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?

The Enemy Within / Mudd's Women / What Are Little Girls Made Of? / Miri

"Kirk likes eggs, so I hate 'em!"

Ugh.  Let's get this over with...

Synopses

The Enemy Within
A transporter malfunction splits Kirk into two antithetical people.  Sulu almost freezes to death.  Frost doesn't form until 117 degrees below zero.

Mudd's Women
The Enterprise interferes with a business supplying wives to rich miners.  "Venus drugs" are no more effective than a placebo.  The magic feather was just a gag!  You can fly!  Honest, you can!

Ron Popeil invented a machine that
clones people into robots AND
rotisseries chicken.

What Are Little Girls Made Of?
Nurse Chapel's former fiance starts turning people into robots with an ancient robot-making machine.  Robo-Kirk infiltrates the Enterprise to yell at Spock.

Miri
The Enterprise finds a band of orphaned children living alone an identical copy of Earth.  Kirk hits on a barely-pubescent girl.

Reactions

First off, there are two episodes in close succession in which there's an evil double of Kirk.  Really?

If they dressed me like that,
I would be angry, too.

Second, that dog.  That terrible, terrible, angry, weird dog in an alien-unicorn-dog costume.  Where was the Humane Society?

Third, "venus drugs" seem to just be pills that do your hair.

But mostly, I'm going to harp on the episode Miri.  Everything about this episode was wrong.

Kirk is really flirty with Miri, a girl who is just hitting puberty.  It's plainly wrong.  He's obviously flirting with her, and when she starts to show some affection for him, the rest of the away team has to explain that to him.  He's like, "Whaaaa?  She likes me?  Nah, that's crazy!"  You've been flirting with her basically non-stop since you got here.  Also, gross.

Then there's the fact that kids have been living alone, self-governing in weird little gangs, not aging, for 300 years.  And they just ran low on food.  What the hell kind of food have they been living on for 300 years with no agriculture or industry in their society?

No, no, no, no, no.

And lastly, we come to the captain's log at the very beginning: "In the distant reaches of our galaxy, we have made an astonishing discovery. Earth type radio signals coming from a planet which apparently is an exact duplicate of the Earth. It seems impossible, but there it is."  Nobody cared enough to ask why there was an exact duplicate of the Earth.  Not only is it ridiculous for it to exist, and more so for it to be quickly ignored, it was irrelevant to the plot anyway!

In summary, John Kennedy was a Catholic.

Where No Man Has Gone Before / The Naked Time

Recently we watched the third and fourth episodes of Star Trek: Where No Man Has Gone Before and The Naked Time.

Phenomenal cosmic power!
(Itty-bitty living space.)

Synopses

Where No Man Has Gone Before
While exploring the edge of the galaxy, the Enterprise encounters an energy barrier that gives two crewmen godlike powers.  Godlike powers seem to include immunity to phaser fire, but vulnerability to large rocks.

Oh my.

The Naked Time
The Enterprise crew is intoxicated by an inhibition-stripping contagion that causes Sulu's shirt to disintegrate.  Kirk gets jealous and rips his own shirt.  Scotty can't change the laws of physics, but accidentally invents time travel anyway.

Reactions
The godlike powers plot was really not that different from the previous episode (Charlie X) and left me a bit bored.  Parts of it were completely inexplicable, and the rest was just cheesy.

Seeing everyone lose their inhibitions was fun, but even that episode had its fair doses of "seriously?"  Like when they have to give Kirk a shot, so they rip his shirt apart.  And after traveling back in time three days, they basically say "Well, that was interesting.  Some day, we may try it again."  Just stuffed that little trick in their back pockets for a rainy day, I guess.  It felt all wrong.

I'm starting to get this feeling of "okay, let's just get this over with" in season 1.  To be fair, some of it's cheesy because it's fully 50 years old.  Some things I think of as cheesy now were probably new and interesting at the time, and have now been copied to death.  But I think some of this cheese is why I had a negative impression of the original series to begin with.  Here's hoping it gets better.

The Man Trap / Charlie X

Tonight we watched the first two episodes of the original Star Trek series: The Man Trap and Charlie X.

Synopses

The Man Trap
During a "routine" mission on a remote planet, a crewman mysteriously dies.  A shape-shifting monster goes around stealing the salt out of people's bodies.  Crew deaths?  4.

Charlie X
A spooky kid is rescued from a crash after 14 years in solitude.  He gets on-board and immediately starts melting things with his mind and creeping on Janice.  Spock encourages Kirk to be a father figure.

Reactions

The martial arts were different back then.
Or, will be different then, eventually.
Whatever.

Monsters!  Theremins!  3D chess!  Punching with clasped hands!  Console burns!  For me, all familiar old Trek tropes.

But as a first-timer on the original series, some things really surprised me.  Where are Chekov and Scotty?  Are they not introduced until later?  Why is Shatner wearing a weird green uniform, seemingly at random?

I was also surprised by Uhura's flirtation with Spock.  I had assumed that the Spock/Uhura thing was an invention of the J.J. Abrams movies.  Also, Spock plays the lute!  I had no idea.

Fun fact:  Light bulbs that illuminate the
entire face were not invented until 1967.

One scene keeps bothering me.  At one point in The Man Trap, Uhura encounters a strange crewman in the hallway.  He starts out being a bit forward, and quickly transitions to creepy and physically menacing.  Some other people show up and she runs off, but at no point does she report him to anyone.

I guess not reporting it was not troubling to audiences in 1966, but it is a bit unsettling to me now.

Charlie X really reminded me of a TNG episode called Suddenly Human, in which the Enterprise rescues a human kid who was raised by aliens.  Picard reluctantly agrees to try to be a father figure and teach the kid about being human.  But nobody gets melted or disappeared.  In some ways, Charlie X had more in common with The Twilight Zone.

I am so glad we're doing this.  I can't wait to see what's next.  Happy New Year!

The Seven Year Trek

Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Watch Shatner.

I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation.  My oldest brother got me into it when they were still making new episodes.  I remember when the finale, All Good Things... originally aired.

As an adult, I eventually watched TNG again, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  I loved them both.  I saw some Star Trek: Voyager here and there, and the first few episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise.  I was luke-warm on those.  I have still never watched a single episode of the original series.

This month, my wife and I went to the Star Trek exhibit at Seattle's Museum of Pop Culture.  Although I already know more about Star Trek than I probably should, the exhibit did a really fantastic job of communicating to non-fans why Star Trek mattered: the cultural impact, the influence on technology, the aspiration to a more peaceful and just world.

Gene Roddenberry started it all with the original Star Trek series.  So why haven't I seen it?

In 2017, that changes.  My wife and I have hatched a plan to watch all 725 episodes of every Star Trek show, in order: TOS (The Original Series), TAS (The Animated Series), TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise.  At a rate of two episodes per week, we'll be done in about... seven years.

Wish us luck!