A matter of Color.

[Thanos007]

I'm guessing by now that most people on this site know the original command uniforms were an avocado green but due to lighting and film showed up as yellow/gold. Question: do you feel the command uniforms should be considered as intended and be avocado green or should the be considered as yellow/gold as viewed?

 

[Phaser Two]

I think of them as gold as that's how they showed up and how they were later depicted in TAS, DS9's "Trials and Tribble-ations," ENT's two-parter "In a Mirror, Darkly,"** etc.

Incidentally, does anyone know why Kirk's wraparound showed up correctly as green? I guess it was a darker shade of green than the "gold" shirts?

**come to think of it , though, I can't think of a single "goldshirt" in those two ENT episodes. Archer wore the green wraparound and everyone else I remember was in red or blue.

 

[Thanos007]

Incidentally, does anyone know why Kirk's wraparound showed up correctly as green? I guess it was a darker shade of green than the "gold" shirts?

Different material would be my guess. The duty uniform for the first two seasons were made of velour. Which is kind of fuzzy. Very short nap. The season three uniforms were made with a double knit polyester. I don't know if they were the same shade of green or where actually gold.

 

[Tosk]

Gold. Obviously.

 

[Phaser Two]

Different material would be my guess. The duty uniform for the first two seasons were made of velour. Which is kind of fuzzy. Very short nap. The season three uniforms were made with a double knit polyester. I don't know if they were the same shade of green or where actually gold.

All true but I don't think Kirk ever wore the green outfit in S3, after they changed material. Maybe that's what you were pointing out.

 

[The Old Mixer]

**come to think of it , though, I can't think of a single "goldshirt" in those two episodes.

Sisko wore gold in "Trials and Tribble-ations," assuming that's the Tribble episode that you meant.

 

[Phaser Two]

Sisko wore gold in "Trials and Tribble-ations," assuming that's the Tribble episode that you meant.

Argh, yes, thanks! Silly of me. That's what I meant. But I also need to edit my post for another reason - - by mentioning "those two episodes" I meant both halves of ENT's "In a Mirror, Darkly." I definitely remembered Sisko wearing gold - and IIRC there were a few other people wearing gold around - in DS9, I just misnamed the ep.

 

[tomswift2002]

I think the green wrap was kind of suppose to be the Captain’s only, especially since Mirror-Archer mentioned it was in the “Captain’s warddrobe”, just like Kirk’s formal uniform jacket was also green (which we saw in “The Menagerie” and the Lincoln episode in Season 3).

 

[Desert Kris]

I took the green wrap around to be a Captain only thing, too, casual wear in the vein that the Captain can be a little more informal if he wants, a rank-has-its-privilege kind of thing. Also it was used to distinguish the difference between good Kirk and bad Kirk in The Enemy Within, a visual for the audience to lock in on.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

I'm guessing by now that most people on this site know the original command uniforms were an avocado green but due to lighting and film showed up as yellow/gold. Question: do you feel the command uniforms should be considered as intended and be avocado green or should the be considered as yellow/gold as viewed?

There's a common misconception about that. The color confusion of the Kirk-Sulu tunic was not caused by the NTSC television format, nor by the film stock they were shooting on. It was the dye itself. Theiss bought white fabric and dyed it, and the pale shade of "green" he chose for Command looked green under ordinary lights, but under bright studio lights or sunlight, the same pigment looked yellow-gold. And this was to the naked eye, in person. The show's 35mm film and the orginal television broadcasts were accurate.

Theiss himself did not work on set with those bright lights, so he thought the uniforms were green. He used a darker shade of green on the wraparound tunic, which was originally intended to ensure that one Kirk in "The Enemy Within" would be easy to distinguish from the other.

When Star Trek was re-mastered for the 2006 DVDs, they falsely "corrected" the image by deliberately biasing the uniforms back toward green. That was a mistake. The shirts really were gold when seen in bright light.

[This is a re-post of my reply to the same issue in a prior thread.]

 

[Timo]

Sisko wore gold in "Trials and Tribble-ations," assuming that's the Tribble episode that you meant.

And that episode also gives us our canonical answer to what the color was, in-universe.

Sisko: "In the old days, operations officers wore red, command officers wore gold."
Dax: "And women wore less."

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Thanos007]

Anyone know if there were any other mods made to the uniforms between season two and three besides a change in the fabric?

 

[Kor]

The film was processed/finished/whatever in such a manner that the uniforms consistently appeared gold in the final product. So this was obviously a deliberate production choice.

Kor

 

[FormerLurker]

There's a common misconception about that. The color confusion of the Kirk-Sulu tunic was not caused by the NTSC television format, nor by the film stock they were shooting on. It was the dye itself. Theiss bought white fabric and dyed it, and the pale shade of "green" he chose for Command looked green under ordinary lights, but under bright studio lights or sunlight, the same pigment looked yellow-gold. And this was to the naked eye, in person. The show's 35mm film and the orginal television broadcasts were accurate.

Theiss himself did not work on set with those bright lights, so he thought the uniforms were green. He used a darker shade of green on the wraparound tunic, which was originally intended to ensure that one Kirk in "The Enemy Within" would be easy to distinguish from the other.

When Star Trek was re-mastered for the 2006 DVDs, they falsely "corrected" the image by deliberately biasing the uniforms back toward green. That was a mistake. The shirts really were gold when seen in bright light.

[This is a re-post of my reply to the same issue in a prior thread.]

I don't remember the source, so it's just speculation at this point, but I recall someone somewhere saying that Theiss knew the dye reacted to bright lights that way, and intended to get a gold highlighted green from it. The darker green of the wraparound and the dress uniforms weren't to keep the command color in line, but to establish that the command color scheme was more fluid than services or sciences.

And much of the time, Scotty's shirt looked more pink than anyone else in engineering, or Uhura anyway, so that fluidity was either intentional, or Scotty's shirts got washed more often.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

And much of the time, Scotty's shirt looked more pink than anyone else in engineering, or Uhura anyway, so that fluidity was either intentional, or Scotty's shirts got washed more often.

I never noticed the fading, but you can see that the extra dry cleanings shrank the stars' uniforms:
http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x08hd/mirihd025.jpg

It's an odd case where the guy playing a security guard has a better fitting costume than William Shatner.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

They were intended to look how they looked on film. Theiss was a professional who understood perfectly that things looking different on stage was part of the production process. They looked they way that did on stage in order to get the look on film they would finally have.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

They were intended to look how they looked on film. Theiss was a professional who understood perfectly that things looking different on stage was part of the production process. They looked they way that did on stage in order to get the look on film they would finally have.

Theiss may have liked how the Command uniforms ended up looking under the lights, but he originally intended them to be green. The yellow-gold hue that emerged from his faint shade of barely-green dye was one of those accidents that works out well enough to stick with.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Theiss may have liked how the Command uniforms ended up looking under the lights, but he originally intended them to be green. The yellow-gold hue that emerged from his faint shade of barely-green dye was one of those accidents that works out well enough to stick with.

I'll go along with that.

So, even if it wasn't originally intended that the color change would occur, he understood that the color change did occur, and how and why it did, and he did not attempt to correct it back to his original intent, because the final results were acceptable. Is that fair?

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

It's been a hot minute since we've had a good gold vs. green tunic debate.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

It's been a hot minute since we've had a good gold vs. green tunic debate.

And yellow-gold wins. It makes for a brighter, more upbeat color palette alongside the red and blue shirts. It just makes the show look better, and its brighter aspect helps make Shatner pop as the leading man.