Question about Balok's "puppet"

As I'm watching the episode, there was something I noticed about the puppet that Balock used. Is he based off Munch's famous painting known as 'The Scream'?

Look at the simiarities between the two.






I don't know, maybe not, they just look a tad similiar to me.

Does anyone know?

 

Possible. Artists working in Hollywood know their artists hanging in museums inside and out, I'm sure.

But I have Balok question: this epiosde was only the third one filmed. In it, Spock says Balok reminds him of his father. Of course, that can easily be interpretted to mean that Sarek is an un-yielding prick, just like Balok, but I wonder: at the time the episode was made, before we'd ever seen another Vulcan or Romulan, do you think this is what a full-blooded Vulcan was supposed to look like?

As Scotty said: "Then may heaven have helped your mother."

 

^ I always assumed it was the un-yielding prick attribute he was referring to. Once a logical decision is made, there would be no reason to change it unless the conditions have changed.

As for the OP's question, I agree there is a strong resemblance but I have no insider knowledge.

 

I doubt it. It would go against the spirit of Munch's work. Balock's puppet was supposed to appear alien to the crew. Munch's emphasis was on HUMAN reaction.

 

Spock referred to his parents in the past tense until they actually wrote an episode about them.

 

Great catch. I never made that connection and I love that painting. It seems quite plausable the painting at least had some inspiration on the Balok puppet/avatar.

After all, no ears, so I can't see how anyone could interpet Spock's comments as physical appearance. After the Ferengi, the Vulcans have the most ear ego in the Trekverse.

 

The Balok puppet was the strongest visual image I had as a kid (3 years old) from Star Trek - it scared me sooooo bad that I had to hide behind my mom's chair in the living room...and it sometimes was in the end credits...I would be happily watching the credits and then....owhhhh!!!!!

 

I thought it was just your bog-standard alien, "greys" were described as far back as Roswell weren't they?

 

I wonder if the puppet still exists somewhere in a collection or museum?

 

I know.

As for what happened to the puppet, I remember Shatner mentioning it, involving a prank on one of the production crew, involving putting the puppet on a plane, startling the member of the production crew as he was heading on a business trip or something. It was in Shatner's Star Trek Memories book.

 

Oooh, nice catch! Yeah, I thought about that, too. Put pointy ears on Balok and you'd have a truly alien looking Vulcanian indeed.

 

The Balok puppet was designed by Wah Chang, who, among other things, shared an academy award for the Time Machine prop in Pal's movie of the same name. He used similar design themes for a lot of his pieces. For example, take a look at the Pillsbury dough boy's head and the Thetan from the Outer Limits episode "The Architects of Fear," also both done by Chang. Do they resemble Balok?

 

No, they really, really weren't. The "grey alien" image is a product of the 1970s. The descriptions of aliens in alleged UFO encounters have always mirrored pop-culture images of aliens at the time. In the '50s they were claimed to be little green men or bug-eyed monsters, and in the '60s they were idealized humans in funny costumes (like the aliens in low-budget TV shows). The image we now know as the "grey alien" actually originated as a book illustration representing a speculation about what humanity might evolve into in a million years. Soon after that book came out and the image was popularized, it began showing up in claims of "real" UFO encounters. But at this point, the late '60s and early '70s, UFO hype was becoming a pop-culture phenomenon in itself, and so the media picked up and perpetuated these alien images in films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. So the image reinforced itself and came to be considered the "default" for alien appearance.

As for Roswell, although it's true that the original crashed object was described in a headline at the time as a "flying disc," that was within a year of the coining of the term "flying saucer," and it hadn't yet taken on the unambiguous connotation of "alien spacecraft," but was just being used for any unidentified object seen in the sky without any inherent assumptions about said object's origin. It was quickly identified as a crashed weather balloon and everyone forgot about it for over 30 years. But starting around 1980, UFO "researchers" dredged it up and began questioning people in Roswell about it, and those people were quite happy to take advantage of the free publicity and let the UFO buffs inflate this minor incident into some massive alien conspiracy. The mythology about Roswell is a product of the '80s and '90s, and the "greys" are a product of the '70s and afterwards. Nobody in 1966 would've been familiar with either.

I don't think the evil Balok looks any more like "The Scream" than it looks like a light bulb. It's just a representation of a gaunt, menacing humanlike head, with a hint of the oversized, bald skull that was common in monster-movie depictions of aliens in the '50s and '60s. The only thing it and "The Scream" have in common is that they're both derived from the human head or skull.

Besides, "The Scream" is another thing that's better-known today than it was in the '60s. It became kind of a pop-culture phenomenon starting in 1984 when Andy Warhol made a series of silk prints of it, and it's become a self-replicating cultural meme since then. As with the "grey alien" image, I think it's anachronistic to assume that designers in 1966 would've been as influenced by it as we are today.

 

I guess there are many things we take for granted that aren't as eternal as we like to think. Prime examples being Santa Claus the jolly red man from the Coke ads and the image of a white Christmas that Dickens gave us.

 

What a talented fella. Interestingly, his IMDB profile doesn't list his ST or OL work:

Wah Chang's IMDB profile

Check out The Outer Limits Companion for some detail about the work he did for that show:

The Outer Limits Companion - Amazon

Doug

 

His ST work was done VERY much on the QT, so to speak..in the Justman/Solow book, they make a point of saying how Trek had to skirt the union rules by saying Wah Chang just HAPPENED to have these things made ,and they JUST happened to buy them ..remember that he designed and/or built just about ever major prop you see in Trek - phasers, communicators, tricorders....not to mention specialty pieces like Balok and the Gorn...

 

Ironically, that's an urban myth. The predominant depiction of a red and white Santa predates the Coke ads by almost 50 years.

http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/santa.asp

 

For many parts of the world, the Coke Santa claim does hold true: there was no Santa of any sort there until the explosion of western advertising, so the first incarnation of the bearded gift-bringer would be the one whose beard was all curly, fluffy and white, whose clothing would be red, brimmed in white fur, and who would be riding in a deer-pulled sled.

The English Red Santa of the 1860s simply wasn't globally relevant. E.g. eastern Europe was largely a Santa-free zone, even though enjoying a midwinter gift-bringer tradition.

In my backward little Finland, Santa indeed first appeared in red in the 1930s and established his position in the 1950s. However, he never quite managed a complete transition - he's still called "The Christmas Goat"! This is a name of interesting connotations when applied on an avuncular befriender of little children, as "old goat" is a common expression for a lecherous or otherwise sexually overactive person...

For a flavor of on-topicality, I think Balok here bears a close resemblance to what we had before Santa. Just add some horns and a goatee!

Timo Saloniemi