EXCERPT | Creating Final Frontier Creatures for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Star Trek Explorer #6 is now on stands, and we're excited to dive right in!

From the exclusive interview with Star Trek: Picard Season 3 showrunner Terry Matalas to sit-down chats with Nana Visitor and Armin Shimerman to help launch the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine 30th anniversary celebrations, from Doug Jones' reflections on Saru's journey on Star Trek: Discovery to all-new and exclusive short stories, and beyond, there's plenty of Star Trek to revel in this month. You can grab a copy of Star Trek Explorer #6 at your preferred retailer.

We go behind-the-scenes at Legacy Effects, to discover some of the secrets to creating aliens for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds…

Unlike subsequent Star Trek series, Strange New Worlds is set in the original series timeline, in which the number of alien races was somewhat limited. “They did the best they could with the budget they had in the 1960s,” notes Chris Bridges, Legacy Effects' head of prosthetics, “but this was 2022, so we needed to give them an updated, current twist, while still giving a shout-out to the original canon. We had to go back and watch the original episodes those aliens appeared in.

“There’s something cool about going back to the original show and elevating things slightly without reinventing it,” J. Alan Scott, Legacy Effects co-owner, continues. “You can make the Tellarites exactly like they were, but The Original Series was strapped in terms of budget and technology, so how can we make them a bit more interesting while still in the same vein as the original?”

An early challenge for the Legacy team was tweaking Ethan Peck’s Spock from previous appearances in Star Trek: Discovery. As Bridges recalls, “He was only in a couple of episodes and didn’t want to shave his eyebrows, so Hugo Villasenor and I tag-teamed that makeup, using brow covers and applying his eyebrows, which was a lot of work. And at the end of one night, Ethan said, ‘If we ever get our own series, I’ll shave!’ so when Strange New Worlds was greenlit, I said, ‘I’m shaving your brows!’ which cut his makeup time in half.”

“We did a couple of tests with different versions of browcovers,” adds J.D. Bowers, Legacy Effects lead sculptor, “and they always looked bulky. I think I pulled the card of saying, ‘Hey, I’m lucky enough to be one of the few people that worked with both Zach Quinto and Leonard Nimoy, and they both shaved their eyebrows. If you want to be Spock, you might have to keep up the tradition!”

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds streams exclusively on Paramount+ in the U.S., U.K., Latin America, Australia, South Korea, Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. The series airs on Bell Media’s CTV Sci-Fi Channel and streams on Crave in Canada and on SkyShowtime in the Nordics, the Netherlands and Portugal. The series is distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution.

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