I am talking about Fee Jack the movie from 1992. This movie is about a race car driver from his present day pulled into the future to be used by a wealthy man as a replacement for his aging body.The movie has the star have an accident where he is presumed dead, is pulled into the future some 30 years hence. What I see in this movie is the question of what makes up a person. Does not having a body make you not human? Is the thing being saved the essence of the person?T here is a real question about what is ethical in this movie. Can we just zap someone to bring us a new life? I think not.This movie raises the question of controlling your life force and what does happen when the body dies. Can we as humans attempt to control our death even when we are gone?Those this movie is someone cheesy and spoofish it does make me think about what could happen. Many ideas from sci fi have been attempted or done with science.Taking a life to save own without consent is immoral on so many levels.

To hav e a spiritual switchboard seems to take away the movement towards a higher power. Makes it more mechanical and impersonal. Is this what humans are coming to? Hope not.

“Star Trek, the final frontier”, this is the statement at the beginning of the show. While I believe that this show on a ship named “Enterprise” is about in most respects  commercialism and colonial advancement, it does attempt to break the racial barriers of the 1960’s.

With the crew of 400 on board the ship and hurtling through space, it attempts to show people of different ethnicities working together.  The first inter-racial kiss on television was in “Plato’s Step-children” from 1968. This kiss, between Kirk and Uhura, in the 1960’s at the height of the equal rights movement was a daring move by the shows creative staff. The contraversy brought into play by this kiss gave much attention to the fact that racial equality is important and in the future will be gone.

Yes, I know he is the white captain of the ship, but the crew was made up of others whose roles in the maintain of the ship and crew were of different races (even alien to Earth, Spock). Eventually in future spin-offs and movies there are female captains and admirals of different races and alien cultures.

While there is evident racism in this series and maybe not be as direct in the questioning of racism as the movie from 1967 “Guess Whose Coming To Dinner” with Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn and Sidney Poitier, it still was fighting the gender and racial stereo-types that were very much ingrained in society at the time. Taking baby steps the same as in learning to fly before going into space. Not perfect but an attempt to change the landscape of television of the 1960’s.

While some were played by actors not necssarily of that race (Scotty and Checkov),  Sulu and Uhura were Japanese and black. These were the boundary pushing attempts to “boldly go were no one has gone before”.