According to “ Star Trek Chronology” Phillips explained that he’d always wanted the Klingons to look this way, but he’d never had the budget.Īs for an in-story explanation for the change, Roddenberry and Phillips joked that there were “Northern Klingons” and “Southern Klingons.” A serious in-story explanation wouldn’t come until “ Star Trek: Enterprise.” When the movie came out, fans were stunned by the drastically different look of the Klingons. Rick Stratton, Mark Seigel, and Mike LaValley sculpted the forehead prosthetics by making molds of the actors’ foreheads and sculpting the ridges on top of the mold. These factors made the forehead ridges envisioned by Fletcher and Phillips possible. The makeup department’s budget was also much higher than it had been for the series. He also noted that their long hair should cover parts of the extended spinal column.Īccording to “ Star Trek: The Original Series Sketchbook,” makeup and prosthetics had advanced quite a bit by the time “The Motion Picture” started production. His notes, excerpts of which were included in “The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” indicated that Fletcher envisioned the forehead ridges as an external extension of the Klingons’ spinal column. He imagined the Klingons as having a rigid exoskeleton. In an interview on The Captain Logan Show in 2017, Fletcher said that he was also inspired by the exoskeletons on lobsters. Fletcher and Phillips embellished these ridges for the Klingons in “The Motion Picture.” They were inspired by an alien species Gene Roddenberry had developed for a previous television pilot, “ Planet Earth.” The Kreegs were a dark-skinned warrior species, like the Klingons, and they had a bony ridge down the middle of their foreheads. The Klingons underwent a complete redesign for the first TOS movie, “ Star Trek: The Motion Picture.” According to “ The Making of Star Trek: The Motion Picture,” costume designer Robert Fletcher worked closely with Phillips, who returned as the lead makeup designer, to develop the Klingons’ new look.įletcher and Phillips came up with the distinctive forehead ridges which have come to define the Klingons. Many find the TOS depiction of the Klingons racist, as Aamer Rahman pointed out in an article for io9. Colicos also suggested a slightly green tinge to the skin color to imply that his character was, in fact, an alien, not just a Soviet villain. Phillips and Colicos decided to give the Klingons black hair, dark skin, and a Fu Manchu mustache. He envisioned Kor as a vicious, brilliant military leader, so the parallels to Khan were strong. Colicos responded that he saw the Klingons as a stand-in for the Soviets and suggested that he look vaguely like Genghis Khan. When John Colicos - who played Kor in multiple “Star Trek” series - showed up in the makeup department on his first day of filming, the lead makeup designer, Fred Phillips, asked him how he wanted the Klingons to look. In his script for “Errand of Mercy,” Coon simply described the Klingons as “Orientals.” He gave no other notes about their appearance.Īccording to Captains’ Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages, the first actor to play a Klingon devised how they should look. According to Memory Alpha, since the series was in development during the Cold War, the Klingons became an allegory for the Soviet Union. He set out to create a purely evil enemy for the crew of the Enterprise. Coon had a very specific idea of what the species represented. When the Klingons were first introduced in the episode “ Errand of Mercy,” writer Gene L.
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