Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Orions
8. Keeping An EE On EYE-On
From the start of season five of Star Trek: Lower Decks, the Blues were back. Rather pointedly, so was 'Or-EE-on,' the (mis-)pronunciation of 'Or-EYE-on' from Pirates of…, now made extra canonical. Like the history of their particular hue, various explanations have been given as to the origin of the differently articulated, including just blaming it on William Shatner.
Perhaps the most satisfying account comes from the writer of Pirates of , Howard Weinstein. Weinstein was just 19 when he wrote his script for The Animated Series — the youngest ever to do so. Speaking on the Enterprise Incidents podcast in 2023, Weinstein noted that it wasn't until he started going to conventions that he got an answer for the suddenly Or-EE-on from the actors.
For the first season, Weinstein was told that most of the actors recorded their lines together at the Filmation studio. For later episodes, however, the actors switched to recording their lines on a tape recorder from wherever they happened to be. With that, they no longer had "anybody to play off of". "Someone at the studio must have written a pronunciation guide and decided that everyone's going to pronounce this word as Or-EE-on. So, they did," Weinstein concluded.