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Yeoman Rand's Tower of Hair

ZapBrannigan

ZapBrannigan

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Yeoman Rand's shift starts at oh-eight-hundred, but her hair doesn't make it in until nine. They have to clear the corridors for it. Questions:

1. What were they going for? Is it supposed to be her real hair, in universe?

2. If it's not "supposed" to be a wig, do we think Rand got what physicists call a super-massive hair transplant? Or some kind of gene therapy to grow that much hair on one head?

3. To make the basket weave, do we think TOS had hairdo technology like The Jetsons and Lost in Space, where you put your head inside a big "hair dryer" cone which does all the work in seconds? Would the lights flicker on Deck Five when she turns it on? Offhand I can't recall any interaction between Rand and Scotty; maybe he hated her for that. Critical systems like the Transporter must have dedicated power lines so they wouldn't be affected by heavy-duty personal appliances.

4. It didn't take much (one incident) for Scotty to resent women-as-such just before "Wolf in the Fold." Maybe he was already halfway there, owing to all the women onboard with huge hairstyles, and the incessant power drains their styling machines were causing.
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ZapBrannigan said:
In Rand's case, I think there was an intended sci-fi aspect to the hairstyle. Ask any woman if she can braid her hair into a right-angle basket weave like that. It was created to be something exotic that you "couldn't do" in real life.
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Reminds me of some 'shops I did back in the heyday of the Caption Contests
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DAX: It damn well better be period accurate. It took half a day to weave this thing!!

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DAX: Don't worry, these hair styles were very popular in Kirk's time.
 
ZapBrannigan said:
1. What were they going for? Is it supposed to be her real hair, in universe?
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This has been a question for decades. Does Captain Kirk wear a toupee, or just William Shatner? Was Uhura's hair intended to be real? I never gave it much thought until Strange New Worlds' version came along with very close-cropped hair.
 
foxhot said:
Most to all of the Power Records TREK comics showed Uhura as white, and even blonde.
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And in some (I'm not sure how many) of the Power Records comics Sulu was a black man in a blue shirt. And M'Ress was some kind of light blue humanoid, not cat-like in appearance at all. Were the artists not provided with enough visual reference material from the show, or what?

Kor
 
Kor said:
And in some (I'm not sure how many) of the Power Records comics Sulu was a black man in a blue shirt. And M'Ress was some kind of light blue humanoid, not cat-like in appearance at all. Were the artists not provided with enough visual reference material from the show, or what?
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These were for the stories written by Alan Dean Foster (of the "Star Trek Logs" adaptations of TAS). Which is why he used M'Ress. But not anticipating that her character design might be a problem.

At the last minute, it seems, there was a quibble about possible ownership of Filmation-created materials. The artwork of human crewman, Connors - who was an expert in Edoan musical instruments and just happened to have an Edoan musical instrument in his cabin - shows some rather odd leg angles (where one leg was removed), wider shoulders, and very obvious spacing problems in the word balloons, no doubt where paste-ups of the longer name, "Connors", were glued over the top of the name "Arex". You can even see where extra digits were added to Connors' hand!


Edoan Elisiar instrument by Ian McLean, on Flickr

So M'Ress was drawn using Yvonne Craig's Marta as a model, and even Uhura and Sulu were recoloured, with Sulu scoring an afro.


Passage to Moauv by Ian McLean, on Flickr

It was not to be the last time M'Ress had to be redrawn:


M'Ress dismissed, DC Comics Series II (post-ST V) by Ian McLean, on Flickr


M'yra replaces M'Ress by Ian McLean, on Flickr
 
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ZapBrannigan said:
In Rand's case, I think there was an intended sci-fi aspect to the hairstyle. Ask any woman if she can braid her hair into a right-angle basket weave like that. It was created to be something exotic that you "couldn't do" in real life.
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This is what I thought when I saw my first episode of Star Trek, The Man Trap when I was six.

Despite The Jetsons and Lost in Space, I thought the ridiculous complexity of Rand's beehive was supposed to indicate that human beings in the future had advanced to the point to where women could weave such a complex 'do in five minutes every morning.

Hey, I SAID I was only six.

Robert
 
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