Captain's Blog, Supplemental: Color Bias

The weirdo green wrap-around number.

In an earlier post, I wondered aloud about Kirk's weirdo green uniform.  My phone recently told me "You've shown interest in Star Trek" and suggested I read an article about almost this exact question: Shirts and Skins in TOS

It turns out that the yellow uniform we're used to was actually green all along.  To summarize the article, film is complicated, and color perception is complicated.  Film especially sucked in the 60's and 70's, and post-processing of the film turned green uniforms yellow.  Colorists added additional "red bias" during processing to make people's faces rosier and healthier-looking.  (There's also a fascinating YouTube video about the history of film's color bias as it pertains to race: https://youtu.be/d16LNHIEJzs)

So anyhow, the weird wrap-around top that Shatner wore was created by the costume designer in a deeper shade of green after seeing how skewed the film came out.

The more you know.

So now you know, there were no yellow/gold/mustard uniforms in the original Star Trek.  Only green ones.  Crazy, right?