TMP's uniforms

Discussion in 'Star Trek Movies I-X' started by RobertScorpio, Mar 17, 2009.

  1. RobertScorpio

    RobertScorpio Pariah

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    Often attacked at being nothing more than PJs, I actually like the TMP uniforms. I actually think, based upon my one visit to NASA while active in the military, they looked the most realistic.

    Although I love TREK 2's uniform, its my favorite, I just don't see it being worn in the 23rd century. I also never cared for TNG's uniform until the switch over for First Contact.

    But anyway, the TMP uniform may look sterile, and boring. But for realism I am willing to bet that if they ever have space ships, or space stations, going to Mars or whatever, the real uniforms will look more like TMPs than any other uniform TREK has ever shown us.

    Rob
     
  2. Jeyl

    Jeyl Commodore Commodore

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    I like the Admiral Uniform that Kirk wears when he's introduced. That was classy. However, the color choice for the uniforms leave much to be desired. I mean, brown, white and beige? I'm not color blind!

    Also the way the uniforms are made leaves little to the imagination. Just look at the first shot of the bridge when crew members working around and that one crew member who is stretching to get things up in the ceiling. And that shot of Decker in the corridor after the Transporter accident. :cardie: Ahhhh!
     
  3. RobertScorpio

    RobertScorpio Pariah

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    Showing Decker's woody was not by accident. They saw that in the editing room and let it go. I am pretty sure everyone saw it when they were filming the scene...it was there because someone wanted it there...

    But as for the colors? The actual real life military does not have, nor has it ever had, a rainbow collection of colored uniforms...And actually one of the reasons for this? You actually stumbled upon it; color blindness.

    I didn't say the TMP uniform was my choice for a movie. I liked the uniforms from KHAN-SEARCH FOR SPOCK and onward. I'm just saying that in a real life setting, those TMP uniforms, much like those in Andoromeda Strain, are more realistic...

    Rob
     
  4. Piper

    Piper Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    I've never liked them, far too Space-1999 for me. After TOS's colourful palate it just didn't feel right for Trek to me.
     
  5. GodThingFormerly

    GodThingFormerly A Different Kind of Asshole

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    Well, ST:TMP was produced in the late 1970s. Who is to say that the late 2270s won't suffer a similarly tragic lapse in good fashion sense? ;)

    Gene Roddenberry planned to depict widespread public nudity amongst the civilian population of 23rd century San Francisco in order to visually indicate the era's "mature attitudes" concerning such matters until Paramount's Michael Eisner demanded a G-rating for the film. Starfleet's contour-hugging spray 'n' wear uniforms obviously wouldn't cause the slightest embarrassment in such an idyllic Neo-Athenian/Post-Hebraic society.

    Hardly. People don't go color blind from being exposed to an excessively wide chromatic spectrum. :rolleyes: The reason ST:TMP's Starfleet uniforms came in a variety of styles and colors was simply to let crewmembers express a touch of individuality as a psychological welfare mechanism during multi-year interstellar exploration missions. Similar thinking was, coincidentally, also demonstrated in The Cage.

    TGT
     
  6. Genesis Does

    Genesis Does Lieutenant Red Shirt

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    The uniforms were not terrible, but they were not good either. I will give you that the Admiral uniform is AMAZING and I even liked the white Kirk uniform.

    For the most part though, they are pretty drab.
     
  7. flandry84

    flandry84 Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Yeah,I've always liked these uniforms too.Far more utilitarian and presumably more comfortable in the climate controlled corridors of a starship.Also,the pick&mix aspect of their design seem more realistic as a working uniform.
    Such a pity that TNG never adopted the body-armour idea for their security staff.
     
  8. Jbarney

    Jbarney Captain Captain

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    I've always like the movie era uniforms and think they are the best of all of the uniforms we have see in Star Trek. This thread almost invites a discussion as to why the heck Starfleet seems to be always changing the uniform style.

    Anyway, I love the TMP era and think with the comics and novels that go into that time period, there is some GREAT trek there.
     
  9. Maurice

    Maurice Snagglepussed Admiral

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    The only thing I really didn't like about the uniforms was the untucked dress shirt look to the bottom of the tunics. I didn't like that line. The colors were bland, but since when are duty uniforms in most militaries colorful?
     
  10. CoveTom

    CoveTom Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Do you really believe it was that and not simply more of Roddenberry's teenage male approach to sex through which he tried to shoehorn as much cheap romance novel crap into Trek as he could? I suspect the latter. And running around naked would demonstrate a more mature society? Clothing has a wide range of utilitarian functions beyond simple modesty and I doubt it's going away no matter how "mature" our society becomes about sex. No, I think Roddenberry just wanted to be able somehow work naked women into Trek.
     
  11. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    I like the TMP uniforms. The blandness of the colors is something of a myth, arising from the fact that all the home-video versions available for two decades were based on film-to-video transfers that washed out the colors severely. The Director's Edition is digitally remastered and thus represents the more vivid colors of the original film. (Important to remember that, contrary to the recent abuses of the word, a "remaster" is a new print taken from the original master print, and is therefore as authentic to the original as possible.) The colors are hardly garish, true, but they're not as bland as people think. For instance, the uniforms that look gray in the washed-out video transfers are actually more of a slate blue, and the medium brown-appearing ones are more of a mustard hue.

    And I agree with the comments above; why would military duty fatigues be brightly colored? Look at the colors of real-life military fatigues: khaki, tan, gray, black.

    As for the TWOK uniforms, I think they're ridiculous. I could buy them as formal dress uniforms for special occasions, assuming Starfleet was on a historical kick and considered it fashionable to dress up like something out of the Horatio Hornblower era. But it makes no sense for the crew to wear something that ornate and complicated and anachronistic as everyday duty wear. Now, if you ditched the jackets and just went with the undershirt with insignia and rank pins attached, that could work; in fact, it would be very similar to the pilot uniforms. But wearing the whole elaborate getup as a matter of routine just doesn't make sense.


    Whatever Roddenberry's proclivities, he was hardly the only futurist of his era to propose that current nudity taboos would vanish in the future. It was a fairly common prediction in science fiction of the '50s, '60s, and '70s, and possibly later. In Larry Niven's Known Space, for instance, nudism was a legally recognized practice that anyone could engage in with the proper license. It was a natural enough extrapolation from the Sexual Revolution, and from the steady erosion of nudity taboos over the past century or so. In Edwardian times, legs were considered so obscene that you couldn't even show the legs of a table. Today, we're much more liberal. Just an hour or so ago, I went out for a walk on this lovely day we're having and saw two women casually sunbathing in bikinis that would've been grounds for arrest just half a century ago.

    For that matter, America's nudity taboos are hardly global. There are plenty of places in the world where toplessness is perfectly acceptable on beaches or elsewhere. In African culture, there's never been a stigma about showing the breasts (although the legs are often considered taboo). Taboos can change wildly across cultures as well as eras, so there's no reason why it's implausible that a society in the future might be more tolerant about nudity than the present-day United States.

    And just because some people choose to go nude in some contexts, say on a warm day, that doesn't mean that clothing ceases to have practical use. It just means that people aren't afraid or ashamed of what nature gave them. And yes, I do consider that more mature than reacting to the human body as though it were something disgusting or terrifying.
     
    Last edited: Mar 17, 2009
  12. Basill

    Basill Captain Captain

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    I love the TWOK onward uniforms especially the colors, but I agree they were best suited to formal dress uniforms. Of course it was only officers that wore the big tunic wraps. The little TWOK jumpsuits were supposedly dyed carryovers of the TMP jumpsuits. A much better variation but still a little tight. The TMP uniforms aren't all that bad, except for the jammie look. I really loved the short sleeved tunics that Kirk and a few others wore (I think Sulu and Uhura at least). They felt most real of all the uniforms I've seen before or since. The colors... ? They weren't all that different from the undershirts of the TWOK onwards. I even liked the belt buckle/life monitors.
     
  13. QuasarVM

    QuasarVM Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    I can tolerate, but do not like the Star Trek II -VI uniforms.

    They don't look like a step forward from the TOS uniforms...if anything, a step back. Like you might accept the crew of the Horizon or Valiant wearing those...but not a post 5-Year Mission Starfleet.

    I like the TMP uniforms, but I would have made them one piece and kept the colors from TOS. I would not have had that useless and unused bio-monitor on the belly either.

    I would have made them look more like the Admiral's uniform, but one piece..and the dark gray would have been either blue, red or gold...maybe use the green Kirk wore during TOS season two as part of an Admiral's uniform.
     
  14. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Oh, that was a great idea! An acknowledgment of the fact that clothing in the future wouldn't just be inert cloth, but would actually have electronics built into it. What they should've done was keep the perscan devices and actually made use of them, say, as a way of tracking landing parties' position and status from the ship.
     
  15. GodThingFormerly

    GodThingFormerly A Different Kind of Asshole

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    Why on Earth couldn't it have been both? :lol:

    Just because the perscan technology wasn't described in dialog doesn't mean that the devices were "useless and unused" considering that they were directly inspired by NASA's biobelt instrumentation developed for the Apollo Program. When one takes into account that starship crewmembers are routinely exposed to alien biospheres on a more or less weekly basis while on a 5YM the necessity of just such an uninterrupted biotelemetry system should become self-evident.

    TGT
     
  16. Jeyl

    Jeyl Commodore Commodore

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    It's that a bio belt, it's a black box. Something has got to survive from all those Red Shirt killings of the past. :rommie:
     
  17. QuasarVM

    QuasarVM Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    It's useless and unused because it contributed NOTHING to the plot/script. What was the point? We didn't even see it used. And it took away from the uniforms and was probably kind of distracting to the audience "What is that black box on their bellies?"

    What can I say? I didn't care for them.

    Had they been used in the story in some way, I could have gotten past it...but they weren't. I agree, the idea was cool...but it was, basically, an idea that went unused. Christopher's idea above would have been cool.

    On Space:1999, year one, they had these wrist monitors. At least those were shown in use in one episode.
     
  18. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    The point is to create a future world with believable texture and detail. There's no story point to the graphic displays on the consoles or the signage around the ship, but that doesn't mean it was wrong to go to the trouble of working out in detail how the consoles functioned and writing detailed instructions on the signage even though it would be too small for the camera to read. It's good filmmaking to incorporate a level of detail beyond what's significant to the story, because it creates the sense of a larger, fuller world that the story is just visiting.

    And I thought the belt monitors looked cool. They didn't "take away" from the uniforms. They looked futuristic and functional, like they served a purpose, even if it wasn't clear what the purpose was. They were certainly better than all those useless metal pins and gold braid and frippery on the TWOK uniforms, which were obviously just decorative.
     
  19. Duane

    Duane Captain Captain

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    TMP uniforms are the most realistic. Visually a bit boring. Wrath of Khan uniforms were so thick and heavy. They must have been torture for the actors to wear.
     
  20. jefferiestubes8

    jefferiestubes8 Commodore Commodore

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    I totally agree. A costume designer on a science fiction show works out things like a black box on a belt even if it is not used. Actually if it holds something then the prop master must design and make the prop that the actor uses.

    While it goes beyond the topic of this thread
    The production designer on a science fiction show has to design a world.
    The level of detail is what makes a film/TV show more believeable.
    All of the work that the Production Designer, Art Director, and Set Decorator did on the 1999 feature film "Fight Club" creating a house they built from scratch for exterior and interior scenes gave it so much more realism.