When The Two SPocks Met DId ANyone Notice...

[TRON JA307020]

that their ears were different? I am not talking about the difference that age may make. As we get older our ears continue to grow and get bigger, that is a fact. Since both Spocks are half human I would say their ears would also get bigger as they grow older. The difference that I am talking about is the ear lobes. Prime Spock has detached ear lobes and NuSpock had attached lobes. Since Spocks ears are such an integral part of the character I thought the producers of the movie would have picked a actor with detached lobes to match Ninoys ears or at least have built prosthetic ears for Quinto that included detached loves to better match Nimoy. This was one of the first things I noticed when watching ST09. So I started to think of possible in movie explanations. Maybe due to the time change when everything was changed NuSpock got his head caught in a Vulcan mechanical fruit picker as a child and he had to have surgery to get his ears reattached and as the doctor reattached the ears when he got to the lobes he gave NuSPock attached ear lobes instead of his original detached ear lobes because he didn't know that they were previous detached at took a shot at how his ears originally set to the side of his head.

Anyone else notice the lobe difference and do you have a in movie explanation for the difference? I do like my scenario because its a take on a classic line from TOS Trek and a mechanical fruit picker sounds pretty plausible.

This thread is mean to bring out some creativeness so give some cool explanations. They can be serious, scientific, funny etc.

 

[The Wormhole]

Anyone else notice the lobe difference and do you have a in movie explanation for the difference?

Just the usual stock explanation for this sort of stuff: Because Nero.

 

[Christopher]

Nobody's going to cast an actor because of his earlobes. Lots of the new actors have physical differences from their counterparts. Pine, Urban, Pegg, and Yelchin have different eye colors from the originals. Pegg has a different hairline than Doohan. Saldana is much more willowy of build than Nichols. Yelchin has curlier hair than Koenig. Pine, Quinto, Urban, and Cho have different vocal ranges from the originals (Kirk and McCoy now have deeper voices than Spock instead of the reverse). And all seven new lead actors range from 2 to 4 inches taller than their counterparts.

But they're not casting models, they're casting actors. Performance and chemistry come first. Looking right is a bonus. That's why neither Tom Hardy in Nemesis nor James McAvoy in the X-Men films looks exactly like a young Patrick Stewart. You're never going to find an exact double, at least, not one who's a good enough actor. So they cast the best actors in the role and trust the audience to suspend disbelief. Being an audience member isn't passive; you have to do your part too, and choose to play along with the illusion.

It's amazing that Zachary Quinto looks as much like a young Nimoy as he does, while also being a talented actor who's capable of conveying the same personality with comparable charisma. It would be unrealistic to expect more.

 

[TRON JA307020]

Nobody's going to cast an actor because of his earlobes. Lots of the new actors have physical differences from their counterparts. Pine, Urban, Pegg, and Yelchin have different eye colors from the originals. Pegg has a different hairline than Doohan. Saldana is much more willowy of build than Nichols. Yelchin has curlier hair than Koenig. Pine, Quinto, and Urban have different vocal ranges from the originals (Kirk and McCoy now have deeper voices than Spock instead of the reverse). And all seven new actors range from 2 to 4 inches taller than the originals.

But they're not casting models, they're casting actors. Performance and chemistry come first. Looking right is a bonus. That's why neither Tom Hardy in Nemesis nor James McAvoy in the X-Men films looks exactly like a young Patrick Stewart. You're never going to find an exact double, at least, not one who's a good enough actor. So they cast the best actors in the role and trust the audience to suspend disbelief. Being an audience member isn't passive; you have to do your part too, and choose to play along with the illusion.

It's amazing that Zachary Quinto looks as much like a young Nimoy as he does, while also being a talented actor who's capable of conveying the same personality with comparable charisma. It would be unrealistic to expect more.

I agree with you except that the other actors didn't meet their counter parts like Quinto did. The ear lobes are glaringly different. I think they cold have given Quinto better ears to match Nimoys easily. But I am not upset by it its just something I noticed and was curious if anyone else did or if even the producers thought of it.

Keep in mind this thread is not meant to be serious. Its meant to be taken in a lighthearted fun spirit. I really am not that bothered by the ears. If you have a in movie explanation I would like to hear it. Since you are a writer of ST books I bet you could come up with a pretty god one.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Yes I noticed, no I didn't care.

If stuff like that ruins it for you, or you need some kind of explanation, you're watching it wrong.

 

[TRON JA307020]

Yes I noticed, no I didn't care.

If stuff like that ruins it for you, or you need some kind of explanation, you're watching it wrong.

It didn't ruin the movie for me. I really don't need a explanation to make the movie more enjoyable,. This is a fun thread to see if anyone can come up with a imaginative explanation. Lets just see who can come up with the coolest, funniest or really interesting explanation.

 

[Christopher]

If you have a in movie explanation I would like to hear it. Since you are a writer of ST books I bet you could come up with a pretty god one.

The in-movie explanation is that what we see isn't what's really there. Spock Prime recognizes young Kirk and Scotty on sight. As far as the story is concerned, they look the same as they always did; it's just that the story is being acted out by different performers.

Same with any other recasting. There's no need to believe that Saavik got extensive cosmetic surgery between The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock; in-story, she looks the same, but she's just played by a different actress. Same with the three different actresses who played Tora Ziyal, or the different cats who played Spot. Conversely, the "Balance of Terror" Romulan Commander isn't necessarily a dead ringer for Sarek, or Number One a twin for Nurse Chapel; they were just both played by the same actor.

Sure, there are sometimes cases where a recasting is explained in-story, justified by plastic surgery or something. When the current Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon changed Leonardo's voice, they explained it as a result of his injuries in the season finale. But most of the time, it's just a straight-up Other Darrin situation -- the actor changes, but the characters act like there's no difference. Because in-story, there isn't.

Gene Roddenberry was partial to the idea that what we see in the shows and films is not a literal, firsthand depiction of events, but a dramatization created after the fact, interpreted through an artist's hand. In his TMP novelization, he presented TOS as an exaggerated, sometimes inaccurate dramatization of Kirk's "real" adventures, with TMP being a somewhat more authentic dramatization. That was how he accounted for the changes in the technology, the Klingons' appearance, and so forth.

So by this theory, Spock looks like neither Leonard Nimoy nor Zachary Quinto; there's a hypothetical, Platonic ur-Spock that Nimoy and Quinto are both approximating as best they can. We're not seeing a live video feed from the Trek universe, we're seeing a dramatic recreation of its events as interpreted by actors, writers, special effects artists, and so on. And that interpretation helps make sense of thousands of small inconsistencies. I've become rather partial to it.

 

[DonIago]

Explanation: What we're watching is actually a recreation of events from even farther in the future intended as entertainment and a historical record for people of that time (see "Living Witness"). Since we're not seeing the actual people but rather actors, there's bound to be some discrepancies.

 

[TRON JA307020]

If you have a in movie explanation I would like to hear it. Since you are a writer of ST books I bet you could come up with a pretty god one.

The in-movie explanation is that what we see isn't what's really there. Spock Prime recognizes young Kirk and Scotty on sight. As far as the story is concerned, they look the same as they always did; it's just that the story is being acted out by different performers.

Same with any other recasting. There's no need to believe that Saavik got extensive cosmetic surgery between The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock; in-story, she looks the same, but she's just played by a different actress. Same with the three different actresses who played Tora Ziyal, or the different cats who played Spot. Conversely, the "Balance of Terror" Romulan Commander isn't necessarily a dead ringer for Sarek, or Number One a twin for Nurse Chapel; they were just both played by the same actor.

Sure, there are sometimes cases where a recasting is explained in-story, justified by plastic surgery or something. When the current Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon changed Leonardo's voice, they explained it as a result of his injuries in the season finale. But most of the time, it's just a straight-up Other Darrin situation -- the actor changes, but the characters act like there's no difference. Because in-story, there isn't.

Gene Roddenberry was partial to the idea that what we see in the shows and films is not a literal, firsthand depiction of events, but a dramatization created after the fact, interpreted through an artist's hand. In his TMP novelization, he presented TOS as an exaggerated, sometimes inaccurate dramatization of Kirk's "real" adventures, with TMP being a somewhat more authentic dramatization. That was how he accounted for the changes in the technology, the Klingons' appearance, and so forth.

So by this theory, Spock looks like neither Leonard Nimoy nor Zachary Quinto; there's a hypothetical, Platonic ur-Spock that Nimoy and Quinto are both approximating as best they can. We're not seeing a live video feed from the Trek universe, we're seeing a dramatic recreation of its events as interpreted by actors, writers, special effects artists, and so on. And that interpretation helps make sense of thousands of small inconsistencies. I've become rather partial to it.

Yeah that's one I have thought of to especially when Spock recognizes the younger Kirk and especially Scotty who looks totally different. Of course they are all about 8 years younger than when we met the characters in TOS so they may have changed. Not likely of course. The producers of TNG once said after the first TNG movie came out that the reason the bridge looked different and in more detail is because it always looked that way but a television budget didn't let them make it as detailed. So yeah its interpretation and seeing it through a different lens so to speak.

I kind of like my Vulcan Mechanical Fruit Picker though.

 

[Franklin]

Yep, I noticed. Just another little detail they were too careless to try to get right.

Still it's not at bad as Yelchin's and Pegg's accents. In Trek, that's NOT how a Russian or a Scotsman talk.

Don't even get me started on the change in Kirk's eye color or Urban carelessly parting his hair on the wrong side in his acknowledged "tribute" performance of McCoy. Both of those are far easier to remedy than the natural shape of ear cartilage, so why would I expect Spock's ears to be right?

Oh, and

 

[Christopher]

^Yeah... there's no forgiving their failure to force-grow clones of the original actors and train them to duplicate their acting styles. What were they thinking?

 

[USS Triumphant]

I think we can take it as a given that the nuUniverse was a parallel universe, rather than an altered one. So all of these differences are acceptable and could even be expected. The reason I say we can take it as given is that, if it had been an altered one, Spock Prime would have insisted on trying to repair it - just as he did every other time the original crew faced such a situation.

 

[Robert D. Robot]

Nobody's going to cast an actor because of his earlobes.

I thought I once heard Russ Meyer was big on earlobes. I think they were the critical criteria he looked at when casting his movies. Not so sure that this factor was important in Trek movies, though.

 

[Christopher]

I think we can take it as a given that the nuUniverse was a parallel universe, rather than an altered one. So all of these differences are acceptable and could even be expected. The reason I say we can take it as given is that, if it had been an altered one, Spock Prime would have insisted on trying to repair it - just as he did every other time the original crew faced such a situation.

It is not "a given." The clear intent of the filmmakers was that it was a temporal branching as a result of Nero's intervention. Again, Spock Prime recognized Kirk and Scotty on sight. To him, they look the same. The differences that we see are differences in the filmmakers' interpretation, not differences in the underlying reality they represent -- the same as the differences in Saavik's appearance in different movies, or the difference in the Klingon makeup between the TOS movies and TNG, or the differences in the way phasers work between "Balance of Terror" and other episodes.

The reasons Spock Prime didn't try to "repair" the timeline are, one, because he was trapped in the past in an era that didn't have the technology for controlled time travel and thus didn't have the means; and, two, because the filmmakers rejected the premise that an altered timeline "erases" the original, instead employing the more scientifically plausible premise that it coexists alongside it (so yes, they are parallel, but only following their branching, not before it). Spock Prime doesn't need to "fix" history, because his own universe is still there, unchanged and unharmed. Yes, that's a change from how it was done in the past, but it's the prerogative of science fiction creators to update the science when a better understanding comes along -- which is why you don't see a lot of stories with Martian canals and Venusian dinosaurs anymore. In-story, we can assume that the Federation has gained a greater understanding of temporal physics by 2387, so Spock Prime knows better now than to think his timeline's been erased.

(In my DTI novel Watching the Clock, the theory I offered was that timelines can be "erased" after a fashion, but only in specific circumstances. The default should be their continued coexistence, because for two timelines to spontaneously recombine is an insanely improbable thing from a physics standpoint, like expecting the shards of a broken glass to spontaneously reassemble, only far more so. There'd have to be some particular mechanism that would make a timeline erasure happen despite all the physics and probability reasons why it shouldn't. So it follows that there should be plenty of cases where timelines don't get erased, because that's the more natural outcome, despite the fantasy that decades of time-travel fiction has conditioned us to believe.)

 

[Kor]

Gene Roddenberry was partial to the idea that what we see in the shows and films is not a literal, firsthand depiction of events, but a dramatization created after the fact, interpreted through an artist's hand. In his TMP novelization, he presented TOS as an exaggerated, sometimes inaccurate dramatization of Kirk's "real" adventures, with TMP being a somewhat more authentic dramatization. That was how he accounted for the changes in the technology, the Klingons' appearance, and so forth.

I think that was just Gene R. trying to distance himself from the series.... biting the hand that fed him.

Kor

 

[Nerys Myk]

Yeah I noticed. Then I moved on. Not a big deal. Though I do recall someone posting graphs charts and illustrations about it.

 

[M'Sharak]

When The Two SPocks Met DId ANyone Notice... that their ears were different?

November 2007: http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?p=1052454&highlight=earlobes#post1052454

December 2007: http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?p=1152886&highlight=earlobes#post1152886

July 2008: http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=60427&highlight=spock+earlobes

July 2008: http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?p=1841812&highlight=earlobes#post1841812

July 2008: http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?p=1851914&highlight=earlobes#post1851914
http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?p=1853095&highlight=earlobes#post1853095
http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?p=1861296&highlight=earlobes#post1861296

August 2008: http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?p=1897268&highlight=earlobes#post1897268

December 2010: http://www.trekbbs.com/showthread.php?p=4577175&highlight=earlobes#post4577175

etc., etc., etc., und so weiter...

So yeah. It was beaten to death years ago.

Tell me, Pubert: When you conceived of this as a Brilliant! Idea™ for a thread, did it happen to occur to you that there's a forum search function which allows you to check to see whether anyone else had previously noticed the Thing you just noticed now?

Do make use of it.

[EDIT:

Yeah I noticed. Then I moved on. Not a big deal. Though I do recall someone posting graphs charts and illustrations about it.

Oh, yeah - forgot to include that one. - M']

This thread is mean to bring out some creativeness so give some cool explanations. They can be serious, scientific, funny etc.

You know, I'd dearly love to think that your intentions were pure, here, but your posting history to date makes that utterly impossible for me to believe. Sorry, but I'm just not willing to wait to find out which way the thread will go off the rails this time.

Thread closed.