Could the original concept for vulcans have worked?
- Thread starter FreddyE
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There's already plenty of examples. Excluding the Overlords from Childhood's End that I've already linked, there's: this one all of us know,
this one most of us probably know, some concept art, and of course this one. Wouldn't really matter the color of any of them, except #2 solely because he was supposed to be evoking a devilish look.
Nevermind that if they made Spock red in the same way they made him green, it'd hardly be noticeable in the first place.
this one most of us probably know, some concept art, and of course this one. Wouldn't really matter the color of any of them, except #2 solely because he was supposed to be evoking a devilish look.
Nevermind that if they made Spock red in the same way they made him green, it'd hardly be noticeable in the first place.
Out of all the Star Wars links, I'm surprised that nobody mentioned the Devaronian.
Gene Roddenberry's original Star Trek outline describes Mr. Spock as "probably half Martian" with "a slightly reddish complexion and semi-pointed ears" and "a face so heavy-lidded and satanic you might almost expect him to have a forked tail." Nothing about him actually having a tail!
Early makeup tests with a reddish skin tone looked fine in color, but appeared fake and pasty in black-and-white. (Remember, it wasn't until 1972 -- three years after Trek TOS was cancelled -- that half of all U.S. households had color TV.) So they went with a yellowish tint that looked okay in both color and black-and-white.
More specifically, it looked no different from an actor in blackface.
I thought this was going to be about the original implication that Spock looked different from a full Vulcan. That "probably half Martian" description suggests that a full "Martian" would look different, implicitly less human. And in "Mudd's Women," Harry Mudd concluded on sight that Spock was "part-Vulcanian" (which was the first time Spock's species was actually named in production order), which further suggests that he looked more human than a full Vulcanian would. But that idea was dropped by the time we got to "Balance of Terror," since the Romulans needed to look like Spock so that Stiles could suspect him of being a spy. I suppose that after that, they could've still had proper Vulcans look more alien (since Romulans were described as an offshoot species), but I'd say that what put paid to that for good was the fact that the first time we saw Vulcans other than Spock was "Amok Time," which required a whole bunch of them, so a more elaborate alien makeup would've been prohibitive.
Gene Roddenberry seems to have liked these jokey contrasts for certain STAR TREK characters, as with Geordie La Forge, who started out on The Next Generation as The Blind Bus Driver. It's corny ...
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/the-peoples-court/n9487
Hmm, don't think I ever noticed that.
There was legitimate concern about Spock's "satanic look" in the 60s. Indeed, early promotional pictures actually cropped out his ears and eyebrows because of it.
It was a lot easier to sell a devil-like villain in the 1990s then it was to sell a devil-like hero in the 1960s.
And today we have a successful TV show whose title character is Lucifer himself. How times have changed.
I don't think it would have worked.
