So, Ive been working on a little project for our upcoming June shoot of "Kitumba."
Folks probably know that the symbol that's been associated with the Klingon Empire is a three-pointed thing superimposed on a yellowish circle:
But here's a bit more background on this symbol from an
Original Series standpoint:
The insignia appears in three
TOS episodes: "Elaan of Troyius," "The Enterprise Incident," and "Day of the Dove." In these episodes, it's just barely visible on the underside of the Klingon (or "Romulan") ship model in two different views:
You can also see it (just barely--if you have a very good eye) on Matt Jefferies' diagram of the ship as it appears on the little tri-screen viewer in the briefing room:
It should be noted that both the studio filming model and the large original prototype of the AMT model kit have the same insignia:
But clearly (and probably most importantly), the best look at the Klingon insignia is the view from "Elaan of Troyius:"
You can see from this shot that the yellow circle is actually a pale yellow, the red wedge is just, well, red, and the green wedge is a light mint green. The third wedge is actually black, not blue as people sometimes think. Notice also that the tallest point points off to the right.
Interestingly, since the Klingon Battlecruiser model was used as a new Romulan ship in "The Enterprise Incident," and since you could just barely make out the
Klingon insignia on what was supposed to be a
Romulan ship, the
TOS production folks actually went to the trouble of developing a symbol for the Romulans that looked somewhat like the Klingon insignia and which plausibly could have been the hard-to-see insignia visible on the underside of the ship model:
(Notice that it has that same "red, green, and black three prongs on a yellow background" look. But notice that instead of the triangular wedge-shaped prongs, the Romulan insignia has little propeller-shaped prongs that are actually the shape of the Romulan doorways throughout the ship interiors.)
At any rate, the animated episode "More Tribbles, More Troubles" had a pretty faithful re-creation of a Klingon ship, and the Klingon insignia on the ship was in its "proper" left-to-right orientation:
However, when the interior of the Klingon ship was shown in this same animated episode, the Klingon insignia was placed in a new up-and-down orientation--and the colors were brighter, closer to primary colors, with blue introduced instead of black:
(Apparently, the artistist/producers hadn't seen "Elaan of Troyius" recently.)
So, the corruption of the Klingon insignia (from a muted, left-to-right insignia shown in
TOS to a more brightly colored, up-and-down insignia) all began with the animated episode "More Tribbles, More Troubles." The up-and-down "incorrect" orientation stuck--and the rest is now
Star Trek history.
But here's a clean copy of the
true Klingon insignia from TOS before it got corrupted in "More Tribbles, More Troubles:"
At any rate, since we'll be seeing a bunch of Klingon stuff in "Kitumba," I needed to create some Klingon signs. But being proudly Old School, I went back to the original Matt Jefferies colors for the symbol. So rather than having symbols made that look like the "conventional wisdom" Klingon symbol (well, okay I do have
one):
...I had some made that look like this:
Here it is with a nearby lightswitch to get some scale:
And another shot to get some scale:
Lastly, you can see that I got a bunch of these:
Matt Jefferies was a color genius and getting our
Trek to look just right depends a lot on getting the colors just right. Even though the symbol is probably visible for no more than about thirty seconds total time over the course of the entire series, it just looks so much more
classic Trek when you get the subtle, muted coloration just right--instead of using garish primary colors.
