Yeah, it really should’ve read “Levar Burton - The New Scotty?” To which people would’ve been like “a black Scotty, WTF?” It’s kind of interesting how much the original dynamic was broken apart with the TNG crew, and glad they tried doing something different instead of just a carbon copy reboot. Some just don’t translate or were completely new “roles” that just didn’t exist in TOS.
There's a (poorly named) documentary called "How William Shatner Invented the Future" which features a bunch of scientists talking about how Star Trek inspired them. Including the inventor of the cell phone.
During the first season of Star Trek The Next Generation, there was never a full-time chief engineering officer for the Enterprise-D. Originally the producers thought that most of the action would take place on the bridge and would rarely go to other areas of the ship, including engineering. The bridge officers would call over the intercom to the other areas and have some voice actor say "Yes sir!" and so forth to save money on new sets. Gene Roddenberry disagreed with this idea and had a change made to the shooting script for the pilot episode "Encounter at Farpoint" to include a scene in engineering; otherwise no engineering set would have been built at all. That set the stage to bring in a new character to act as the chief engineer. Well, it didn't quite work out as planned at first.
My edit must not have gone through. I forgot to add that I was wrong and it wasn't Roddenberry and edited my comment, but it didn't go through to you fast enough I guess. Sorry.
Okay. The idea that they didn't want to film in Engineering really confused me. Because Encounter At Farpoint made a big show of Picard walking the entire set from top to bottom.
It makes a lot of sense that Roddenberry himself vetoed that idea.
I really liked that! It accurately demonstrates that when you are building a new team, leadership roles are especially challenging to fill. It made it feel like a believable workplace.