20 Things You Didn't Know About Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
12. Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?
In Star Trek VI, Walter Koenig's Chekov utters the line Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, in the run-up to the Klingons' arrival. The line was originally to be spoken by Uhura.
Nichelle Nichols flat-out refused to say it. It was a reference to the Spencer Tracy/Sidney Poitier/Katherine Hepburn comedy of the same name, wherein a white woman brings an African-American fiancee home to meet her parents. While the film ends with the message that there was never any reason to oppose the relationship, in any case, Nichols felt that having Uhura utter the line was distasteful, thus the change.
Another line was due to be spoken. This line - yes, but would you want your daughter to marry one?, was subsequently omitted from the script altogether, as production could not find a satisfactory way to include it, nor a character to which it best belonged.