Star Trek and Teenage Heartthrobs

Star Trek, and by extension Gene Roddenberry, had a peculiar world view. It's firmly stationed in the nineteen sixties. Indelible and unmoving.

Season one of the show we had our competent, and diversely multi-cultured, cast of naval spacemen. But there was something missing. You can't court everybody with short-skirted, dark-skinned honeys or green-blooded, logic-spouting romanesques. You have to bring in the teenage girl demographic too.

Season Two. Enter Chekov. Not Anton, but rather Ensign Pavel Chekov.

Although Roddenberry had attached an apocryphal origin of placating cold warriors, the Soviet Union, who were also at the time in a space race, he is instead Star Trek's idea of the teenybopper idol, with his mop-top, his foreign accent, and audience analogue youth: the heartthrob. Of course, he didn't talk like 'is, allo, allo, is Chekov 'ere, allo guvnor, but rather with a delightful "Russian" accent, (i.e. "nuclear wessel").

But the The Monkees-esque youth movement courting teenage heartthrob is all right there in the image.