Comisar’s collection is filled with gems from major moments in television history, chief among them Captain Kirk’s red-and-gold Grecian tunic worn in Star Trek’s third-season episode “Plato’s Stepchildren,” in which William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols’ Lieutenant Uhura shared TV’s first interracial kiss. It’s often pointed out there were others that came before: A full decade earlier, in 1958, Shatner kissed France Nuyen on The Ed Sullivan Show during a scene from the Broadway production of The World of Suzie Wong. But the Kirk-Uhura kiss is the one best remembered, as NBC executives feared it would spark backlash from Southern affiliates. Nichols would later recall but a single letter of complaint, which read, “I am totally opposed to the mixing of the races. However, any time a red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain’t gonna fight it.” Here, too, are Kirk and Uhura’s Starfleet-issued tunics, which have never gone out of fashion thanks to the never-ending adventures of the Starship Enterprise on Paramount+.
Intelligent Collector