As William Shatner ever mentioned what colour he thought his shirts were?
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I watched “Return to Tomorrow” last night, season 2, episode 20. Kirk’s shirt, his normal command tunic, was definitely a greenish-gold, and not yellow. It was a remastered episode.
Fascinating. Avocado green gold.
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https://www.anovos.com/blogs/news/14900365-standard-vs-premier-or-what-color-was-captain-kirk-s-tunic
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Well, one of them is an abstract string art… very popular back in the day, I used to make them out of kits myself. Very 60’s/early 70’s.
But the ones above it… yeah, looks sort of like measuring or drawing tools, but could be abstract art intended to suggest such a thing. The upper one is sort of T-square, the bottom… something for curves?
Huh! Never even noticed the string art; my eyes were always drawn to the tool-thingies. :smack:
In re color, this might be of interest to some:
Look at how green Kirk’s tunic is in that photo, and how gold Chekov’s is! (Assuming, of course, we all perceive them the same way. I find the difference is even greater when viewed on a smaller scale: go to Revealing the Colors of the Enterprise | Star Trek and scroll to bottom.)
In one of his early books, David Gerrold says they were green, but due to a technical “freakout,” they appeared gold on TV.
He seems a bit irritated by this attitude, but I think it’s a profoundly true point. What is Star Trek? Is it what existed on the set at Desilu, or is it what existed on the TV sets of the nation when it was broadcast, and has been shown and watched in reruns ever since? I would argue that it’s the latter. And as everyone admits, on screen, Kirk’s tunic appeared gold.
So to my mind, the “correct” color of Kirk’s uniform is gold, because that’s what appeared on screen. The fact that it was green on set is an interesting bit of trivia, but nothing more. If you want to cosplay as TOS-era Kirk, you wear a gold tunic.
Well, given how it looks on Netflix now, the next generation of Star Trek cosplayers—should there be one—might no longer have the same reference point. So who knows.
On another point, why do we call it “gold” in the first place? The insignia badge is gold; the lace on the cuffs is gold. But the shirt is yellow, not gold.
I’m going to have to watch a few episodes on Netflix, just to see how Kirk’s tunic looks. If it appears as more green, I have a feeling it’s going to look awfully weird to me… 
Speaking for myself, it does look weird.
I hadn’t noticed, but then…
- I saw TOS in black and white originally and for about two decades of re-runs, and
- I am, in fact, colorblind, or at least “colorweak” regarding green. In fact, the wrap-around tunic everyone else is calling green is more of a greeny-yellow to me, and
- that bottle of “green” stuff that Scotty was pouring out for that alien actually looks more like a greenish-blue to me than a discreet green.
But then, I do not see the world as most others see it. Still love these discussions about color perception, though. 
Looks like in Trials and Tribbil-ations they went with almost a harvest gold.
It’s kind of like finding that all your life your dad had an affair that he didn’t tell anyone about and you actually have a half brother six months older than you.
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Might it have something to do with red-yellow-blue being the primary colours in real life, but a television reproduces all the colours in the spectrum using red-green-blue diodes (RGB)?
For example, take a look at this jersey Belushi was wearing on NBC in '75/76. I see a kind of halfway point between green and yellow. Like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle; sometimes it looks green, and sometimes it looks yellow, depending on how you look at it.
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Sorry, forget the link!
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I’d love to see you do some kind of color test, where it saves the results. Your colorblindness sounds more like it’s shifting colors than the typical inability to distinguish some colors.
It might be fun to see if we could use your answers to colorshift something. We could see what you see, and you could see what we see.
And to relate this back to Star Trek: like Geordi’s VISOR.
In cases like this, would color-scanning hardware give an objective answer?
(In the thread on the refurbished original Star Trek Enterprise spaceship, there was a recent addition giving exact scanned color values.)
Or…would a scanner suffer from the same problems our eyes are, and two different scans of the same object would give two different results? Is “objectivity” actually possible in extreme cases of color perception?
Specifically, it’s deuteranomalous trichromacy, which basically means that while I see green it’s not the same green color-normals see. It can, indeed, be described as color shifting.
It’s actually the most common form of “colorblindness” but since it interferes very little with daily life it is also frequently missed as a diagnosis. I was not diagnosed until my late 30’s, somehow it wasn’t noticed even when I studying for an art degree. Not that deuteranomalous trichromat artists are unknown - Marvel comics artist John Byrne also has the same form of color perception which did not interfere with his work as an artist. When most people hear the term “colorblindness” they think of something like deuteranopia, which is the inability to see green. (Protanopia is the inability to see red, tritanopia the inability to see blue, and achromatopsia is the inability to perceive color at all and such people experience sight as a grey scale). Deuteranomalous, Protananomalous, and trinanomalous conditions allow perception of, respectively, green, red, and blue light but it’s not the same perception as those with normal color vision.
For that matter, I did a brief stint doing background color work for comic books. My speciality? Foliage like trees and bushes - you know, things that are green - and camouflage patterns, which are into the green/brown range that can give me trouble. Had no complaints and nobody, including myself, seem to realize I was “colorblind”. Then again, people with red/green variant vision were used to spot camouflaged installations by militaries in the early half of the 20th Century (it’s designed to fool normal vision, not abnormal), and may have advantages spotting things in green foliage. I was known for consistency in my camouflage pattern shapes from frame to frame, something color normals might find harder to achieve. The more impaired one’s color vision the more one relies on things like shapes and borders to make sense of what one sees.
We actually did something like that in an old thread around here somewhere. There was also a discussion of whether or not people such as my self with anomalous color perception would want to receive a treatment to normalize our vision. The verdict on that was mixed, with some being enthused about it and others feeling they’re so used to seeing the world as they see it that acquiring normal vision might be disturbing or difficult/impossible to adjust to.
The one color shift I can probably most easily describe for you color normals involves “FAA green”. To me it is sky blue. This caused some confusion for me very early in flight training, and it was my FAA physical where my color perception anomaly was first diagnosed. I was required to undergo additional testing to make sure it would not be a safety issue (it wasn’t) and after that I agreed to refer to that blue color of light as “green” when engaged in aviation activities.
There’s a scene in the first of the very passable Vanguard series of novels in which Scotty buys that bottle. He asks the smuggler from whom he buys it “What is it?” and is also told “It’s green.”
Yeah, that kind of thing is one of the things I always hated about Star Trek novels. It ruins the original joke.