Spock's ears and William Shatner's hairpiece.

You can see Shatner's hairpiece margin in many scenes, especially if he has been perspiring. Also, in some fight scenes the hair does not lay right afterwards, giving him a telltale line. Still, it looks pretty damn good most of the time!

 

I remember one of the various Star Trek magazines had an early Shatner publicity photo (between the second pilot and regular producion) printed up reeeeeeeeeeeeally big, and you don't have to look that hard to see the toupee tape along the edge of his hairline. Something like that, though, would be invisible on a typical tv set, especially in the mid-60's.

ST IV, I suspect he was doing the Hair Club thing, whereas his current hair, I think, is finally his own again, i.e., the transplants finally took.

 

Didn't know about De, but Walter Koenig only wore the Beatles wig until his own hair grew long enough (compare "Catspaw" with "Trouble With Tribbles", for example). Or, they got a better wig. Remember, although he played a 22 year old, Koenig is actually in the same age range as Shatner and Nimoy.

 

plus its easy to see the join on the ears because you know the general area where it is......who knows where the hair piece is blended in

 

Look, I'll tell you the way it is:

There is no way Shatner was wearing a wig in the TOS. You can't, even now, get a hairpiece that thins at the front. No-one, who wears a hairpiece, brushes their hair up. You would be able to see the gauze or the latex. You can see it on Dame Edna's wig.

In the 80's, they invented a wig with a transparent, latex,waterproof base. Shatner wore one in ST4. That's why he did the underwater scenes.

Thats the way it is.

 

You are exactly right, Cheapjack, about being able to see the gauze. You can on the HD-DVD discs, pretty easily in some cases.

Someone else can post here when you can see it on the regular DVDs, too. It came loose once or twice.

Sorry to tell you this but Shatner wore a hairpiece. I've seen it.


EDIT: You know who wore a really excellent swept up wig on screen? Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October. Now that was a wig job!

 

Sort of. He wore the full wig at first, til his hair grew out. But at some point he started wearing a rug to cover a bald spot he had as early as his audition. As he related on page 180 of "Warped Factors" (hardcover):

 

So, Ron Popeil owes Nestles' some money.

As for the "nobody who wears a rug comes their hair back" angle, we ain't talking a rug Shatner picked up from a wigmaker in Fresno. We're talking professionally made hairpieces from some of the most skilled hairstylists in Hollywood, who specialize in creating pieces that can withstand an extreme closeup on a movie screen (the key is using the right color mesh and stiching in each hair one at a time in just the right density to achieve a natural appearance).

On a side note, the women wore wigs, too, mainly as a timesaver in makeup, a practice that continued with TNG and probably a dozen other shows.

 

Howcome he dosn't brush it up now, though?

You can't get wigs that good. He even lets it flop over when he comes up for air in ST4. Everybody flops their hair back when they come up out of water.

 

By ST:IV you were seeing a transplant job Shatner had done. That wasn't a wig.

 

So now he's had it removed and he's wearing a wig?

I'd heard that he tried a transplant, and it didn't work.

He was wearing a new invention - a wig with a latex base.

They were invented in the eighties. I read about them in Playboy.

I still don't believe he was wearing a super-duper latex based,thinned wig in TOS. They were tight on money. It would have broken the budget.

The only time we'll know is when he or his hairdresser confesses.

 

^ Your personal canon.

 

What does he wear on Boston Legal? If it's a wig, it's a really good one!

 

TOS actually was a fairly expensive show for the 60s, but sci-fi shows always operate at a disadvantage because you can't always use stock props, set pieces, or costumes. You have to build more original stuff than a show set in contemporary or historical times. As such, even if the shows were higher-budgeted than an hour long cop show, it would still be a "tight" budget. This is one reason why, whenever possible, they did "parallel evolution" civilizations so they could utilize stock streets and costumes.

Personally, I wish they'd been slightly more imaginative with the stock costume rentals, mixing up pieces from different eras to make them more "alien", like using a 19th century jacket with 16th century pantaloons on a modern street set, so it wouldn't be an exact clone of Earthly fashion in a given period.

 

I agree. I always laugh when today's fans criticize the "fake rocks" on TOS. As if they couldn't afford real rocks? Or that, gee -- maybe there was some other reason to use rocks that wouldn't kill someone?

 

You have to compare apples to apples. You can't compare the look of TOS to TNG any more than you can Forbidden Planet to 2001, they're different eras with different techniques and different states of the art. If someone wants a more valid comparison, compare a TOS episode to a Lost in Space episode for production values, or, heck, even to Bonanza. The "outdoor" sets look equally fake on all of them, as does the lighting.

 

With all the reinventing-the-wheel that had to take place with Star Trek, hairpieces and wigs was the one area that had already been nailed down decades earlier, along with their having Fred Phillips, one of the best makeup artists in the business.

I'll see if I can track down that early publicity pic of Shatner, where you can see the toupee tape. It's quite a shocker.

 

I would like to see that, though the other photos didn't convince me.

Howcome he was sp open about it in the 60's, but so defensive in the 80's? It's practically a national secret!