Yvonne Craig Was Understandably Worried About Star Trek's Blu-Ray Release
In 2006, CBS began the meticulous process of remastering the original "Star Trek" series for release on Blu-ray and on HD DVD (remember those?). The live-action sequences were to be seen in high-definition for the first time, and the new versions were extrapolated from surviving 35mm masters. The show's special effects were to be recreated using modern CGI techniques, as modern HD TV screens would have made the original effects stand out in an awkward way. The release of the "remastered" Treks caused some debate among Trekkies. Was it exciting to see a TV series from 1966 brushed up to look as modern as possible, or should the shoddiness of the original be maintained for reasons of aesthetic purity? Luckily, unlike the "Special Editions" of "Star Wars," both the old versions and the new versions are readily available on Blu-ray.
The debate, however, will eternally remain if it's better to watch "Star Trek" in production order or broadcast order. If you said broadcast order, you're a cop.
Of course, seeing "Star Trek" with a crystal clear digital image wasn't necessarily what the show's creators or actors had in mind. This was a show meant to be seen on a cathode ray tube TV in the late 1960s. A lot of the show's more shoddy visuals could easily be hidden in TV signal fuzz, and actors' blemished would go mercifully unnoticed. This last point caused a moment of concern for actress Yvonne Craig, who played Marta in the 1969 episode "Whom Gods Destroy."
In the book "The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek: The First 25 Years," edited by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, Craig admitted that she never wanted people to see her armpits so clearly.
This ain't The Red Shoes
In "Whom Gods Destroy," Marta is a compatriot of Fleet Captain Garth (Steve Ihnat), a former Starfleet officer who has been locked up in a mental asylum after sustaining a head injury. Curiously, Garth has learned the ability to shapeshift, and he lures Captain Kirk (William Shatner) to his planet with the hopes of hijacking the Enterprise and escaping. Marta, also an escaped inmate, has a few wild dance numbers and will attempt to seduce and then murder Kirk. Needless to say, she is not successful. Ultimately, poor Marta will meet a grim fate: Garth will explode a bomb implanted in her body.
Craig, a professional ballerina, was already known to 1960s kids as Batgirl from the original "Batman" TV series. In "Whom Gods Destroy," Craig provided her own choreography. The showrunners at the time clearly knew very little about dancing, as they seemed to ask quite a lot of her casually. She said:
"When they had to audition me they said, 'Can you do a three-minute dance?' and I said, 'Unless you're doing 'The Red Shoes,' three minutes is a long time,' but I said, 'Yes, I can do a three-minute dance if you want it, but you'll probably just have to cut it to pieces, because that's crazy.' It's nuts, but it was fun to do."
Her concern about Blu-rays, however, made her realize that, in a later scene, she was to have her arms above her head a lot. As one can see from the above photographs, Marta is an Orion with green skin. Craig had most of her body painted green, including under her arms. The kind of makeup they used at the time made her underarms look ... mossier.
Mossy armpits
To that, Craig said:
"When I was doing the scene where I was blown up, we couldn't keep that green paint on me. It was just a nightmare, and so when I raised my arms I had what looked like Spanish moss in my pits. It was just dangling so I said to the cameraman, 'Does this bother you?' And he said, 'No, it's too far away, they'll never see it.' Years later, I thought 'Oh my God, I wonder if with Blu-ray you see it all.' Well, you didn't because they cleaned it up. I was just so grateful. But it was hard to keep the paint on, it was a mess."
Craig, then, offers a thank you to whatever digital technician went into the original "Star Trek" masters and thought to give her smooth armpits. No audiences have, as far as anyone knows, been subjected to Craig's underarms.
Craig, it should be noted, was no Trekkie. She only ever appeared in the one episode and, it seems, never bothered to look back at the show and take in some of the older episodes. Trekkies, it seems, made the wrong assumption. She said:
"People come up to me and say, 'Do you remember the fourth episode?' and I say to them I only saw two episodes of 'Star Trek,' one was 'The Trouble with Tribbles' because I just love them, and I saw mine once."
Craig worked consistently in television through the late 1970s, when she seemed to semi-retire. She passed in 2015 at the age of 78. Rest in peace to a grand talent and a great dancer.