No alien races on screen with bird like Wings ?

[Eagle]

Well one winged race was mentioned in one of the series during conversation, sorry - I can't remember which series or episode . However I was just wondering why the art department never tried to create a winged race in any of the Star Trek films or series ?

I mean they went crazy with bumpy foreheads amongst other things, but surely to create a pair of wings ( Dogma style ?! - or even weirdly alien ) wouldn't be that hard to do - animating the winged people flying would be easy to achieve in the later series especially.

lol - I actually expected ( I was just a kid ) to see an angelic race during TNG's first season episode "Angel One" complete with wings but I think the groan factor would've been to much to bear if that had happened.

 

[Orac]

There was a bird-like humanoid species with wings that appeared in a couple of episodes of the animated series. If memory serves in the episodes The Jihad and Yesteryear.

 

[The Wormhole]

The Talosians seemed to be holding a birdman in The Cage. And then there are the oft-mentioned but never seen Xindi-Avians.

 

[Nebusj]

Eagle said:
Well one winged race was mentioned in one of the series during conversation, sorry - I can't remember which series or episode . However I was just wondering why the art department never tried to create a winged race in any of the Star Trek films or series ?

I imagine the problem is it's really hard to create a credible-looking pair of wings that grow on the back of a humanoid, particularly if you need them to flap (see, well, the Buster Crabbe serials, as fun as they are). But if you put the wings over a person's arms, then they can move easily, but the person has no way to pick up anything which is generally a problem if you want a person to represent a technological civilization. (Unless it's from the Original Series where half the locals had psychokinetic powers.)

Plus it takes all month to glue all the little feathers on. So it's a huge expense and very limiting to the actors to put them in a bird costume, and the temptation to just do silly forehead bumps is probably overwhelming unless it's Just Got To Be Birds, which it rarely does.


(There was one of the handful of live-action serials that Hanna-Barbera produced, along the lines of Danger Island, in which the heroes were menaced by the Falconians from Falconia, and they were supposed to be bird aliens. But while some of the headpieces were fine, the wings looked like they were wearing their grandmothers' throw rugs instead.)

 

[M'Sharak]

The Wormhole said:
And then there are the oft-mentioned but never seen Xindi-Avians.

They had the poor foresight to have become extinct several decades previous, as I recall.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Yeah, they got killed off during the war between the Xindi

 

[Therin of Andor]

orac said:
If memory serves in the episodes The Jihad and Yesteryear.

The Skorr in "The Jihad" (represented by Prince Tchar) and the Aurelians in "Yesteryear" (represented by historian Loom Aleek-Om). The recent trading card series claimed they were the same race but the scripts and the "Star Trek Logs" adaptations do not.

 

[Forbin]

Xena's representation of Cupid was a guy with very credible angel wings grafted to his back, but they didn't flap. Latex is one thing, budget-wise, but animatronic mechanisms are another.

These days, budget willing, it could be easily-enough CGIed. Look at Angel in the X movie.

 

[Kirby]

^^ They had to re-record all of the dialogue in scenes that involved the Andorians because the mechanism to move their little antenna made too much noise, so I imagine that wings would just be that much more of a problem.
As for the Xindi Avians, in my mind I pictured them as Big Bird, which just didn't work.

 

[Forbin]

Thank god they never mentioned the rare Snuffleupagus-Xindi!

 

[SlyCardie]

If we do have the good fortune of Star Trek coming back on the air, I hope that we see crazier types of aliens. Too many humanoid ones.

 

[captcalhoun]

i'd be happier with humanoids who are more exotic like Caitians, Saurians and Anticans for example and not poxy wrinkle-nosed Bajorans and their ilk.

CGI live-action Triexian would rock the house too, even if only a ten-second cameo walking past in the background...

 

[Orac]

Therin of Andor said:

orac said:
If memory serves in the episodes The Jihad and Yesteryear.

The Skorr in "The Jihad" (represented by Prince Tchar) and the Aurelians in "Yesteryear" (represented by historian Loom Aleek-Om). The recent trading card series claimed they were the same race but the scripts and the "Star Trek Logs" adaptations do not.

So they were just drawn the same then.

 

[Therin of Andor]

orac said:
So they were just drawn the same then.

I never thought they were all that similar, myself, although my introduction to both races was via the "ST Logs" episode adaptations so it was probably the way Alan Dean Foster described them.

We never see the Aurelian fly or unfold his wings and he has rather spindly legs and a topknot of feathers on his head. The Skorr has a hooked beak, is much bigger, and seems well muscled.

"The Jihad" seems to suggest a First (or early) Contact with the Skorr, and yet we know from "Yesteryear" that Kirk had already met an Aurelian before, and that he was a trusted historian on the Time Planet of the Guardian of Forever.

 

[JD]

Here are a couple of screencaps I found on Trekcore.
One of the Aurelian and one of the Skorr

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Kirby said:
^^ They had to re-record all of the dialogue in scenes that involved the Andorians because the mechanism to move their little antenna made too much noise, so I imagine that wings would just be that much more of a problem.
As for the Xindi Avians, in my mind I pictured them as Big Bird, which just didn't work.

If anyones ever seen the film 'mimic' will know that theres nothing a bit of CGI cant accomplish.

 

[137th Gebirg]

JD said:
Here are a couple of screencaps I found on Trekcore.
One of the Aurelian and one of the Skorr

Good find! There definitely seems to be some subtle differences between the Skorr and the Aurelians. Perhaps one is an offshoot of the other, like Vulcans and Romulans with slight evolutionary drift to account for the differences.

I remember seeing an artist's rendering of a Skorr wearing a blue armored vest a while back. It looked positively bad-ass, and I have it in my archive somewhere. Can't find it online right now - maybe someone out there knows what I'm talking about and can find a link.

BTW: Speaking of the Xindi, there appears to be a Xindi Insectoid on the High Council of the TAS Episode "Time Trap":
http://tas.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x12/thetimetrap_061.JPG

 

[captcalhoun]

wrong colour and the eyes aren't compound.

 

[Eagle]

Thanks for the replies folks !

I've never seen all of TAS so I never knew that race existed in those pictures that were linked.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

captcalhoun said:
wrong colour and the eyes aren't compound.

Then again, Klingons wear pink in TAS, so I wouldn't take color too seriously