Star Trek TOS So Humanoid Centric

I’m rewatching TOS, and it seems as though the majority of the alien life is humanoid, most of them looking like Terrans in most every respect except hairstyle and costumage. I know they devised an explanation of humanoids being seeded throughout the galaxy, but it gets old after awhile. It seems like most of episodes involve some humanoid that has somehow gained superhuman mind powers and tortures or seduces Kirk until they find a way to defeat the power or gain it themselves. Many of the TOS writers also wrote scripts for other TV shows such as Wagon Train, Bonanza, Hawaii Five-O and so forth, so they weren’t sci-fi writers per se. Often the Star Trek episode would revolve around a basic human trait instead of exploration of the universe. Episodes such as Day Of The Dove were nothing more than a simple morality tale drawn out over 45 minutes of airtime.

It would have been more consistently interesting if the mission to “seek new forms of life” led them to just that, discovery of strange, non-humanoid species. Every few episodes they’d have a non-humanoid represented by some light blips, but infrequently by costume design of heads and body parts (such as the Gorn in The Arena). The Vulcan Spock would usually be the most exotic species in any given episode. TOS is my favorite Star Trek series, all the same, and had its share of excellent episodes such as Journey To Babel and Trouble With Tribbles, but they had more diverse species in the animated series and later series. Did any of the Star Trek series have an episode with the Close Encounters roswellian, little green man stereotype alien?

As I recall the Roswell aliens were actually Ferengi.

EDIT: Ah, here.

The show was a morality play, that was the point. That’s why Spock was essential and was kept for the second pilot, he was the lens the show used to examine human behavior. By searching the stars, we are examining ourselves.

And it was a relatively low budget show, so the aliens couldn’t be too exotic.

I’ll have to watch that. Thank you. :smiley:

Another exception worth mentioning - the horta.

For a TV show with their budget, they did very well. Don’t forget the Horta, which Janos Prohaska invented by crawling around Gene’s office in a blanket-sort-of thingy.

Besides, once the aliens get too alien, their motives become alien, and therefore boring as hell to the audience. Same same with Kirk banging their females.

I give credit to the animated series, which had two non-humanoid aliens (Lt Arex and Lt M’Ress) as regular crew members.

It’s a lot cheaper to do it in animation.

The money was the main factor. CGI didn’t exist for TOS, so it was all costuming and making, and it’s much easier to just find costumes or use green makeup. It was far too expensive for the other ST shows.

So you were stuck with humanoids.

Well, they had a decent number that were supposed to be non-humanoids taking on a human shape. Q, for example, or the changelings and in DS9. Which is a decent way of getting around the problem without breaking the special-effects budget. (actually, if you count Dax, DS9 had two non-humanoid characters on the main cast).

(also the OP seems to define “humanoid” differently then I do. I think of the word as meaning “roughly human shaped”, that is, bipedal with two arms and one head. Both the Gorn and the classic “little green men” are humanoid in that case.)

Don’t forget the Horta, though.
EDIT: Not sure how I missed that many posts before posting that.

I recall hearing Marina Sirtis answering this question. IIRC, it was because very few non-humanoids responded to casting calls.

I think my least favorite episode is The Omega Glory, written by Roddenbury, and don’t care much for the other earth history episodes such as Patterns of Force (Star Trek’s Hogan’s Heroes)and Spectre of a Gun (Star Trek’s Bonanza), although I like Plato’s Stepchildren just because it’s rare for a TV episode to touch on philosophy and I like the costume and scene sets. Assignment:Earth was just a test run for another TV series in the planning stage because they were going to cancel TOS after the second season due to low ratings. The humanoid morality tales such as Let That Be Your Last Battlefield aren’t among my favorites either. TAS had some good sci-fi episodes such as The Slaver Weapon written by Larry Niven and Time Trap.

That type of episode showed that TOS could be sci-fi based without a large budget, but TOS often stuck with the humanoid-based episodes, maybe because most of their writers were established TV script writers who were more accustomed to write for shows such as Bonanza or Flipper.

It’s also simply easier to get audiences to sympathize with humanoids because the audience is human.

TOS also featured the Medusans (“Is There in Truth No Beauty?”).

That episode wasn’t racist, but it was incredibly sexist.

And here I was thinking TOS had more diverse aliens than every trek aside from TNG, later on in VOY and ENT and DS9 aside from Odo they got really lazy and had nothing but funny forehead aliens.

The Horta, the Excalbians, the “zoo animals” kept by the Talosians, the Gorn, some I’m probably forgetting.

Isn’t there some fanwank about a common ancestor for all humanoid life in the galaxy? I recall some king of Vulcan/Romulan/Human connection or something.

As per the OP, there’s that entity from “Day of the Dove”.

Not to mention the tribbles. Plus the energy beings in “The Lights of Zetar”. Plus the blood-sucking creature from Kirk’s younger days, in “Obsession”. Plus the Denevan parasites that killed Kirk’s brother.

How so? There is a really sexist episode and the fan wanks trying to explain it as not true are silly, its the episode where they reveal there are no female captains.

You know what REALLY bugs me? How many damn episodes of TNG occur totally on the ship, I mean wow I never realized how cheap they were until rewatching it seemed like every other episode was something weird happens on the ship that consumes the entire episode. Go down to a damn planet!

Not a fanwank, it was in a TNG episode (and was mentioned in the OP).