was going on. Once it's up on the screen, it's too late and Gene got to talk about some of the problems that we had today that way. You go through at least the first two years of Star Trek (1966) and you find some amazing stuff. Everything that was going on Gene put into the series. He just put strange costumes on the actors and painted them funny colours and left the same situation in.
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And here's another example of how he tried to get around censorship and NBC's pigheadedness.

When we started out in '64... I was playing Number One, which was a woman second in command of a starship. Now that was innovative, but of course NBC got ahold of it and "You've got to get rid of the broad. No one will believe a woman second in control of a big starship." They said, "You've got to get rid of the guy with the ears 'cos he looks too Satanic." But the third thing was you've got to make it more men than women, because otherwise they're going to think there's a lot of hanky panky going on in the starship.

Gene, realising that he was hitting his head against a wall, and realising what the mentality of the people who were making those decisions was, figured he would do in my case, although he knew it was going to break my heart, figured he would fight and keep the Spock character and marry the woman. So we all got basically what we wanted, and as far as the women are concerned, he figured that 30 good women could handle a crew of 300 anyway. So that's how we ended up with our crew.
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