What about the “Smoke monster” from Obsession?
And the giant space ameba from The Immunity Syndrome?
Don’t forget Korob and Sylvia, the tiny aliens from Catspaw.
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No, he wouldn’t count at the time. “The Trouble With Tribbles” was his first “published” work. All of the classic Gerrold stuff (When HARLIE Was One, the Cthorr series, Star Wolf, etc.) came after.
He didn’t. He mentioned them twice in the passage you quoted.
As are the Caitians (M’Ress’s people), and, as Simplicio mentioned, the Gorn.
And probably most of the ‘zoo animals’ mentioned, but I can’t remember the scene clearly enough to say.
Obviously the real question is about ‘aliens that required more than simply a facial appliance or two to show their true form (whether that form was shown or not)’.
But that’s a much less interesting question than truly non-humanoid aliens, IMO… Full body suits (the Gorn, Maguto, salt monster, etc) aren’t really that much more variant on humans than facial appliances or non-prosthetic makeup.
Things that require puppets, or actors moving in entirely non-human ways, or sprinkling some glitter in water and filming that - those are more interesting. ‘What kind of really interesting aliens can they do on a TV budget?’
I am pretty sure we did see a Tholian face at least in TOS in The Tholian Web, we did not see that they looked like spiders made out of crystal until ENT.
Indeed. And Gene’s original pitch for the show plays up the “Parallel Earths” angle, almost more like “Sliders”—heavy traces of this filter through to what we saw onscreen in TOS, as evidenced by several planets having almost identical societies to several Earth civilizations, and in one case, an identical planet. Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planetary Development basically codifies this in-series, plus the sundry alien intervention (the Preservers, and the “Ancient Humanoid” DNA seeders, among others).
Yeah, but he was talking about the human version, not the aliens themselves, which only appear for a few seconds at the end (before they get oxidized by the atmosphere).
Two hundred quatloos on the charter member!
Okay. I didn’t really mean non-humanoid but rather different enough that you wouldn’t mistake the alien for a human if it was transported to earth and given a makeover and earthling clothing. Many of the TAS aliens I found interesting, as well as TOS humanoid species such as Andorians and Tellarites. Star Wars has a lot of various humanoid species that don’t look like earthlings, but many Star Trek episodes lack this variance.
The Klingons and Romulans were different enough for me, at least they were variant to a similar degree as Vulcans, but a lot of TOS episodes had alien species that would totally fit in as earthlings given a fashion makeover. All the Gideons would need is switch of earthling clothing for their beehive design clothes and hair wigs or haircuts. I don’t mind this every now and then, I liked the pseudo-renaissance Capellans in Friday’s Child, but when they string several episodes in a row like this, it gets old, although TOS is my favorite ST series because of the characters and some of the better TOS episodes.
True, such as Star Wars’ exposition of Taoism, but Star Wars and the best Star Trek episodes, and sci-fi in general, include various alien life to make it more cosmic than Bonanza. Even the Wizard of Oz in 1939 had a more thorough attempt than some Star Trek episodes at creating an alien world.
I agree with the earlier comment that too many TNG episodes happened all aboard the ship. They were too frequently couch potatoes, and the action would often be fake holodeck leisure entertainment.
I never had any problem with the Terms of Service for Star Trek. You watch an episode, you wait a week, you watch another episode. Not particularly onerous.
I was unable to comply with them myself, on account of I was ten years old when it started airing, and I didn’t get to exercise control over a television.
The 1968 book, The Making of Star Trek, explains this very phenomenon. As mentioned up thread, the show had a sketchy budget (especially the final year) and the majority of aliens necessarily had to be human-like. The network censors were also annoying in how the alien private parts needed to be covered. For some reason, the underside of the female breast had to be covered, no exceptions. The creators wondered if maybe moss grew there?
Watching the original series is almost painful today, because of the cheezy props and bad special effects.
~VOW
I had that book, I remember that exact line about the undertit moss.
Maybe so, but it holds up better than SNG, DS9 or Voyager. Those series just seemed plasticky and not particularly meaningful. Only Enterprise has any kind of real feel to it (except for that pathetic last episode).
Roddenberry also insisted that all aliens not have too much appliances or makeup simply because he knew that, with the budget and technology of the day, there was no way they would look realistic. He changed this for the Animated Series, because those were no longer a problem, but brought it back for TNG, and it was adhered to as good advice at least until the Borg, and was never completely discarded. (It was also allowed for extras in the movies.)
Largely this is the result of the very practical matters of making the show. TOS was run on a tiny budget. And yet, if you compare, you will find TOS had far more aliens that were more than just humans with funny nose ridges. Sure, there were plenty of humans with funny costumes, mostly explained as parallel Earths and seeded life forms and such, and some of them were costumes or disguises or illusions the aliens were using. Quick work arounds that avoid making elaborate costumes and extensive makeup jobs for lots of characters.
And yet with all those, you still have episodes that have non-human looking humanoids (Tellurites, Andorians, big-headed folks from Talos V, the salt creature), plus numerous non-humanoids (horta, energy beings, etc). Those played their part, when it was part of the story to tell.
But that’s the second key element: the point of TOS was to explore the human condition through the thin guise of the future. Most of the aliens were basically human because they were moral stand-ins for humans. The point of the story was the things going on, not whether the aliens were just brown-smeared guys with goatees and funny clothes.
Yes, that was the point.
Sure, the SF adventurist would like to see the new discoveries and the exotic. But that wasn’t really what the show was about, regardless of the fancy sounding mission statement for the Enterprise. They wrote a broad goal that allowed them a wide canvas so they could paint the stories Roddenberry wanted to tell.
One episode refers to “little green men” when they drag a fighter pilot on board, only to introduce him to Mr Spock at that moment. :dubious: 
(Dammit, I need a green dubious.)
I think that was the first episode I actually saw, at midnight on Saturday night or something. That’s what made me want to watch the show. It was so damned weird I had to see what it was about.
Then I saw the one with the small pyramid and Kirk losing his memory and hanging out with the Indians several times. (Seriously, that seemed to be the one they aired most consistently. Over the 3 or 4 years my local station started playing in the afternoons after school, that one must have run 5 or 6 times, whereas certain ones only ran 1 time that I saw.)
And they couldn’t show belly buttons. Same as I Dream of Jeannie.
Even with an unlimited CGI budget you still run into problems making the audience connect with the characters if you make them too alien. Farscape had alot of non-humanoid aliens (puppets rather than CGI), but even they usually had a humanish face. Plus it get’s really tiresome for the actors to have to act opposite empty space over and over again.
The makup for the Bajorans was designed to be both really cheap (since they knew there’d be alot of them on DS9, and to avoid covering up the actresses faces.
And of course Roddenberry’s explantation was that the Klingons always had forehead ridges, they camera just didn’t pick them up. He died before the DS9 episode and long before Enterprise.
In the 70s when censorship got lighter he made up for it in one of his failed TV pilots (that got recycled into Andromeda by making all the women have two
bellybuttons.
So – even at the beginning, Trekkies had a reputation for not knowing what actual women looked like?
I always liked the explanation from the FASA Star Trek Role-Playing Game, where the forehead-Klingons being the true “Imperial” Klingons, but they had a tactic when they ran across other large interstellar empires that they would make fusion hybrid Klingons and use them on that particular border–the idea being the fusions would be able to mix better, and maybe have a better tactical understanding of the enemy empire.
After first contacts, the Klingon’s didn’t really understand the concept of a “federation,” and figured it was just a Human Empire with a bunch of alien servitor races, so the TOS Klingons were all human fusions.
Of course, this was all well before TNG and their rebranding into “honorable” warriors.
Of course they know what women look like.
They’re green.
Well, they’re related.
The “fusions” and the “honorable warrior” version of the Klingons actually came from John M. Ford and his novel The Final Reflection. The FASA RPG used the Ford novel as the basis for their Klingons. The honorable warrior version of the Klingons was popular enough that it influenced the later series.
No, the line was “Perhaps the censors think moss grows there” [emphasis added].
The line is making fun of the prudishness of the show’s censors, not the naivete of the show’s fans.