This thread causes me to wonder; was DeForest Kelley's beard for McCoy's first appearance in TMP his own, or an appliance? I've heard he had grown one for some reason or other, but it would be nice to know for certain.
That's right. I was thinking he was the only mustached guy in the series....then I remembered this fellow:
What about Captain Leo Walsh??? Anyway, it's funny, but I always wondered why Doohan grew a mustache. I always thought he looked better without it. Even after 30 years of relentless TOS and I-VI movie watching, I never quite got used to it. Except for 2 seconds in TWOK, Scotty was never left in command of the Enterprise. The stache made him too grandfatherly IMO. Which is odd considering what a badass he was in real life. Did he ever shave it off post-TMP?
I would have mentioned him and Mudd too, but Krasnovsky is the only "instance of facial hair portrayed among Starfleet personnel" in TOS I know of.
Scotty in the series was actually quite badass, he was a friendly guy but he also had the fortitude to call bullshit on people and deck them if necessary. There was the feeling he was more fully rounded as a character as well as being the engineer. He wasn't somebody to be f***ed around with. Movie Scotty, on the other hand... is just that old guy who runs the engine room and repairs things when they break. And the moustache does tend to give him that 'grandfatherly' quality, as you put it. Of course, he is supposed to be older by then (as they all are)... I do have to give credit to The Undiscovered Country for making Scotty a bit more like his TOS self, though. Calling Azbetor a "Klingon bitch" who "never shed a bloody tear!" might have been too salty language back in the 1960s, but it's definitely something I could have imagined the TOS version of Scotty saying.
True, CorporalCaptain. I guess maybe it's just that guys tended to be clean-shaven on tv back then. A beard or mustache tended to mean something about their character. I remember watching an old Perry Mason, where a new guy came to this town, and was eyed suspiciously by everyone. I guess the fact that he wore a goatee seemed to be enough to provoke the suspicion.
I thought Doohan (Scotty) looked good in a mustache, and it suited him even more as he aged, making him look professorial and distinguished. Considering Simon Pegg has sported a beard in real life, it would be kind of neat if Scotty had a mustache in ST3.
Another example I thought of from TAS... Captain O'Shea of the Huron had the mustache and beard combo. (image) In the early TOS novel The Entropy Effect, Sulu had a mustache on the cover. (image) (Doesn't pre-date TMP, though.) According to Wikipedia, that's only been going on within the last 15 years, so it wouldn't have been a factor in the late seventies. During TOS, Starfleet implemented a strict no-facial hair policy, so that they could easily tell if you got replaced by your evil counterpart from another universe!
"Beard", generally speaking, means, all of the hair on the lower part of the face, except maybe the stache. "Goatee", "muttonchops", etc. are styles created by shaving off parts of the beard. You're still shaving off your beard if you shave off your goatee, just as you're shaving off your hair when you shave off a mohawk. It's a Faaaaake. It was glued on for the one scene.
If there were 4 men, one with a mustache, one with a soul patch and two with full-on beards, and you said "shave your beards," then mustache man would not shave and the dude with the soul patch would either think you're talking about the other two guys, or he would question your meaning to make sure, or you guys would debate the term "beard." But if you instead said, "shave your facial hair," then there would be no question. They would all know you were telling them to shave off their respective...facial hair, for lack of a better term (including "beards"). So for the sake of general discussion, I still think "facial hair" works better for the general category we were referencing earlier in the thread, even if it makes you cringe.
All kidding aside, I wish Spock had grown facial hair later in the series. He DID look super cool with the goatee. I'm sure Gene Coon could've written a quick blurb following up on Mirror, Mirror with something to the effect of, "I was intrigued by Dr. McCoy's suggestion that "facial hair" gives an officer a more "distinguished" appearance." to which, of course, Kirk and McCoy bust Spock's chops as Uhura, Chekov and Sulu all exchange smirks.
In one of the novels, it is revealed that Doohan's mustache is actually an alien parasite he picked up on an adventure which enhances his engineering prowess. Okay, not really. Scotty was killed between TOS and the movies, but replaced by evil mirror Scotty who has a pornstache. Okay, I made that up. I'm a filthy liar.
No, you'd say, "You need to shave." You're just being difficult. lol Why aren't eyebrows included then? They're on your face. The common usage of the term is fairly modern parlance but historically that's not how it was referred to.
Coming to Trek via the classic movies before TOS (and being very young), I initially assumed Scotty had been recast for the movies, he looked so different!
Beam me up, Stached Scotty. Beam me anywhere. I prefer Risa, but I'll accept a transporter accident at this point.
I'm not crazy about the term, either, but it shows there's some desire for something that covers beards, mustaches, beard-mustache combo, sideburns etc. without getting into specifics. There's no single word that can be used that way, so we're left with "facial hair."