Having grown up with hearing this trope from my dad (also a big Trekkie), and only going back to TOS in my 20’s, I don’t even know how it got so exaggerated. There wasn’t nearly as many red shirt deaths as I expected. I even watched it on Spike, when they had trivia and a literal red shirt death counter overlay.
I think it’s in comparison. How many red shirts are killed, vs how many blue shirts? According to startrek.com, twice as many red shirts were killed in TOS than either blue or yellow; in fact, 50% more red shirts were killed off (24) than red and yellow combined (16).
Some Reddit person tried to debunk this by doing a pie chart that showed red barely beating yellow, but they combined TOS and TNG numbers, and the shirt colors swapped between the two series.
Security in the Star Trek universe is a more dangerous posting than the others.
Red also covers Engineering, the kind of people who will be standing next to a power coupling when it explodes.
The real enemy in deep space is the ship itself.
It really did get exaggerated. It’s not as often as you’d think.
Same thing with the “Kirk sleeps with all the aliens” trope.
I reckon local stations just picked the 20 or so episodes with the most action and violence and just replayed them over and over for 30 years
Same thing with Shatner speech. Very exaggerated.
Yeah, but when it does occur, it’s fantastically funny. I can only think of a couple times through the series and the films when you hear it.
Everything in TOS is grossly exaggerated. I don’t know what kind of cultural phenomenon is that, but the reaction to everything there happens to an absurd level.
I think the opening scene for the 2009 movie had more visual deaths in it than all the series combined. And one of the shockers of WoK was how we finally saw first hand what “casualties” looks like when you’re right there.
