Military heraldry does not change. Watch a color film about the US Civil War. Look at the vertical stripes on the officers pant legs, chevrons on enlisted men’s sleeves, and piping on their uniforms. Of the 3 combat arms, infantry wore blue, cavalry wore yellow, and artillery wore red. 100 years later when the helicopter went to war in Vietnam, the 1st Air Cav’s dress uniform patches were yellow.
In Star Trek TOS, Command wore yellow, Science wore blue, and Engineering and expendables wore red. But starting with TNG, Command wore red and engineering wore yellow. I don’t recall what the expendables wore after TOS. But this change in colors just gripes me.
As for Starfleet being military, the entire franchise seems to have an issue with are they or are they not. Ostensibly they were explorers, but they were armed to the teeth and quite bloodthirsty on occasion.
And yet, ironically, a mere decade before the civil war, the infantry color was white. And then again just a couple decades after the Civil War. This is memorialized in my alma mater’s school colors: red (artillery), white (infantry), and yellow (cavalry). Because those were the branch colors when the school (a military school) adopted its school colors.
This is consistent with the Wikipedia article @Monty cites.
No. They wore green, as can be seen from stills taken on the set. After processing the films made for broadcast, they appeared to be gold. This was most pronounced when the uniform shirts were made from velour in seasons 1 and 2. The relatively primitive color TVs of the era didn’t help much either. I think David Gerrold described this phenomenon as a “color freakout.”
In other words, different fabrics photograph and televise differently, due to a number of factors. Star Trek’s creative lighting may also have played a role, since Herb Solow once described the difficulty post-processors had in getting things like Spock’s yellowish complexion just right.
As I have argued before, Star Trek is what appeared on our TV screens, not what happened on the Desilu sound stages. The uniforms may have been green on set, but that’s nothing but a bit of trivia. On screen, and in our memories, and therefore officially and canonically, the command color was yellow (or gold, if you prefer).
The closest analogue to Starfleet is the British Royal Navy of the 18th and 19th centuries. Its duties included policing the seas, exploring, colonization, humanitarian actions, and fighting in times of war.
Wow, that’s a sinister-looking Kirk! Maybe it’s his evil transporter duplicate.
That figure is wearing that weird wrap-around tunic that they used to deal with Shatner’s weight fluctuations. It always appeared green on-screen. For whatever reason, probably the material, it wasn’t affected by the camera effects that made the original green uniform appear yellow.
Huh, I have never really thought about whether those uniforms were really gold or green or whether there were supposed to be different colours; it was always that shirt Shatner wore.
Regading Black and White filming, the makeup artists and set designers/decorators of the era were grandmasters without a doubt. The way the people and the sets looked in real life was more of a horror show vibe but it came out very well on screen.
Now that I think about it, I believe the color specified for Command Level in the Franz Josef Tech Manuals of the 1970s was “tenne,” a somewhat tawny shade of gold (or orange) used occasionally in heraldry.