But still, Yaphet is very rarely used, when compared to (I can’t think of the character’s name but the Worf clone) because of the CGI. With Yaphet, it also takes extra time to set up because the actors and everyone needs to know where to look and how to compose the scene. It’s sort of like what happened on TNG in the early years with the floating table top graphics (T’Kon empire)—-everybody needs to be looking at the correct area otherwise it doesn’t work.
Dax Symbiant
- Thread starter USS Excelsior
- Start date
All the examples you cited are still humanoid with facial expressions visible through the makeup.
When is the last time someone commented about identifying with the Horta?
The point of the episodes was to relate to the Horta or the energy monsters once understanding was reached.
The cardassian men were somehow sexy
I wonder what it would be like to touch aliens, to smell them, as well as see them on TV. I wonder if the other sensory inputs would be as alien as the visuals. Klingons, we’re told, smell like lilac (I really should go smell a lilac and try to process what that might mean), and Cardassians drink fish juice instead of morning coffee...I wonder how diets like that might be reacted to by the body.
Also, we humans are pungent to Vulcan noses, so maybe they and Romulan are eerily scentless or tasteless to the kiss?
Why do you assume that the Earth cetaceans in cetacean ops would be dolphins? Dolphins are the smaller toothed whales, but there are about 80 or 90 species of baleen and toothed whales total. Assuming that the cetaceans in cetacean ops were dolphins is making an assumption that might not be correct.
I can imagine that Oannes from Mespotamian myth,who looked like a fish above and and a man below, might have been a cetacean like alien who had a water tank with mechanical legs and arms (the man below part) which he(?) used to walk on land and interact with Humans.
You seem to assume that water-breathing aliens would have arms and legs to put on water suits to walk around the ship, and thus that those water-breathing aliens might have looked humanoid - like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, or maybe like frog-men. But hypothetical water breathing aliens might look like octopuses with tentacles to manipulate objects, or maybe look like Earth cetaceans, without manipulating limbs, and thus be without technology until they interacted with land based aliens and acquired technology from them.
Vulcans should be really hot. Not sexy, they should feel hot to the touch since they probably have a body temperature much higher than Humans.
In "The Deadly Years":
So Vulcans should feet hot to the touch. I don't know how Vulcans smell to Humans, merely that Humans smell rather bad to Vulcans.
If you are interested in how intelligent extraterrestrial beings would feel to the touch or smell, you might try getting close to the closes beings on Earth to intelligent extraterrestrial beings, beings such as apes, elephants, cetaceans, and octopuses.
Last edited:
I take it you like broad-shouldered gents.
Or ones resembling Marc Alaimo. Wouldn't fault anybody for that!
As per TNG "Perfect Mate", the E-D has dolphins specifically (in addition to lots of other lifeforms including plants and fish). And they are valued for their looks rather than their taste. Whether they have anything to do with Cetacean Ops is unknown; Recreational Ops might be a fitting role for them, too.
Timo Saloniemi
As per TNG "Perfect Mate", the E-D has dolphins specifically (in addition to lots of other lifeforms including plants and fish). And they are valued for their looks rather than their taste. Whether they have anything to do with Cetacean Ops is unknown; Recreational Ops might be a fitting role for them, too.
Timo Saloniemi
They say there are significant differences in how the human brain takes in CGI vs. non-CGI. And my apologies in advance for a Star Wars tangent, but that's why I always preferred puppet Yoda over the CGI one. At the same time, it was obvious that they had to stick with one or the other for the later movies, and for the fighting scenes, the CGI won out. I would still like to see a deleted scene, though, of them attempting a Yoda fight scene with the puppet.
As said earlier about makeup, though, all the way up to "Insurrection," they were still making alien species who were totally identical to humans without even bothering with modest Trill distinctions we saw in the series. Not even the slightest attempt, even for the big screen.
It's not as much a tangent as correlative example.
If Star Trek can do "parallel to Earth culture" stories (many of which are good), it also stands to reason that most life forms capable of developing technology would need the dexterity and mobility that humans have (Thank you Terry Nation for that dialogue
) to begin to build any of it. Or 6 arms and 4 legs and being triple-jointed, but remote controlled animatronics are even more expensive than false prosthetic on a costume but that technology has come rather a long way...To me, in general, regarding alien visage, the problem is still budget or lack thereof when it comes to make-up. In TOS, all they had was boot polish and plastic imp ears since nobody was going to risk using fake fang teeth. So we got characters, Earth nation allegories/digs aside, that acted completely different and that made them alien. But they remained compelling despite looking like humans wearing boot polish or doubling as Lucky Charms mascots. TOS had Tellerites and Andorians, the former looking cheap, but they were still more effective than Yoda was. And the one-off case with the Horta, which nobody knew was more than just an animal until green clover Spock mind-melded with it, though it must have picked up enough English from paper documents somewhere, or had the ability to telepathically read minds somehow - but only read, not transmit - in order to somehow spell out and etch rather neatly "NO KILL I" into the smooth cave floor, since a real cave floor would make such writing even harder to read (and find) but now I'm being nitpicky.
And while big screen movies should be laying out the latex the same way a river floods over a bridge in spring, as movies are supposed to look and be big (on a 60' screen), I don't think expensive mock-up protrusions alone are enough to sell an alien species we wouldn't roast on a grill:
CGI Yoda in most scenes did not bother me. At least until the laughably bad fight scenes where he's whizzing around the screen like a meth-overdosed ping pong ball in a gravity-void room. That's a bit new and ostensibly epic but in real life was hilarious for all the wrong reasons, since there were no right reasons to be laughing at what was supposed to be a tense fight scene.
Yes, Yoda's younger in the prequels (30 years prior to ANH?), but usually with The Force these physics-bending things are given a little more graceful treatment. Christopher Reeve's Superman movies weren't as audaciously silly in execution and felt a lot more epic. Even that recent Doctor Who episode totally ripping off Star Wars by having some cardboard cutout mentally set up a Jenga tower with boulders was more convincing with the Forcey-horsey stuff.
Luke was strong with the Force. He could have taken out the entire gang of Jabba in his hut by flitting about like that. Vader wasn't that old of a geez either. But the SW movies even in 1983 knew when to respect certain issues. Luke had super dexterity but wasn't a live action cartoon.
But to compare, while I saw the CGI in Spider-Man and Hulk, it told enough of the story to get past its imperfections and the audience knew their abilities, and was kept to a minimum. The brain knows it's not real, yet a lot of us also watch cartoons and buy into those no matter how outlandish those are so there's more going on. And not because these are entertainment things made for and by humans since aliens are just a theory, with zero tangible proof. Or, rather in real life aliens do exist but what's needed to traverse the whole of the cosmos alone is substantial, and how not all life forms develop and evolve at the same time. And yet we all suspend disbelief to varying degrees and/or conditions before we're taken out of a show. It's interesting stuff.
It's also true that Star Wars' stop motion technology utilization, while passable, didn't show the AT-AT and AT-ST things in TESB and ROTJ respectively very convincingly either. But the actors played out the scenes with absolute sincerity. That's what sells stop motion, animatronics, cartoon drawing because "Futurama" draws in and kept attention far better than SW I-III and a number of other recent movies, CGI, or a ping pong ball-eyed piece of tailored shag carpeting with someone's fingers shoved up it: The quality of dialogue and an absolutely straight performance no matter how weird the actor feels. At least from where I'm sitting.
That was a bit tl;dr wasn't it but it's complex and it's just how it works... Yeah, Trek VI acknowledges this as Azetbur states 'humans only club', thinking only humans are in the Federation when numerous humanoid species that are so similar to humans exist or because they always felt left out, from her perspective. A shame the movie didn't go along that venue as well, but its main story was worthy on its own. But suspension of disbelief is still required from the audience as well as robust scripted dialogue acted out believably, and the fact that gorgeous looking alien designs (CGI or practical effect) don't always work if used excessively or without tact...
The jokes about how everyone wore shoulder pads in 1990 to look more "appealing" and/or to hide slouched back problems aside, some physical attributes are more sexually appealing than others. Most people just don't care for walking toothpicks. Probably goes back tens of thousands of years and biological constructs still don't see machines as being stimulating enough to bring home to meet the parents and/or children.
Similar threads
