Comments on: "Unbelievable. Do you recognize those uniforms?"

"Unbelievable. Do you recognize those uniforms?"

zarq — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 19:29:15 -0800

Artist Dusty Abell has created a massive poster featuring "at least one, sometimes more, character, entity, starship or structure from every episode of [Star Trek: The Original] series." Via io9, who ask: How many characters can you name? Stumped? Here's a key of all 123!

Some close-ups. This is a follow-up to his "Television Sci-Fi and Superheroes of the '70's" and Saturday Morning Action Adventure TV posters. JPG Downloads: * Star Trek: The Original Series * Television Sci-Fi and Superheroes of the '70's * Saturday Morning Action Adventure TV Mr. Abell is a character designer for Warner Bros., and a former artist at Marvel, D.C. and Dark Horse Comics.

By: maqsarian

maqsarian — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 19:52:23 -0800

What, you've got room for Kor and Kang, but no Koloth? #strangenewworldproblems

By: barnacles

barnacles — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 20:09:33 -0800

I wish this poster had more of a theme than simply "A bunch of stuff standing there", but whatevs: it's a lot of fun to look through and realize how many you know. Nice find! (That said, I'm surprised that although he's drawn hundreds of recognizable characters, his rendition of Kirk is ... well, if I hadn't know that Kirk is in the poster and probably in a prime position, I never would have guessed that was supposed to be Kirk)

By: maqsarian

maqsarian — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 20:12:56 -0800

Maybe Koloth's the one taking the picture.

By: sourwookie

sourwookie — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 20:27:42 -0800

How is it I new exactly where Balok would be?

By: maqsarian

maqsarian — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 20:44:07 -0800

Which Balok, the puppet or the tranya-drinking baby Clint Howard? Uh, spoiler alert.

By: ericost

ericost — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 20:54:24 -0800

It's awesome, but I don't understand why the red color for the shadows on the faces, especially those in the foreground. It makes it look like a print job where the plates were out of registration.

By: Artw

Artw — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 21:20:50 -0800

Lovely stuff. Really, for a space show, TOS didn't really have the Enerprise meet that many spaceships that weren't actually just the Enterprise.

By: ricochet biscuit

ricochet biscuit — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 21:40:37 -0800

How many characters can you name? All of them. Jesus. Does it enhance or diminish my geek cred that it took me maybe four seconds to spot that Pike was in there twice?

By: Alexander Hatchell

Alexander Hatchell — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 21:40:55 -0800

This is remarkably effective at helping quantify exactly how wasted my youth was.

By: Mezentian

Mezentian — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 21:51:53 -0800

I cannot believe I stared at this for hours not being able to place the White Rabbit. Also, the Botany Bay was a pencil? How did I not notice that?

By: potsmokinghippieoverlord

potsmokinghippieoverlord — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 22:00:12 -0800

Radioactive Melvin Belli is my favorite.

By: George_Spiggott

George_Spiggott — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 23:49:44 -0800

By: Artw

Artw — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:05:36 -0800

It's entirely likely you've blocked The Way To Eden from your mind, because, well...

By: maqsarian

maqsarian — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:40:02 -0800

Hey, lay off the space hippies, Herbert.

By: Artw

Artw — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:55:39 -0800

Shut it, Spock.

By: Mezentian

Mezentian — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 01:02:00 -0800

It's entirely likely you've blocked The Way To Eden from your mind, because, well... yt I'm not falling for that one. I went looking for that song over lunch. It was.... God, I hate that episode.

By: Artw

Artw — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 01:06:29 -0800

The terrifying thing is one of those space hippies is Charles Napier.

By: Mezentian

Mezentian — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 01:08:44 -0800

That's not all that's terrifying.

By: maqsarian

maqsarian — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 01:28:24 -0800

An ex-girlfriend of mine had a cat named Eden; I used to pick the cat up and sing "Heading Out to Eden" to her whenever I went over. Eden... did not enjoy it. That cat was a total Herbert.

By: jim in austin

jim in austin — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 04:50:14 -0800

Morgan Woodward could have been in there twice as well...

By: Karmakaze

Karmakaze — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 05:47:04 -0800

I need to send this to my housemate who's a first generation fan. I wonder if this prints out...

By: ricochet biscuit

ricochet biscuit — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 06:25:32 -0800

Morgan Woodward could have been in there twice as well... Multiple appearances by actors is not the same thing: my fave, Eddie Paskey, could have appeared at least five times by those criteria (not including his work as a stand-in), and I am sure he is not the record holder. I cannot find a source for just TOS, but I know that if you count the later series there are five actors who have appeared as seven or more characters. What leapt out at me was the same character showing up twice (albeit as portrayed by two different actors). Of course, it would have been sly to have Sandra Smith appear twice: once as Janet Lester and once as Captain Kirk.

By: Halloween Jack

Halloween Jack — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 16:05:37 -0800

I failed to recognize only two things, and they were both ships. (105 and 114 in the key). Neither of them made any impression on me at all apparently. Which is surprising because if this illustration is anything to go by they were rather better designed than most of the one-off ships in TOS. The reason that you didn't recognize them is that--and I'm truly dismayed that they were included in the poster, which has obviously had a lot of love and care put into it, for this reason--they weren't in TOS. At least, the original The Original Series. When TOS was filmed, it was under a very tight budget for what was supposed to be a cutting-edge SF series, and in particular filming spaceship miniatures went beyond both the money and the time that they had available to them. (Remember that TOS had 79 episodes over three seasons, about twice as many as you'd have today.) This led to some compromises; the only reason why the shows had transporters (and therefore all the episodes and plot twists centered around them) was that it was too expensive to film a shuttle landing every week. As it was, spaceship shots were used over and over again; this recycling extended to the models used, so, for example, the original Aurora (from "The Way to Eden") was the result of kit-bashing the Tholian spaceship model from "The Tholian Web" together with some bits from the AMT model kits for the Enterprise and the Klingon battlecruiser. (The FX people would also use an AMT Enterprise kit for the torn-up Constellation from "The Doomsday Machine" because they only had one Constellation-class model--the Enterprise--and didn't want to mess it up; they put the scorch marks on the assembled AMT kit with, IIRC, a cigarette lighter.) The Antares didn't appear on screen at all. Fast-forward four decades to CBS Paramount Television (the latest incarnation of Desilu Studios) wanting to put out a remastered version of TOS. Nowadays, it's pretty easy and cheap to throw up some CGI of Random One-off Starship of the Week, so almost all of the special effects shots were redone, including all the spaceship shots. In some cases, the new spaceships were call-outs to various other things (the model that they used for the Antares was apparently based on one found in the animated series). Hence our not remembering it, just like those TV shows that have started digitally inserting ads for products that didn't exist when the episode was originally filmed. (I've greatly enjoyed the DVD version, since it showed a much cleaner version than the scratchy and often heavily edited prints that I saw on TV in the seventies, but I don't have much use for these CGI-enhanced versions.)

By: Halloween Jack

Halloween Jack — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 17:46:59 -0800

Also, too: no Lieutenant Kyle and no Kevin Riley. I can tolerate a couple of quasi-canon starships, but this is an outrage.

By: adamdschneider

adamdschneider — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 08:18:53 -0800

Wait, is this not actually available for purchase as a physical poster? Now that is an outrage!