“Jumbo, or Super Spandex, whatever you want to call that heavier weight stretch, will stretch from side to side or top to bottom, depending on how you cut the garment,” explains Blackman. But Roddenberry’s forte was sci-fi, not fashion, and his textile of the 24th century was a disaster in the 20th.įor one, it was incredibly uncomfortable. When Roddenberry launched the show a couple years previously, he had told his costume designers that Spandex, the super-stretchy artificial fabric so synonymous with the ’80s, was also the preferred fabric for the clothes of the future. Joining the show in the third season, Blackman found the costume department of The Next Generation to be a smelly and unpleasant place. Spandex uniforms made the cast look like futuristic instructors of space aerobics.

In this archived interview with the BBC, Bob Blackman, the costume designer behind the show’s iconic uniforms, talked about the problems that Spandex caused the cast and crew and how he used design to fix it. In addition, Kurtzman said that they didn’t want to pull what he referred to as a “Red October” - a reference to, in his words, “that great brilliant moment in ‘The Hunt for Red October’ where you’re watching the Russians speaking in the submarine and the camera moves in on Ramius, and he switches from Russian to English, and now you’re watching the Russians speak for the rest of the movie in English.But by the time Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted on TV in 1985, Roddenberry’s vision of the future encompassed more than peace, love, and harmony. I was not interested in doing that version of the show.” “In a moment when we are living in a world where ideologies are so polarized and polarizing, what I did not want to do was just make them the bad guys. To use a word that may seem ironic, our approach was to humanize the Klingons, meaning we know a lot about them,” he said. “For me, at the core of ‘Star Trek’ is the idea that Starfleet’s mission is to understand the other, or what is perceived as the other. Moore (who was instrumental in developing the Klingons during the “TNG” days) has said was inspired by “samurai and Vikings.”įor “Discovery,” executive producer Alex Kurtzman said that once the team had decided to make war with the Klingons a major part of the series, the next decision they had to make was how they wanted to represent the enemy. While ostensibly enemies of Kirk, Picard, and beyond, the warrior race has attracted devotees intrigued by their culture a culture which “Next Generation”/”Deep Space Nine” writer/producer Ronald D.

Since the earliest days of “Star Trek,” the Klingons have been an iconic opponent of the Federation, and also a source of fascination for fans.

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