As I was surfing around the net I came across an interesting interview on TV.com where they interviewed George Takei who plays Hiro’s father. Here is a small snippet:

Do you see any other similarities between Star Trek and Heroes?

George Takei: There are. First of all, Star Trek personified diversity. Gene Roddenberry used to tell us that the Starship Enterprise was a metaphor for Starship Earth, and the strength of both starships lay in its diversity, coming together and working in concert.

Well, on Heroes, you have that same theme: diversity of people from certainly the US but also Haiti and Japan and India endowed with powers of one kind or another working sometimes together, sometimes in opposition to each other, for good or for evil. So there’s that similarity there in the stories.

And they both whet the imagination of the viewers, so they start creating their stories as well. I span the two generations, one of the ’60s and another one that’s 21st century, and in different ways and shapes and forms, they reflect similar values.

TV.com: You mentioned diversity earlier, and you play the father of Heroes‘ time-traveling Hiro Nakamura. Did you ever imagine that one of the most popular characters on American television would speak most of his lines in Japanese?

George Takei: Isn’t that amazing? Again, this is a commentary on the global nature and the diverse nature of our audience. People used to go to foreign language films and read subtitles, but they were the elite. You know, the intelligentsia, [the cinemas] that used to go to foreign films. But here now on primetime network television, you have whole scenes playing out in Japanese with English subtitles. I think in my own professional career lifetime, I’ve spanned quite a few changes, and I think it’s all for the better.

For the rest of the interview head over to TV.com