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I always thought the glaring western motifs were a tribute to the original concept of Star Trek being “A wagon train to the stars.”
this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2024
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Nah, it's for the same reason they never went to a jungle world.
Back in the day they just shot everything in the desert outside of LA. It's the whole reason westerns were a thing in the first place, free setting.
So there was a bunch of props and sets from the studio, and Star Trek could do it for free.
I mean, wasn't even MASH in the desert for some reason?
The Original Series straight-up used the Downtown Mayberry set from The Andy Griffith Show twice.
Star Trek used a LOT of stuff from other properties due to money. But I still feel like the western sets were used by choice. Especially in Enterprise, which was meta at that point.
I thought it was because they all like spaghetti
It is the reason a lot of Stargate was shot in various temperate rain forests.
To be fair, I’d say cowboy appearances would be relatively proportional to the population, maybe 1 or 2% of each series… Except DS9, which has a bit of an Alamo obsession.
Should come as no surprise the folks stationed on DS9 were obsessed with the defense of a lone fortress against impossible odds.
The difference being that the Federation was there by consent of the Bajorans and didn't proceed to seize the entire area from its rightful owner. 😂
Like Gul Dukat, James Bowie and William Travis came to impose slavery on the native population.
The battle of the Alamo is presented as tragedy but the fact is the good guys won.
I think TOS had as many mobster episodes as it did cowboy episodes.
It had an oddly large amount of episodes involving ancient Mediterranean civilizations, though… Those darn Greeks/Romans taking over our Trek!
I mean, there's Romulans
A black sheriff?
It worked in blazing saddles!
He said the sheriff is near!
you would do well to stay away from firefly.
Did Voyager or Discovery ever have cowboys?
In cowboy times they went to Fairhaven, Ireland instead.
Guess Tom Paris prefers horseless carriages.
Maybe not literally, but the season 3 episode where Discovery arrived in the future went hard on the western vibes. I think they even included swinging saloon doors at one point.
Fun fact: Star Trek has lasted longer than the wild west did. 58 years versus 47 years
If you want to be like that about, what we think of as American "cowboy" culture only lasted 25-years or so, Civil War-ish to 1880-ish. Yet we treat it like it was a 100-year block of Western history.
Same with "pirates" or "medieval times" or "samurai japan." Our popular conceptions about a lot of time periods are heavily compressed and tropified. Yeah some of them technically lasted for hundreds of years but we just pretend that swashbucklers, armored knights, and ninjas (and cowboys) were all happening around the same time and remained as we depict them for the entirety of their existences.
These are literally paid advertisements for the animal agriculture lobby.
Don't underestimate the power of "We need a cheap episode, where's the literal decades of western props we keep in storage?"
In case of TOS, they literally pitched it as a kind of Western but in space to the studios due to the popularity of the genre on TV (both DeForest Kelly and Shatner had also already appeared in Western serials).