Probably not related to Dr. Noonien Soong, the inventor of Data (and Lore).
But which just caused more fan speculation, of course.
I feel compelled to share this picture:
You just know that’s going to be some alternate reality someone’s going to explore/-ploit in a future series.
The relationship is that both are named for the same person, a friend of Gene Roddenberry.
Oh, wrath me, Maddy!
Sweet mystery of life… .
I love that. At least her chest wasn’t a prosthetic.
Neither was Ricardo’s!
Whereas Dr. Seuss gave us General Genghis Kahn Schmitz.
There’s no other Kahn than the Titan!
This is really at the heart of the ‘offensive/not offensive’ issue.
Khan, as in Genghis Khan, is a ruler or chief. Kahn = Cohen (Jewish priest), and is also a German name. So at least 2 or 3 similar names.
“Kahn” also means boat or barge in German.
I just happened to run across this documentary about Touch of Evil on YouTube, and there are a few comments from Heston about how the character was presented. Not intended to justify anything, just more information (for example, he says he grew the mustache and dyed it to match his dyed hair, and that his make up was “at touch of olive”). There is also stuff about the character himself that we (I think) don’t get in the movie. The relevant part starts at 3:15.
I just came across an old performance of Martha Raye in blackface, but what’s so wild about it is a special effect they used that I’ve never seen before.
It’s some kind of makeup/lighting effect. The black face shows up under certain colors of light. The same effect was used in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on Fredric March; as the light was faded in/out, the makeup became more prominent and Hyde appeared.
A similar effect went viral a few years ago in a clip from a mostly forgotten mystery-comedy called Sh! The Octopus, from 1937, featuring actress Elspeth Dudgeon transforming from a sweet old lady to a horrific monster.
What’s interesting about the Martha Raye clip is that it actually shows the guy switching the filters on the light.
For whatever reason, YouTube’s algorithm suggests episodes of Jeeves and Wooster to me. This is a British programme that aired between 1990-93, starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, and adapted some of P.G. Woodhouse’s Jeeves stories. The one I saw last night was called Kidnapped! (though it’s also called The Mysterious Stranger) and featured a group of Bertie’s friends as a blackface minstrel show. Hugh Laurie even wears blackface at one point. The episode aired 35 years ago; I would have thought it was unacceptable even then.
Yes. It only works in black and white films. You use contrasting colors – makeup that’s green, say, when illuminated with green light is effectively invisible. But illuminate it with red light and it becomes dark. The clip above shows a lighting engineer rotating a color wheel to turn Raye from black to white. The trick wasn’t realy quite that simple – you have to make sure that the illumination in both colors remains constant, even while you’re changingcolors.
The effect was used in the 1924 Thief of Bagdad and in an episode of the original The Twilight Zone (“Long Live WAlter Jameson”), and in a lot of examples that have shown up on this Board over the years.
It’s worth noting that the laugh-a-minute theme of that comedy with Martha Raye was…eugenics.