STAR TREK's Triangular Sideburns
05.04.09
With JJ Abram's Star Trek revival just a few days away, the internet is awash in spoilers. I feel pretty confident that the only thing I don't know about the new movie is what "Scotty's little buddy" looks like. (Heck, I even know that Scotty has a "little buddy"!)
But everything else? Every other shock, twist, and revelation?
Ka-spoilered.
That said, I'm still really, really excited about this movie. Not because I have any particular attachment to Star Trek, but because I'm a huge, huge, HUGE fan of Mission: Impossible III.
No, seriously.
That said, it is also true that I am a massive geek, and I do have one massive geek bone to pick with JJ Abrams. (That sounded less icky in my head.) Now personally, I don't care about the angle of the ship's nacelles or how many digits should proceed the decimal in a Federation Star Date or even whether the insignia for the Reliant is the same as the insignia for the Enterprise.
(ANSWER KEY: 37º/5/NO!)
What I do care about (in a pretend-funny-outraged way) are the sideburns...
One of the more obscure pieces of Trek lore that I've picked up over the years is that everyone to ever serve on the Enterprise has had the exact same triangular sideburns.
Who's got two thumbs and crazy triangular sideburns? This guy:
(And also those other two guys, flanking.)
The original idea behind the sideburns, if I'm remembering correctly, was that Roddenbury wanted crazy futuristic hair for everyone, but his cast was all concerned with not looking stupid.
And so it was that out of this creative tension, an exciting new hairportunity presented itself! For theirs was a bold vision of the future, in which the interior angles of each sideburn would ever total 180 degrees!
*Ahem* Anyway...
I don't know whether the triangular sideburns in original Trek were real or not, but I remember seeing a clip on Access: Hollywood once where one of the guys from Voyager revealed that his were paste-ons.
So what's the contravery with triangular sideburns in the new movie? Well, we can clearly see that Zachary Quinto's Spock is rockin' the isosceles burns:
But what about Chris Pine's Kirk?
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!
I haven't checked the full crew, but it appears that JJ has deemed triangular sideburns "too weird for humans." (Or possibly "too logical for humans?")
A contraversial position to be sure, but as this is the director of M:I:III we're talking about, I must concede to his better judgment...