I heard that at the end of a long meeting trying to assign character names, the head writer said, “C’mon everyone, let’s wrap this up. The name of the Russian guy is the only one left to check off.”
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I only have myself to blame, leaving a loaded gun like that in plain sight.
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And it took me decades to get this, because they used the English transliteration when they dubbed it into German. Well, at least not the one commonly used for Tschechow.
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Not according to the teachers in my midwestern school (I was in 8th grade in 1968).
When the social studies teacher said, “pick a form of government to write about,” I chose “communism” (purposely to poke at her, because she was a really bad teacher). To get to do the project, I had to go over her head and get cringing permission from the head honchos.
Did you live through the cold war in the US?
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I did, at least the tail end. So did Gene Roddenberry, who was a lot older than me and took a big professional risk (one of many) insisting on a Russian character’s inclusion. Fortunately not everyone in America during that era was as benighted as your teacher and administrator.
I can’t find any clear evidence about the origin of the name, but Koenig claims that Roddenberry changed the character’s nationality (originally an English Davy Jones type heartthrob) to recognise the fact the the Russians made it to space first. Since Anton Chekhov is a big favourite with screenwriters I can easily see Roddenberry honouring him too.
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The name of the Russian guy is the only one left to check off.
Ha, good one!
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New-klee-er wessels…
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St Petersburg is a port city, so I assume flying that way to the Baltic is accepted.
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That, and lava.
I asked Hong Kong Chinese and Pakistani colleagues whether their floors were ever lava when they were kids.
They replied: “All around the world, it’s always lava.”
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I used to do that to make sure my nephew stayed in bed. He’d smile when I transformed the floor from the doorway but it was always a nervous smile.
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Never knew about the floor being lava until an adult, from American media.
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Yep; both horrified fascinations were part of my childhood.
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Couldn’t see much from under the desk.
When I was a kid the good Russians had names like Natalie Wood and Yul Brenner.
(Lots of Russian Jewish names in my family, of course, but I’m not sure we saw one another as ‘good’.)
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Hollywood was disproportionately fascinated by squishy ground traps because that’s where the La Brea tar pits are 
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Ask a San Francisco motorcycle police officer.
I too grew up in Ontario and had a baseless fear of quicksand. But it was “the undertow” that really filled me with terror.
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We grew up in fear of quicksand. Every now and then our local quicksand appears in the media which makes me feel justified.*
Haven’t heard about the giant hogweed in ages though.
*in reality it was the nature of a tidal estuary you want to watch out for. Water would be flowing in any direction and you could find yourself slowly and then suddenly in water. And yes, walking across the sands wouldn’t be safe either.
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He’s also a creep who did a series for Channel 4 about money - one of his examples was Chile where his argument boiled down to: ‘so they were a bit fascist in the 1970s, murdered their president and imprisoned and tortured thousands - but look at all these skyscrapers!’
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Money and markets over democracy and human rights – Libertarian cryptobros make their priorities clear:
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