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- For the followers of Garibaldi, see redshirts
A redshirt is any character or person in a work of fiction who is meant to serve only as cannon fodder, and dies soon after being introduced. The term stems from the popular American science fiction television series Star Trek. In these series, characters wear shirt colours defining their station and/or area of expertise. In the original 1966 series, a person wearing a red shirt was a member of the Engineering or Security department on any Starfleet vessel. Security officers had a habit of meeting tragic and fatal ends (with at least one dying nearly every episode), and fans of the series have come to use the term "redshirt" to describe any nameless, faceless, and—most importantly—expendable character.
In later Star Trek series, gold shirts came to be worn by members of the Engineering or Security department instead, while red was relegated to the Command departments.
Star Trek: Voyager encountered something of a problem when it came to redshirt deaths: because the ship was stranded in the Delta Quadrant with no means of restocking its crew, it was limited to the roughly 120 personnel that were left on the ship. The high rate-of-attrition for redshirts sometime made the plot mechanics that necessitated a redshirt death difficult.
The same problem occurred in Star Trek: Enterprise. This time, the crew was only 83, so there could not be as many redshirts. Until the third season, none of the crew were killed.
On Futurama, Zapp Brannigan was fond of issuing the command to "Send in the Redshirts!". And on an occasion when the crew were trapped on a planet with a redshirt, he was quickly killed—and then the corpse was repeatedly blasted each time they angered their captor, rather than a 'key' character dying.
A redshirt is a player on a college sports team in the United States who has been kept out of competition for a year in order to prolong his or her eligibility.
Red Shirt is the name of a very small town on the western edge of Badlands National Park in South Dakota, USA. The same name is also used to refer to the surrounding region, since there are few other landmarks. Red Shirt is inside an Indian reservation.
Redshirts is also a term given to employees at Games Workshop stores.
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