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Spotting The Motion Picture's Aliens

So TMP is the beginning of the Andorian re-design, with the antennae moving to the forehead from beside the crown?
 
The Betelguesians have popped up in "Discovery".


Betelgeusians of 1979 and 2020 by Ian McLean, on Flickr

That redesign disappointed me. The TMP version appears to have two mouths, a beak-like one in place of the nose and a more mammalian mouth below. I identified them in my novels as a speaking mouth and an eating mouth, respectively. The DSC version just gives them a more conventional humanoid facial structure, which is much less interesting.
 
Why the devil weren't these designs revisited in later shows, especially Enterprise?!
It does frustrate me that we just get new species thrown in all the time, when I would love to see these aliens developed. My favourite - nay - the only good - part about Section 31 was the Deltan.

Strewth, Rhaandarite women are canonically played by male actors. You would have thought Discovery or Academy would have been all over that.
 
Why the devil weren't these designs revisited in later shows, especially Enterprise?!
andorians did feature heavily in enterprise, of course. there's a saurian on the Discovery... LD of course probably put many of them in bg shots at least. just assume any totally bald human is a deltan! XD
 
According to the novelization of SFS, Deltan males have hair like Crystal Gayle.

And the Wrath of Khan novelization before it, IIRC.

Sort of like how TAS appeared to assume that male Orions were blue while females were green. It occurred to me a few years back that that was probably because of the Orion spy Thelev in "Journey to Babel" disguising himself as an Andorian -- maybe the Filmation people figured he was already blue-skinned and just needed the white hair and antennae.
 
And the Wrath of Khan novelization before it, IIRC.

Sort of like how TAS appeared to assume that male Orions were blue while females were green. It occurred to me a few years back that that was probably because of the Orion spy Thelev in "Journey to Babel" disguising himself as an Andorian -- maybe the Filmation people figured he was already blue-skinned and just needed the white hair and antennae.
And, canonically, tribbles are pink!
 
Even today with the remastering, it's still hard to even know if you are looking at an alien. All that money for make up, wardrobe, etc., for aliens that are split second appearing, hard to make out, or fleeting at best. Man that budget.
 
According to the novelization of SFS, Deltan males have hair like Crystal Gayle.

Jedda (John Vargas) is a Deltan in the script of ST II. Onscreen he has hair, probably because no other aspects of his Deltan traits were needed.

TrekBBS members plus Mel Efros's son, and Kirk "The Punk on the Bus" Thatcher, helped us unravel some hairy Deltan and Efrosian mysteries in 2006!

Even today with the remastering, it's still hard to even know if you are looking at an alien. All that money for make up, wardrobe, etc., for aliens that are split second appearing, hard to make out, or fleeting at best. Man that budget.

Unfortunately, Robert Wise was disappointed by the TMP aliens, so they didn't get much in the way of closeups, unlike the Cantina aliens of "Star Wars".

Fred Phillips, TMP Makeup Artist, told me that his initial brief was that he was to populate a scene of UFP aliens, as he had done in "Journey to Babel". However, no such scene even appears in "In Thy Image". The aliens are just "busy" in the airtram terminal.
 
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But those tribbles were genetically engineered by Cyrano Jones, and sloppily so. The pink color may have been an accidental side effect, or perhaps Cyrano made them pink on purpose because he thought it would make them cuter.

Yep.

Also, had they been varied colours, as in TOS, the animators would have had to track individual fluffballs as they tumbled from their piles. Pink was a popular colour in TAS. Just ask the kzinti, although the rumour that someone at Filmation was colourblind, and that's why the kzin got pink ships and spacesuits, has been debunked.
 
Yep.

Also, had they been varied colours, as in TOS, the animators would have had to track individual fluffballs as they tumbled from their piles. Pink was a popular colour in TAS. Just ask the kzinti, although the rumour that someone at Filmation was colourblind, and that's why the kzin got pink ships and spacesuits, has been debunked.
It is my considered opinion that there is an illegal tribble hunting operation throughout the Federation which then, much like with leather today, turns them into clothing and upholstery.

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Yep.

Also, had they been varied colours, as in TOS, the animators would have had to track individual fluffballs as they tumbled from their piles. Pink was a popular colour in TAS. Just ask the kzinti, although the rumour that someone at Filmation was colourblind, and that's why the kzin got pink ships and spacesuits, has been debunked.

Yes, that was always a ridiculous rumor, one that should've been easy enough to see through just by applying a little reasoning to it. Yes, director Hal Sutherland was colorblind, but, one, he didn't work alone, so there were plenty of other people on staff who could have told him what colors things were; and two, every character and object in an animated production has a model sheet that specifies its colors in writing as a guide for the painters, so Sutherland could've just read what the colors were.

The colors in Filmation shows were chosen by color director Ervin L. Kaplan, who favored pink, purple, and green because kids liked bright colors. I imagine clarity was a factor too, since in 1973-5, TV reception was often fuzzy and glitchy and many sets were small, so bright colors would've been chosen to stand out. Heck, we only had black-and-white TV in my house at the time, so choosing colors that would contrast well in monochrome may still have been a factor, as it was for the selection of uniform colors in TOS.
 
Yes, that was always a ridiculous rumor, one that should've been easy enough to see through just by applying a little reasoning to it. Yes, director Hal Sutherland was colorblind, but, one, he didn't work alone, so there were plenty of other people on staff who could have told him what colors things were; and two, every character and object in an animated production has a model sheet that specifies its colors in writing as a guide for the painters, so Sutherland could've just read what the colors were.

The colors in Filmation shows were chosen by color director Ervin L. Kaplan, who favored pink, purple, and green because kids liked bright colors. I imagine clarity was a factor too, since in 1973-5, TV reception was often fuzzy and glitchy and many sets were small, so bright colors would've been chosen to stand out. Heck, we only had black-and-white TV in my house at the time, so choosing colors that would contrast well in monochrome may still have been a factor, as it was for the selection of uniform colors in TOS.

My first viewing of TAS’s Auroral Plague was in glorious b/w on a Saturday morning. That was the episode that we were anxiously awaiting its colour debut a few years later on weekday breakfast TV.
 
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