10 TV Hoaxes That Fooled Everyone
6. It Had TV's First Interracial Kiss - Star Trek
Even people who couldn't give two figs about Star Trek might be aware of the widely repeated factoid that the original series made history by featuring the first interracial kiss on television.
In 1968's season three episode "Plato's Stepchildren," Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) share a kiss, which while drawing little attention at the time became a groundbreaking touchstone for Black-white relationships in media in subsequent years.
Today it's held up as the first interracial TV kiss, a claim that for all of its iconography in pop-culture simply isn't true.
The first interracial kiss occurred a decade earlier on The Ed Sullivan Show, when Shatner of all people kissed an Asian actress, France Nuyen.
There are numerous other examples that predate Plato's Stepchildren, even one from an earlier Trek episode itself, when in the season two episode "Mirror Mirror" - aired over a year before Plato's Stepchildren - Shatner kissed Filipino-European actress BarBara Luna.
It doesn't really undermine the power of the scene - for such an iconic and widely-viewed TV staple to broadcast such a progressive, whispered-about ideal to the masses - but it sure wasn't the first show to ever do it.