Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Orions

10. Green Is The New Green

Technically speaking, the first Orion to appear in Star Trek was Marta in Whom Gods Destroy. Vina, as "Orion slave girl" was a Talosian illusion in The Cage, and doubly so in The Menagerie, Part II. In Journey to Babel, Thelev was an Orion but had been surgically altered to look like an Andorian.

Alien projections of an alien imagination still require very real make-up. "Believe me, it was not easy to be green," Susan Oliver, who played Vina, noted in Starlog, issue 135. Finding green make-up that would stick to the actress' skin proved so difficult that they had to "sen[d] for help from New York".

As detailed in The Making of Star Trek, prior to Oliver, test footage was shot in the green make-up with another "actress" — Majel Barrett. However, when the developed film was returned, Barrett's face strangely appeared as non-green as it normally was.

"Paint her greener!", Gene Roddenberry insisted, but the same thing kept happening for the next three days. "We had her so green you couldn't believe it," make-up artist Fred Phillips noted. Eventually, they realised what was going on. Assuming it was some weird error, the technician at the film lab had been correcting Barrett's green face each time during the development process.