If you put square brackets and an s -- [ s ] without the space -- it will go striked out. I suspect you typed color(s) but with square brackets
I've removed it in the above quote to make it easier to read.
What do those uniform colors mean, anyway?!
- Thread starter Neopeius
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If you put square brackets and an s -- [ s ] without the space -- it will go striked out. I suspect you typed color(s) but with square brackets
I've removed it in the above quote to make it easier to read.
Excellent. TY.
I'm on it; however, the word showing on post and in edit-mode is: color - no 's', nor brackets present and showing to alter.
TY x2: It's now been fixed; fix = by copy and paste whole post into word, save in word, paste and re-post in edit-mode.
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Because he came up with the rationale after the show had been canceled, with the full stable of episodes in rerun to use as reference (plus The Making of Star Trek.) It is 1966 and the initial season isn't even finished it's very first run yet. You have a dozen or so episodes to use as a reference.
The exercise here is, if you were watching in 1966, to relate what you remember thinking about the uniform colors, and if you weren't watching in 1966, to speculate on what you might have come up with, sans post-cancellation influences.
and, somehow this means the reference can't be accessed in 2021 to see if it works for the OP.... Why?
You're welcome to do whatever you like. Have fun. Enjoy.
I wasn't around for the original run, but as a pre-school/elementary school kid in the '70s I identified Kirk's shirt color as simply "yellow," but this would have been influenced by TAS and the Mego action figure as much or more that TOS.
In "Rich Text Editor" mode the strikethrough is under the plus sign.
TY x2: It's now been fixed; fix = by copy and paste whole post into word, save in word, paste and re-post in edit-mode.
In "Rich Text Editor" mode the strikethrough is under the plus sign.
On Jan 1st 1966 only 9.7% of US households had color TV, this was increasing massively but it was still a minority even after Trek came off air in June 1969 (Was about 33% of TV households in Jan 1st 1969, 48% by Jan 1st 1971)
So If I were in America and watching Star Trek back then, chances are I wouldn't have a clue if Kirk's uniform was Gold, Yellow, Green or Mauve
IDK, maybe because the OP explicitly stated that we are ignoring all that?
Same.
The Command Division color is a huge can of worms. Your facts are on point, for sure. In David Gerrold's 1973 book The Trouble with Tribbles, if I recall, he reports that the tunics were green in person despite appearing yellow on TV. But elsewhere he says one of Shatner's on-set nicknames was "the kid in the yellow shirt."
Lots of people say this was "a film stock thing," something to do with the chemistry of Kodak emulsions that made green look yellow. But I think it was the peculiar dye Theiss used, and how it behaved in differing light. I think the uniforms were green under normal lights, but yellow-gold under bright studio lights or sunlight.
And I think this held true both in person and on film. And it held true for both the velour and Year 3 synthetic fabric. The green dye had a yellow component that was brought out by bright lighting.
Note that people like Theiss, Weaver, and Gerrold would tend to see the tunics under normal indoor lights. So of course their in person accounts say green. It was green, back in the offices and workshops.
There is supporting evidence here, in which a uniform is gold with the camera flash but green without it:
http://www.startrekpropauthority.com/2009/03/star-trek-exhibition-in-detroit.html
But there are so many variables: film stock issues, lighting differences, the two fabrics, dye ingredients, personal accounts, the fact that no two people necessarily have the same color perception, and the age of surviving costumes, that the subject can support any length of argument.
To muddy the waters even further, the TOS-R geniuses of CBS Digital electronically biased the tunics to look a shade greener than they were on the 35mm episodes being presented. It was so nice of them to fix that for us.
Right, but if Uhura is prominently a Lieutenant, then the single braid would be dispositive. Just saw "Conscience" and Riley is "Lieutenant" there, too.
So at this point, I'd know what a single braid meant and could guess the rank structure from here. I'd still be in the dark re: uniform colors, especially since in "Conscience", Riley is in "Engineering" transferred from "Communications"... and wears mustard (when he's not wearing poisoned milk...)
Black and White would definitely muddle the whole issue -- the albedo of the red shirts is pretty easy to tell from the blue and mustard, but the blue and mustard look alike without color.
Though that would still create a divide between the light uniforms and the dark ones, the light ones being equivalent to officer's chambrai, the dark to enlisted fatigues (recognizing, that obviously some of the darker uniform wearers are officers).
That said, while tvs may have been largely black and white, TV Guide was not. Though Trek doesn't make the cover of TV Guide until April '67...and how many people were like, "Oh! That's what color those uniforms are?!"
But this is all an excellent point. People (including me) jump through elaborate hoops to explain Charlene Masters in blue, or Anne Mulhall in red, but in the end, for most people, these folks were in varying shades of gray.
Though that would still create a divide between the light uniforms and the dark ones, the light ones being equivalent to officer's chambrai, the dark to enlisted fatigues (recognizing, that obviously some of the darker uniform wearers are officers).
That said, while tvs may have been largely black and white, TV Guide was not. Though Trek doesn't make the cover of TV Guide until April '67...and how many people were like, "Oh! That's what color those uniforms are?!"
But this is all an excellent point. People (including me) jump through elaborate hoops to explain Charlene Masters in blue, or Anne Mulhall in red, but in the end, for most people, these folks were in varying shades of gray.
Not following, sorry.
Just put two and two together. Riley's previous assignment in Engineering explains how Riley knew Engineering so well to be able to seal the doors, take control of ship communications and turn off the engines in The Naked Time. During the The Naked Time, he is acting as the ship's Navigator (promotion to gold shirt "Command Division" job). After The Naked Time, Kirk may have transferred Riley (after demonstrating his masterful skills over ship communications) to Communications as found later in The Conscience of the King. Why is he still wearing the gold shirt? Maybe Communication Officers are not color (division) dependent, after all, over the series we see all shirt colors sit in on the Communications Station. Memory Alpha says, "The role of communications officer (also known as comm officer) was a specialized occupation held by crewmembers aboard Starfleet vessels, installations, and bases. Found across multiple divisions, the individuals holding the position were held responsible for managing all incoming and outgoing transmissions, whether they were visual, audio, or text communications."
It was very nice because the tunic GREEN should be presented how it was originally designed to be. Despite the ignorance from some fans and especially the "Fans turned Pro"!The Command Division color is a huge can of worms. Your facts are on point, for sure. In David Gerrold's 1973 book The Trouble with Tribbles, if I recall, he reports that the tunics were green in person despite appearing yellow on TV. But elsewhere he says one of Shatner's on-set nicknames was "the kid in the yellow shirt."
Lots of people say this was "a film stock thing," something to do with the chemistry of Kodak emulsions that made green look yellow. But I think it was the peculiar dye Theiss used, and how it behaved in differing light. I think the uniforms were green under normal lights, but yellow-gold under bright studio lights or sunlight.
And I think this held true both in person and on film. And it held true for both the velour and Year 3 synthetic fabric. The green dye had a yellow component that was brought out by bright lighting.
Note that people like Theiss, Weaver, and Gerrold would tend to see the tunics under normal indoor lights. So of course their in person accounts say green. It was green, back in the offices and workshops.
There is supporting evidence here, in which a uniform is gold with the camera flash but green without it:
http://www.startrekpropauthority.com/2009/03/star-trek-exhibition-in-detroit.html
But there are so many variables: film stock issues, lighting differences, the two fabrics, dye ingredients, personal accounts, the fact that no two people necessarily have the same color perception, and the age of surviving costumes, that the subject can support any length of argument.
To muddy the waters even further, the TOS-R geniuses of CBS Digital electronically biased the tunics to look a shade greener than they were on the 35mm episodes being presented. It was so nice of them to fix that for us.
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Star Trek handling the issues 45 years before everyone else, truly was groundbreaking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
Yes, but on screen evidence is that it is command "gold" further down the road, trumping behind the scenes data pointsThe Command Division color is a huge can of worms. Your facts are on point, for sure. In David Gerrold's 1973 book The Trouble with Tribbles, if I recall, he reports that the tunics were green in person despite appearing yellow on TV. But elsewhere he says one of Shatner's on-set nicknames was "the kid in the yellow shirt."
Lots of people say this was "a film stock thing," something to do with the chemistry of Kodak emulsions that made green look yellow. But I think it was the peculiar dye Theiss used, and how it behaved in differing light. I think the uniforms were green under normal lights, but yellow-gold under bright studio lights or sunlight.
And I think this held true both in person and on film. And it held true for both the velour and Year 3 synthetic fabric. The green dye had a yellow component that was brought out by bright lighting.
Note that people like Theiss, Weaver, and Gerrold would tend to see the tunics under normal indoor lights. So of course their in person accounts say green. It was green, back in the offices and workshops.
There is supporting evidence here, in which a uniform is gold with the camera flash but green without it:
http://www.startrekpropauthority.com/2009/03/star-trek-exhibition-in-detroit.html
But there are so many variables: film stock issues, lighting differences, the two fabrics, dye ingredients, personal accounts, the fact that no two people necessarily have the same color perception, and the age of surviving costumes, that the subject can support any length of argument.
To muddy the waters even further, the TOS-R geniuses of CBS Digital electronically biased the tunics to look a shade greener than they were on the 35mm episodes being presented. It was so nice of them to fix that for us.
As to the OP topic at hand while TOS was my first Trek, I was a late comer, meaning I had Trimble' Concordance to aid in making sense of some of the Trek ideas. My general interpretation was gold as officers, blue as science (with medical kind of folded in their) and red as services. How much of that was informed by the Concordance is now lost to my aging memory. Also, the Mego action figures helped.
Great post.
I think it was only about two years ago that I realized that Hoshi on Enterprise was in the sciences division.
Pretty sure it was the Concordance that referred to them as "command, sciences, services." I think that's where I got it from when I first starting watching in the 70s in syndication. There was another resource - perhaps more of a fan publication - that speculated/indicated that command-grade officers would generally wear their branch color (if different) if they weren't the commanding officer, hence Spock wearing blue (and later when codified as third-in-command, Scotty wearing red). I believe every Star Trek show since the original has had the first officer wearing the command color, though, regardless of branch.
I'm with Zap on this one. No matter what color the shirts "really" were, we're dealing with a secondary/tertiary color here that can easily tip one way or another. Any color reproduction system—film, video, computer-to-print—is going to have variance from one end of the pipeline to the other. NTSC (old US video standard) was jokingly referred to as "Never The Same Color" by many in the industry. (Don't even get me started on PAL—the red-blue flicker of whites would have driven me crazy if I'd grown up in the UK.) I have backstage photos of the TOS trio on lunch breaks and the like, and Kirk's shirt looks unambiguously yellow. But that's color timing. Film isn't any more perfect than electronic systems.
Then there's individual perception. I have acute perception of tiny variations in color, but I know many people who are at least partially color blind, with red-green distinction being the most common.
And there are factors like fluorescence, where light of one frequency is changed to another by certain materials. UV "black lights" and UV-reactant dyes/paints are a superb example. Grandma used to put "bluing" in the laundry to make white shirts whiter, and many detergents have phosphates in them, which have the side effect of producing blue light when "pumped" by UV. "Invisible" UV paints are invisible on my hand in normal room lighting. But step into sunlight, and I can see faint pinkish patterns where the paint is.
Many birds, such as hummingbirds, produce highly refractive effects from their feathers. The colors are not "really there," it is a prismatic effect. I've seen many fabrics that do this. Even daylight changes "color temperature" from dawn to afternoon to dusk.
The human eye is most sensitive to green light. And if you look at a chromaticity diagram, you'll note very narrow regions between the primary colors. That subtle shade of blue might look more magenta-ish or cyan-ish with slight tweaking of the reproduction system. Or that ever-so-slightly green command shirt might look more yellowish.
Command shirts are in the eye of the beholder.
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