What would a live action ares or mress had looked for a fourth season trek?
live action arex
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Like a Gorn on SlimFast.
You have seen this from "New Voyages"? Jump to 7:00. Voice by Christopher Doohan.
In Sydney, Australia, my friend made a very cool M'Ress latex appliance for cosplay events.
Astrex Star Trek Fan Club of NSW by Ian McLean, on Flickr
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Isn't the multi-breasted kitty woman in The Final Frontier considered to be a Caitian?
If M'ress came from a planet of Alpha Piscium, she would be a Caitian from Kaitain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_names_in_Pisces
Because of a smudge on my monitor, the title read more like "'Jive Action Arex", whatever that would be..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_star_names_in_Pisces
Because of a smudge on my monitor, the title read more like "'Jive Action Arex", whatever that would be..
There were cat-like people in TVH on the Federation Council
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Caitian
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Caitian
With 1969-1970 era makeup effects and the budget of TOS' third season or even lower? Probably not that great.
If the question is not "Could Arex have been done in live action?" but rather "Could Arex have been done in live action in 1969?" then I have to agree. Given the makeup for Planet of the Apes in 1968 I think thhey could have pulled off M'Ress, but thhe engineering required for Arex's center arm would have been beyond them.
Not in any official or standardized capacity, though I'm sure some people have speculated that. I very strongly doubt it, since the felinoids from The Voyage Home were intended by the makeup crew to be Caitians, and they and M'Ress are visibly covered in fur, while the felinoid dancer is smooth-skinned with only odd tufts of fur here and there. I suppose you could assume she shaved off most of her fur for some reason, but she's also tiger-striped while the Caitians we've seen are all solid-colored; plus there are anatomical differences in the facial structure and ears, as well as the chest, of course -- although I suppose M'Ress's bust is compact enough that we can't entirely rule out a triple set.
Anyway, there are multiple felinoid species existing in Trek -- Caitians, Kzinti (confirmed by Picard), Vedala, and possibly that proto-Kzinti felinoid on the Elysian Council, which was scripted as a Kzin but bears no resemblance to the ones seen in "The Slaver Weapon" aside from the batwing ears, and thus might well be an entirely separate, or at best distantly related, species (perhaps the "Berikazin" as Alan Dean Foster called it). There are even more if you throw in the novels, comics, and games -- Eeiaouans/Sivaoans, Snnanagfashtalli's unnamed species, Grond, Lyrans, Ferasans, etc. So if there are that many felinoids, there could easily be others.
Indeed. The whole point of creating Arex and M'Ress, after all, was to do aliens they couldn't have done in live action. (M'Ress could've been done with makeup from the knees up, but her feet were digitigrade like a cat's hind limbs.)
The cost of development would have made it prohibitive, but I bet Jim Henson could have engineered something. Now, how "lifelike" would certainly have been the source of debate, but strictly from a "mechanical" aspect, he was employing methods few others had considered. (This would have been the time he started working with the "new" educational series "Sesame Street".
M'Ress? Shoot, Hollywood did foam rubber cat person makeup some 30 years earlier, specifically, the Cowardly Lion for "The Wizard of Oz". (For some reason I had it in my mind that "Planet of the Apes" was the first major use of foam latex, but when I checked...oops! Maybe it's famous for the sheer number of performers wearing sectioned appliances that cover the enter face.) But it would still be several years before makeup designers started "threading" hair follicles into appliances for a fully furred look and even then, just for major movies. It would be even longer before attempting such for TV (like the "Cat-kind" of Doctor Who's "New Earth" and "Gridlock". In 1969, they would have settled for greasepaint patterns to imply fur (and helping the blend the appliances with the actor's real skin.
M'Ress? Shoot, Hollywood did foam rubber cat person makeup some 30 years earlier, specifically, the Cowardly Lion for "The Wizard of Oz". (For some reason I had it in my mind that "Planet of the Apes" was the first major use of foam latex, but when I checked...oops! Maybe it's famous for the sheer number of performers wearing sectioned appliances that cover the enter face.) But it would still be several years before makeup designers started "threading" hair follicles into appliances for a fully furred look and even then, just for major movies. It would be even longer before attempting such for TV (like the "Cat-kind" of Doctor Who's "New Earth" and "Gridlock". In 1969, they would have settled for greasepaint patterns to imply fur (and helping the blend the appliances with the actor's real skin.
But this was long before he started experimenting with realistic creature effects as in The Dark Crystal and beyond. So it's an anachronistic suggestion. Most likely any TOS-era creature effects, if we're talking something less humanoid than a prosthetic makeup character, would've been done by Project Unlimited. Wah Chang worked on TOS, of course, and he and partners Gene Warren and Jim Danforth had experience with creature effects in productions like War of the Worlds and The Outer Limits. And it's hard to think who else might've done it at that time. It's too early for Stan Winston or Rick Baker, and there were probably more stop-motion monsters in cinema at the time than what we'd now call animatronic ones. Maybe Paul Blaisdell, who designed a lot of Roger Corman movie monsters?
As for M'Ress, the man for the job would probably have been John Chambers. He designed Spock's ears, and he also worked extensively on Planet of the Apes.
On a feature film budget like POTA, sure. On what TOS likely would've had to spend at that point in time? Don't hold your breath.
True. The refinements that allowed the expense to decrease were amortized over the course of making the five original feature films. It was only after the last one was made that they even attempted the same thing in a series format (conveniently, POTA). Once attempted, they could figure out how to do it again, better, over time. The earliest efforts include Beauty and the Beast from over a decade later, so it obviously takes time and effort to come up with something that works.
And even there, they reworked the premise so that humans were still verbal and civilized, so that they could center the episodes on villages that had mostly human populations with only a handful of ape characters. Come to think of it, the later films saved money in a similar way -- especially Escape, which had only three apes in it (not counting Extremely Little Caesar).
Obviously live action TOS could have depicted one or more Edosans in one or more episodes under highly unusual circumstances.
They could beam aboard an Edosan ship and find the dead crew lying around, for example.
Or they could contact an Edosan ship in a few short scenes and see a close up of the edosan on the viewscreen, with no clear images of any other Edosans in the background. They could see all three arms if they built a costume with a hole for a second actor to stick his arm through.
I think there might have been a three legged man alive in the era of TOS, so they might have been able to hire him and have him in make up and a prosthetic third arm that didn't do much.
They could beam aboard an Edosan ship and find the dead crew lying around, for example.
Or they could contact an Edosan ship in a few short scenes and see a close up of the edosan on the viewscreen, with no clear images of any other Edosans in the background. They could see all three arms if they built a costume with a hole for a second actor to stick his arm through.
I think there might have been a three legged man alive in the era of TOS, so they might have been able to hire him and have him in make up and a prosthetic third arm that didn't do much.
Umm... through the middle of the first actor's chest??? Is the second actor Kitty Pryde?
The third arm would have to be puppeteered -- probably you'd have him sitting at the console and the arm would be moved from below by a rod coming out of the elbow out of frame. Of course, you'd have to change the head shape to accommodate a human head and neck. Which somewhat defeats the purpose of Arex's design as a character impossible to do in live action. You could try a full puppet creature effect -- maybe one puppeteer works the head and left arm while a second works the center and right arms -- but you'd only be able to show it from the chest up.
Chambers designed Vulcan ears that Fred B Phillips got rather cranky trying to work with, and had to redesign.
By the way, as a young man, Fred did work on "Wizard of Oz", too.
I wish I could find the reference I once had, in which Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett were interviewed by fans about the early days of TMP. He was specifically asked if "Arex and M'Ress would be in the movie" and GR said that he had tried - and failed - to convince Majel to do double duty in the movie: as Dr Chapel and a cameo as M'Ress. Majel was most indignant that would not want to ever be under "all that latex".
Linda Fetters in ST V by Ian McLean, on Flickr
No. She was jokingly referred to in backstage information as a "Kzinrrett".
I reckon she might be a triple-breasted Draylaxian as mentioned in "Star Trek: Enterprise".
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I believe the Enterprise novels by Andy Mangels & Mike Martin posited the same.
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