Why didn't anyone smoke on "TOS?"

[JonnyQuest037]

If I recall correctly, Shatner smoked but quit during the original run.

Yes, Nimoy talks about Shatner quitting in their conversation on the Mind Meld DVD. Shatner says a big reason he quit was because his young daughters would recoil at the smell and not want to hug him. Shatner quit cold turkey, IIRC. Nimoy remembered him at one point going off to a corner of the set and screaming at the top of his lungs, "I WANT A CIGARETTE!!!" But he didn't crack. He quit out of sheer willpower.

Shatner says later on (I think while they were discussing Nimoy and Nerine Shatner's battles with alcohol), "I don't have an addictive personality." Nimoy quietly says, "I do," which might explain why he had so much more trouble quitting.

 

[T'Bonz]

My husband had to quit cold turkey at the end of May. Cigarettes would have killed him. He had to have the carotid surgery. Will probably have the other side done in due course.

His doc - well both of them - was very glad to hear that he has totally quit.

I'm a little militant about cigarettes these days. I know too many personally who died courtesy of lung cancer from smoking.

 

[Timewalker]

I completely agree that smoking has a way of aging film and tv productions at this point. Especially smoking indoors. Anytime I'm watching something and I see someone smoking indoors, I immediately know this story does not take place in the modern day.

That's not a hard and fast rule. Several characters smoke on The Handmaid's Tale, which takes place in a "near future" setting. Every time Serena Joy lights a cigarette it shows just how much of a hypocrite she is - the terrorist group she was part of that created the Republic of Gilead claimed that they wanted to "clean up the country" and were soooo concerned about environmental toxins and the plummeting birthrate. So what does Serena do? She smokes in the same room as the Handmaid who's supposed to provide a baby for the Waterfords.

There was a trailer for a Doctor Who episode in the sixties where Patrick Troughton spoke to us the viewers (kids too) of the dangers of smoking. Strange considering that his earlier self played by William Hartnell was seen to be smoking a pipe in the very second episode of the series!
JB

There's a Fifth Doctor story in which one of the guest characters smokes.


COPD is insidious. My grandfather quit smoking the same year I was born, but died 23 years later. My dad has that now; he's been clean for nearly 10 years... the only favor his dementia ever did was take away his memories of being a nicotine addict and he now has no desire to smoke.

Even so, I've left orders for the caretakers at the nursing home that he is never to be in the company of anyone who's smoking. The mind doesn't remember, but the body doesn't know that.

 

[Spock's Barber]

Yarnak smokes a little bit.

 

[mos6507]

That sounds familiar. He (Shatner) was a fitness bug at the time, so I can see him dropping the cigarettes.

Which might be a reason why he's still around, although his dietary habits leave much to be desired.

 

[Trekfan12]

Which might be a reason why he's still around, although his dietary habits leave much to be desired.

Yes, Nimoy talks about Shatner quitting in their conversation on the Mind Meld DVD. Shatner says a big reason he quit was because his young daughters would recoil at the smell and not want to hug him. Shatner quit cold turkey, IIRC. Nimoy remembered him at one point going off to a corner of the set and screaming at the top of his lungs, "I WANT A CIGARETTE!!!" But he didn't crack. He quit out of sheer willpower.

Shatner says later on (I think while they were discussing Nimoy and Nerine Shatner's battles with alcohol), "I don't have an addictive personality." Nimoy quietly says, "I do," which might explain why he had so much more trouble quitting.

I noticed that Shatner still smokes on occasion. When he was doing "Boston Legal" he would smoke cigars with James Spader at the end of every episode. I saw him smoke a cigar on "Better Late Than Never." ep last season. I have to wonder about his diet too, I know he struggled with his weight when he filmed TOS, as well as the films. I read that he kept on a strict diet when film TMP to fit into those outfits.

BTW my late mom was a smoker, started as a teen. She quit cold turkey in 1984, just about the time when the smoking and non smoking laws came into effect. She passed away in 1996 of breast cancer. I am convinced that she would have died sooner had she not quit (jmo)

 

[Maurice]

^^^Many cigarettes in film these days aren't real tobacco, but cloves (John Hamm described them as "Terrible. They taste like a mixture between pot and soap."

 

[Herbert]

Maybe humanity has outgrown such things by the 23rd century

I like to think of it this way. They had outgrown and matured beyond such harmful foolishness. A shame we're still living with it today.

On the other hand, alcohol was seen many times on TOS so there's that level of inconsistency

 

[Christopher]

I noticed that Shatner still smokes on occasion. When he was doing "Boston Legal" he would smoke cigars with James Spader at the end of every episode.

There's this bizarre idea in our culture that cigars are somehow not as bad a thing to smoke as cigarettes. People who consider themselves non-smokers will still sometimes smoke cigars. I think it's partly the myth that they're less carcinogenic because they're smoked differently, which is wrong -- they just cause cancer in different parts of the respiratory tract, and have an even greater second-hand smoke risk to others. But it's partly cultural, the idea that cigars are a sort of social bonding ritual for commemorating an achievement or victory or whatever. Traditionally, of course, men would commemorate becoming fathers by handing out cigars, which was probably some kind of phallic symbol/fertility thing, which makes it even more icky to contemplate.

 

[Jayson1]

There's this bizarre idea in our culture that cigars are somehow not as bad a thing to smoke as cigarettes. People who consider themselves non-smokers will still sometimes smoke cigars. I think it's partly the myth that they're less carcinogenic because they're smoked differently, which is wrong -- they just cause cancer in different parts of the respiratory tract, and have an even greater second-hand smoke risk to others. But it's partly cultural, the idea that cigars are a sort of social bonding ritual for commemorating an achievement or victory or whatever. Traditionally, of course, men would commemorate becoming fathers by handing out cigars, which was probably some kind of phallic symbol/fertility thing, which makes it even more icky to contemplate.

It's not just cigars but chewing tobacco as well. My grandpa used that stuff all the time, I think to sort of replace smoking which he use to do. He ended up dying from cancer, still in 1996.

Jason

 

[Christopher]

It's not just cigars but chewing tobacco as well. My grandpa used that stuff all the time, I think to sort of replace smoking which he use to do. He ended up dying from cancer, still in 1996.

Yup. Chewing tobacco won't give you lung cancer, just mouth cancer. There is no form of tobacco that is safe to use, no matter how creative you get with vaping or hookahs or whatever.

 

[Spock's Barber]

There's an old joke....

My doctor told me if I didn't either quit smoking or stop having sex then I was going to die. So, I threw my cigarettes in the trash.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Except you couldn't use the word "pregnant" on TV back then -- it's "expecting" or "in a family way," please.

How could you have forgotten "enceinte"? (I Love Lucy)

 

[Christopher]

How could you have forgotten "enceinte"? (I Love Lucy)

Oh, most of the euphemisms are from I Love Lucy. I think it actually coined one or two of them. That was the first US TV show to do a pregnancy storyline, and they fought with the censors over how much they could acknowledge it, because Americans have the craziest notions about what's obscene.

Interestingly, Wikipedia says that sponsor Philip Morris specifically asked that Lucy not be shown smoking while she was "expecting." Although I found in looking into it further that the sponsor usually required the cast to smoke on-camera.

 

[Harvey]

Oh, most of the euphemisms are from I Love Lucy. I think it actually coined one or two of them. That was the first US TV show to do a pregnancy storyline

It wasn't, actually. A little-known sitcom called Mary Kay and Johhny had a pregnancy storyline during the 1948-49 season.

 

[Christopher]

It wasn't, actually. A little-known sitcom called Mary Kay and Johhny had a pregnancy storyline during the 1948-49 season.

The article I found mentioned that, but I got the impression that it didn't do a whole story arc about it. On looking more closely, it refers to Lucy's pregnancy as the first "real-time" storyline about a pregnancy, although given that Mary Kay and Johnny was a live show, it couldn't have been more real-time. What I can find about it says that Mary Kay had to be written out of an episode because she was giving birth at practically that very moment, so the episode focused on her husband in the (fictional) waiting room. But I can't find details about how long before that the pregnancy was acknowledged. It sounds like they did their best to hide it until it became impossible to do so.

 

[Harvey]

Information is pretty scarce -- it was a live show, and not much of it appears to have been preserved -- but this is what I've read about it (from the book America's First Network TV Censor: The Work of NBC's Stockton Helffrich, by Robert Pondillo):

Helffrich revealed that the program "had as its leading lady an actual pregnant woman with her pending confinement a part of the script....References are kept within bounds and camera treatment has so far been acceptable with no squawks from anybody." It is unclear if the word pregnant was spoken, but Mary Kay was clearly seen in her parturient state. After the birth, her new son made his acting debut on the show, playing himself, of course.

 

[plynch]

Y'know that's a good point above, that we would "outgrow" tobacco, but there's alcohol all over in TOS. And showing getting drunk or drinking a lot as funny or ok (Scotty). I guss it took till the next century and synthohol to outgrow that?

 

[Maurice]

Sad how the "firsts" so often get reassigned to shows that had legs and no one remembers the shows that actually did the pioneering.

 

[Nyotarules]

Humanity might outgrow tobacco but some alien race might lap it up as harmless vegatation. A bit like the choclate/sucrose make Vulcans drunk fanon.