Were the Vulcans originally to be more demonic?

[Arpy]

I'm watching "The Corbomite Maneuver" (Ep 1x02), being reminded of how they were making things up as they went along. The uniforms, "Space Central" instead of Starfleet, Spock's shouting on the bridge as though he's on a sailing ship, his puckish expressions, etc.

He mentions how his human mother was happy to be married to his Vulcan father, and, of course, Spock is the only Vulcan half-breed we've ever seen, let alone a full-blooded Vulcan. So, if the inspiration for him was Satan, if they had more of a make-up budget, and this was the groovy 60's, would they have gone further with full-blooded Vulcans looking more demonic if they could?

(Never mind the Romulans showing up in "Balance of Terror" later in the season and looking identical to Spock. Imagine the next Vulcanoid we saw were a Vulcan who didn't have to look like Spock just so his fellow crewmen would distrust him upon seeing their first Romulan.)

 

[Christopher]

It's overstating it to say he was inspired by Satan, I think. The original 1964 proposal does suggest that he would have a deceptively "satanic" appearance, with reddish skin and pointed ears, but it said he was "probably half-Martian," and some of the early plans called for him to absorb energy through a metal plate in his chest, which is definitely more alien than devil. It didn't play up any sort of "demonic" description, because this was science fiction, not horror.

But I've had the same thought otherwise -- the phrasing in the original prospectus does suggest that Spock's basically humanlike appearance means he's half-human, and in "Mudd's Women," Mudd is able to tell on sight that Spock is "part-Vulcanian." So that makes it pretty clear that the original intention was that a full Vulcanian would look, if not more "demonic" than Spock, at least more alien. And you're probably right that "Balance of Terror" was what changed it.

 

[C.E. Evans]

Maybe a full Vulcanian would have been simply a lot more green in complexion.

 

[FormerLurker]

Possible. Sarek's full Vulcan blood is a much darker shade of green.

 

[Doctor Clu]

Perhaps the Vulcans would have looked more like the current Romulans with the cromagnum forehead along with the pointy ears and what not. That is to say if they had the budget for more effects in the 60's.

 

[Scotchy]

They could have gone in a more congenial direction. Add a couple of fudge stripe cookies beside Spock's plomeek soup and he might have been perceived as more of a Keebler elf than a sinister demon.

 

[Christopher]

Perhaps the Vulcans would have looked more like the current Romulans with the cromagnum forehead along with the pointy ears and what not. That is to say if they had the budget for more effects in the 60's.

If you mean "Cro-Magnon," that term refers to the earliest anatomically modern humans in Europe, so they would've had exactly the same foreheads as any of us. Neanderthals were the big-browed ones.

And of course there's no reason why Fred Phillips working in the 1960s would've made the same design choice that Michael Westmore made 20 years later, because different artists have different imaginations and tastes. None of Phillips's aliens were based on forehead appliances until the TMP Klingons. It was either smooth brows or entire skullcaps and/or facemasks.

I think that, at the very least, pure Vulcanians (?) would've had a more vivid green skin tone than Spock did, and perhaps had larger pointed ears and more pronounced eyebrows. If they had gone for head prosthetics, maybe it would've been something like a green-skinned version of David McCallum's evolved form in The Outer Limits: "The Sixth Finger" (either this intermediate form or this final form).

 

[Draculasaurus]

It's always weird when they rib Spock for looking like Satan, and he just kind of looks like a dour but normal guy with funny ears.

 

[Christopher]

It's always weird when they rib Spock for looking like Satan, and he just kind of looks like a dour but normal guy with funny ears.

It was '60s TV. They had a narrower definition of what "normal" looked like. There's lots of older fiction where native peoples of any non-European ethnicity are denounced as "devils" by white imperialists.

 

[Vandervecken]

The way Spock got called out by Tracey as "the evil one" in The Omega Glory does suggest they'd had this on their minds for a while.

 

[mb22]

Not to mention Spock having his ears and eyebrows airbrushed in the NBC promotional handbook for fear of offending Bible Belt stations.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-m-boRfNi68k/VQWf4mvebRI/AAAAAAAACsU/A4PX4WlxwxA/s1600/retouched-spock.jpg

 

[Doug Otte]

Possible. Sarek's full Vulcan blood is a much darker shade of green.

In which episode can we see and compare the color of their blood?

 

[Marsden]

I think what we are now experiencing in this discussion is one of the huge ramifications on our culture that Star Trek has had, namely, if someone has pointed ears, they are now not thought of as some kind of sinister person but a Vulcan (or maybe Elf, Tolkein is more well known now, too even though his books were out in the 50s). That didn't exist before Star Trek, so all anyone could go on then is what they had, and pointy ears used to go with pointy tails and other bad things. The fact that so many don't jump to that conclusion anymore is the change. In other words, if a person with the same exact makeup showed up on "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis" or "I Dream of Jeannie" the audience at home would have known this was a bad guy, or assumed bad guy to be proved otherwise in a plot that involves not jumping to conclusions. The only thing Spock doesn't have is a handlebar mustache he can twirl.

 

[Christopher]

I think what we are now experiencing in this discussion is one of the huge ramifications on our culture that Star Trek has had, namely, if someone has pointed ears, they are now not thought of as some kind of sinister person but a Vulcan (or maybe Elf, Tolkein is more well known now, too even though his books were out in the 50s). That didn't exist before Star Trek, so all anyone could go on then is what they had, and pointy ears used to go with pointy tails and other bad things. The fact that so many don't jump to that conclusion anymore is the change.

No, not really. The portrayal of pointed ears on benevolent fantasy creatures like elves and fairies was commonplace by the 19th century at least. It probably goes back to Ancient Greece -- the deity Pan was portrayed with goatlike attributes including pointed ears, and this influenced many later European depictions of both benevolent and malevolent supernatural entities, as a way of highlighting their animal nature and inhumanity (and, yes, their evil from a Christian viewpoint, but the trait was nonetheless retained in more neutral or benevolent portrayals). Disney gave Peter Pan pointed ears in their 1953 film, probably because of the "Pan" in his name, but while he was portrayed as mischievous, he was hardly treated as a demon.

A lot of our cultural portrayals of aliens are just modernizations of longstanding memes and images from folklore and myth. "Little green men" such as leprechauns existed in folklore and then got transposed to our fantasies of outer space. Aliens were given pointed ears because fairies and gnomes and demons had them. They're all just ways of symbolically coding something as inhuman, so it applies just as well to an extraterrestrial inhuman as a supernatural one. Spock being given pointed ears was as much a reference to the pre-existing notion of aliens as "little green men with pointed ears" as it was a reference to satanic antecedents. It's hard for us to realize now when we see Star Trek as so seminal, but Spock's makeup design was already kind of cliched at the time. (Look at the pointed ears on David McCallum in those shots from "The Sixth Finger" that I linked above. That episode was made in 1963, a year before "The Cage.")

 

[johnnybear]

I used to think that maybe the pure blooded Vulcans would be bald headed and very stoic looking! More alien looking with a tinge of green to their skin (at least before we saw either Sarek or The Romulan commander) because mainly Spock's comments about Balok in The Corbomite Manoeuver! I mean how can that white bald headed thing look anything like the Mark Lenard that we came to know and love?
JB

 

[Kor]

Were the Vulcans originally to be more demonic?

Yes, the Vulcans were originally intended to be the magical, evil spawn of some fiery other-dimensional realm, with pitchforks, horns and tails, whose existence had long influenced Earth mythology and religions.



Kor

 

[Arpy]

I also wonder how the Vulcanian make-up might have panned out. Maybe even in the 60's they'd have known better than to push the red-skin, horns, and tail too far...or not: Trance Gemini from Roddenberry's Andromeda was a pointy-eared, arrow-tailed Luciferian (see Alternate History section here). Maybe they were to be green and goateed (Mirror Spock!) with fanged smiles and...I don't know what else...Puckish hair and horns??

I'd forgotten about Spock's mentioning that the Balok puppet looked like his father. I'm inclined to agree with Christopher that they may have taken the Vulcanians to greener "The Sixth Finger" looking people. Though I would hope they wouldn't look as exaggerated as anything out of The Outer Limits. Especially as they'd already done the massive brain/head bit with the Talosians. Oh to visit that alternate universe!

 

[Christopher]

Maybe even in the 60's they'd have known better than to push the red-skin, horns, and tail too far...or not: Trance Gemini from Roddenberry's Andromeda was a pointy-eared, arrow-tailed Luciferian (see Alternate History section here).

The main inspiration for Trance was that she was an anime pixie. The "Lucifer" thing was a deep backstory thread, and of course "Lucifer" literally means "Lightbringer" and is not intrinsically an "evil" name.

And in general, I'm skeptical of any wiki that treats "Coda" as an "Alternate History" and the incoherent mess Bob Engels spewed out as the "real" version.

 

[Arpy]

Evil-shmevil. I stopped watching the series around the end of the first season, as it became more Hercules: in Space! than whatever Wolfe was planning, and I don't know much about Engels. But the Lucifer stuff was amazing. Wonderfully creative stuff.

The pixie idea fits with it not being a lazy Lucifer/God - Evil/Good dichotomy. She's a fascinating being, not an actual demon, and yet isn't it just like a devil to be unassumingly charming?!

 

[Doctor Clu]

What I liked about Andromeda is how the cast worked on shedding the various bits of alien makeup. Trance, Tyr, Rev Bem... systematic changes for become human/having less time in the make-up chair.