Not my OC
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.
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
I always thought the glaring western motifs were a tribute to the original concept of Star Trek being “A wagon train to the stars.”
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.
A black sheriff?
It worked in blazing saddles!
He said the sheriff is near!
Fun fact: Star Trek has lasted longer than the wild west did. 58 years versus 47 years
you would do well to stay away from firefly.
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).