The Colour out of Space Opera: Index

An index to my series of posts on colour, symbolism, style and space opera, featuring Battlestar Galactica, Blake’s 7 and Star Wars (with guest appearances from all over).
Part One: What is a Space Opera?

Part Two: What is structuralist anthropology, and why should I care?

Part Three: Red And Blue

Part Four: Nature/Culture in Battlestar Galactica

Part Five: Blake’s 7 and the Colour Coded Universe

Part Six: The Anti-Hero’s Journey

Part Seven: White Hat Hackers

Part Eight: What Colour Is The Sky On Your Planet?

Part Nine: Nostalgia By Stealth

Part Ten: The Faustus with the Mostest

Part Eleven: Some Call Me The Space Cowboy

Bonus: The Mandalorian

Conclusion

The Colour Out of Space Opera: Concluding Thoughts

So, by way of ending The Colour Out Of Space Opera, I’d like to offer a few general thoughts and takeaways from this, and a few directions you can pursue yourself if you’re interested in learning, or researching, more on this subject.

1. Everything uses symbolism to make its point, and, because we’re in “Western” society (in this case, blatant ethnocentric shorthand for the UK and USA), we tend to get a lot of symbols in our popular culture that fit our own particular set of nature/culture oppositions. There’s a reason why I’ve steered clear of talking about Japanese space opera; it might be an interesting thing for someone with more knowledge of their particular culture to explore colour symbolism in that context.
2. The way space opera uses symbols, particularly colour symbols, is linked to the job space opera has to do: to introduce casual viewers quickly to casts and scenarios in a way that doesn’t alienate regulars, to provide new and interesting alien planets on a weekly basis in a way that keeps costs down but doesn’t get the viewer saying “Vasquez Rocks again?” (by the way, shout out to Star Trek: Picard for using the actual Vasquez Rocks as a location).
3. Nature/culture: is a big trope that designers and directors exploit big-time, for its emotional significance in “Western” (op cit) culture, but it changes over time. In the sixty years that we’ve been covering here, we’ve gone from culture-good, to nature-good, and now we seem to be going back into culture-good (albeit with some interesting fusion symbolism in The Mandalorian, but it seems to be the only one so far). Arguably in 1990s space operas like Farscape and LEXX you had a period of we-can’t-tell-what’s-nature-and-what’s-culture, which is probably not too surprising, given that it was a decade when people were having to rethink a lot of pre-existing social categories (and, come to think of it, that might make a good bonus episode/coda to this series; comment if you’d like me to write one).
4. Finally, historical-futurism goes back longer than most people realise, and the reason it works is for the same reason that the colour symbolism works: because we have sets of associations piled up in our cultural knowledge that mean we go to certain places when we see certain things. But they work best when you’re evoking a time period sideways, as it were: making us think of Westerns not through Western-style visuals, but through other symbols that evoke the same sort of ideas.

So, I’m going to leave you here with those four takeaways. Obviously one could go on much further, and I might do more pieces later on exploring in depth what particular series do with particular sets of symbols. I should also probably mention here that I have a book coming out in Obverse Book’s Black Archive series of Doctor Who monographs: it’s #43: The Robots of Death, and the reason I mention it here is because there’s a whole chapter on Expressionist design, historical-futurism, and how Doctor Who producer Philip Hinchcliffe made use of it throughout his tenure on the show. So if you like what you read, there’s more!

In the meantime: go out on your own, play with these tools, look at what the designers of your own favourite space operas are doing with colour and visual trope, and have fun with it.

The Colour Out of Space Opera Part Twelve: The Good, The Bad and the Baby Yoda

Last time, I promised a special bonus blogpost, as it were, on The Mandalorian. This series wears its Western origins on its sleeve: it’s described as a “space Western” in publicity, and openly references Westerns all over the place. However, and here’s the thing: this barely shows up in the design. There’s everything else from the Middle East to Samurai to Athenian helmets in there: but there’s nary a cowboy hat, silver or otherwise, in sight.

So how do we get our Wild West? Well, for a start, think about the political subtext to Westerns, namely, the USA in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (with The Wild Bunch and similar pushing us into the early twentieth). A country that’s just come out of a brutal civil war, largely over the issue of slavery; a sudden territorial expansion from the edges of the country into the centre of it; with a new federal government that’s physically incapable of closely monitoring everything going on in its territory.

The Mandalorian gives us a Star Wars universe that’s just finished a brutal civil war. While slavery doesn’t appear to have been the driving issue in the middle three movies (and droids never seem to get emancipation, to judge by the last three), the character of Quill in The Mandalorian is a former Imperial indentured servant, and there’s also clear ambivalence about the status of droids (leaving aside the titular character’s racism against them, the pit-droids in “The Gunslinger” seem to be employees of the repair shop rather than slaves, and Zero in “The Prisoner” seems to be an independent agent). There are petty local warlords profiteering, unemployed ex-troopers from both the Imperial and Rebel sides making a living as hired guns, and people from the losing side attempting to start the war over again. The New Republic is in place, but blatantly doesn’t have the resources to keep order. So, in the same way that Kurosawa was able to set up a dialogue between Westerns and Samurai films by exploiting the similarities between the periods, so The Mandalorian works by playing on the similarities between the Wild West and the post-Empire universe.

On top of that, The Mandalorian heavily references familiar tropes from Westerns. The setup, with a single-parent bounty hunter, is close to that of the 1950s TV western The Rifleman, and the driving thread of a morally questionable man who is redeemed through protecting an innocent, in some ways angelic, figure, is from The Wild Bunch. Individual episodes also reference specific Westerns, with “Sanctuary” most obviously being The Magnificent Seven (with aliens, and five gunslingers short of a full set). There’s even a comely widow for the Mandalorian to regretfully leave, and Cara Dune has antecedents in Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane. Even the concept art that runs under the credits doesn’t just look like Ralph Macquarrie’s original concept art for Star Wars, it looks like the sort of artwork that you might see in a 1950s or 1960s pulp Western magazine. So we have a Western that’s symbolic, rather than visual.

Finally, the colours. Getting back to the original subject of this essay series, The Mandalorian does something pretty interesting here. At first, I’d noticed that our hero is very much the triumph of Culture over Nature; not only does he have that sort of cool blue-spectrum colour scheme, he’s literally encased in chrome for the whole story (except for one brief scene, which, under the circumstances, is the exception that proves the rule.– reinforcing my theory that we’re starting to swing back from nature-heroic, technology-evil, to something more the reverse.

However, he’s not the only hero of this series:

The Mandalorian is also completely inseparable from the Baby Yoda: the Mandalorian smith-priestess even declares them a “clan of two”. And Baby Yoda is nature personified: green, dressed in shades of brown, at one with the force and expressing an astounding range of emotions on his tiny face. So what we have, in The Mandalorian, is the merging of nature and culture, to a positive outcome for all.

Next time: I’ll try and sum all of this up and come to some useful conclusions.

Don’t forget, the book bundle is still on sale! Go have a look!

The Colour Out Of Space Opera: Some Call Me The Space Cowboy

Last instalment, I talked about how to evoke the past well, and not so well, with a quick detour round Metropolis. This instalment, I’m back with our usual case studies, and looking at how each of them has used the Wild West as a reference point: successfully, and not so successfully.

We’ll start with the unsuccessful. Here, once again, is an image from the classic Battlestar Galactica “The Lost Warrior.” Now, this one really ought to work. The Wild West is an appropriate referent for the story, which riffs heavily on Shane and other Westerns of the “stranger rides into town, fixes things, rides off again to the great disappointment of the comely local widow” variety. To be fair, there are some creative design elements in the serial– making the buildings look like repurposed spacecraft, for a start– but the Western aspects include a lot of, well, silver cowboy hats and vests. And, while, as I noted last time we talked about this episode, it does bring home one of the symbolic associations of white clothing for a villain (plantation bosses), it also makes it really sort of too obvious:

Meanwhile, Star Wars is arguably the textbook example of Doing Wild West Space Opera Right. The Tatooine sequences especially are a coming-of-age Western at heart: young boy, dreaming of leaving the ranch and fighting in a civil war, teams up with a grizzled old gunslinger after his family are brutally murdered, and they go to a saloon in a disreputable little desert town in order to recruit a maverick mercenary pursued by all the local bounty hunters, and his brown partner who doesn’t speak English.

This is the sort of thing that generally goes unnoticed by the audience, however, and for fairly good reason. In order to make sure it doesn’t wind up being as on-the-nose as “The Lost Warrior,” the design team have drawn their past-times elements from the Middle East:

Japan:

And 20th century abstract sculpture:

The most obvious nod to the Western genre is Han Solo’s costume. Even there, you’ve got an interesting mix of black and white, pointing to the idea that Solo’s morals and allegiances are a little variable (we don’t see the colour of his hat, after all):

So people don’t tend to notice that the whole thing is a coming-of-age Western. They also don’t usually notice, by the way, that our protagonist’s  family have a plantation and own slaves, and he wants to fight for the “rebels”, which does add an element of ambiguity to the literally black-and-white distinction between the heroes and the villains.

But, and here’s the point where structuralism comes in: the symbolic connotations of all of these places overlap with the Wild West. The Middle East, in the 1970s, was seen as a lawless gold-rush area, province of hyper-masculine gangsters; Kurosawa, one of Lucas’ key influences, is best known for Samurai warrior movies which have later been remade as Westerns; abstract sculpture developed under the same chaotic global conditions that spawned the Wild West (war and extreme financial instability). So, unlike Padme Amidala’s forays into Japanese and Weimar imagery in the prequels, it doesn’t just Look Neat, it Tells Us Something.

And finally, you have Blake’s 7. On the one hand the Western is sort of baked into the programme’s DNA, since one of the reasons for the title was series creator Terry Nation pitching it initially as “The Magnificent Seven in space”.  Somewhat wisely, though, the team largely steer clear of using Western costumes and sets, presumably for reasons of not wanting to make that connection too obvious (also, presumably, because it’s hard to do well on the cheap– that’s a compliment, by the way, Blake’s 7 is a good example of how one can do even space opera well with no budget, provided you have a strong writing team and a creative production team).

The one episode where they do go a little further than usual is “Gambit”, where the Seven and the Federation have both tracked fugitives Travis and Docholli to a bar in a lawless frontier town. The name Docholli is also an explicit reference to Doc Holliday, meaning that it’s hard to ignore the connection. Consequently, both Docholli (right) and Travis (left) rock delightful big hats (Travis’ is, naturally, black):

However, Blake’s 7 does a Star Wars, and takes the curse off it, by heavily referencing the Weimar Republic in other aspects of the story’s costuming and design (for instance the Croupier, emceeing the Big Wheel casino with an aesthetic that’s half Joel Gray and half Marlene Dietrich):

This also, by the way, includes the brief use of South Bank as a futuristic location– famously a product of Bauhaus-influenced modern architecture (there’s not a single good shot of South Bank from the production, you’ll just have to take my word for it). In any case, this even makes the delightful big hats less obviously cowboy-related. Since Weimar fashion could also include big-brimmed hats (many lovely examples here, but take particular note of the gent on the far right):

And Travis, in his hat and cape, looks like nothing so much as the Phantom of the Opera, subject of a not-unfamous film of the 1920s:

So, again, one takes the curse off the Wild West aesthetic, by linking its imagery with the imagery of another period of lawless gangsterism, reckless gambling, hedonism, violent sexuality, interwar social trauma and extreme financial instability.

And then there’s The Mandalorian. Which I was going to talk about briefly here, but then realised I had enough to say about it to warrant another blog post, so that’ll be next time.

 

The Colour Out Of Space Opera Part Ten: The Faustus with the Mostest

Last instalment, I introduced the concept of using the past to evoke the future, and how it works, with a detour into The Fifth Element. This time, I’m going to go back into film design history for a bit, and talk about what makes this work.

My argument about this is that it can’t simply be done for its own sake, or because it Looks Neat. With reference, as we have done throughout this series, to structuralism, there has to be a fit between the symbols used, and the thing being symbolised (for more on this sort of thing, and for those of you who like academic references, look up Dan Sperber’s 1974 monograph Symbolism, or Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By).

Let’s take a look at Metropolis, one of the best known early SF movies, and also, though it’s frequently not mentioned, one of the earliest examples of using the past to evoke the future. In the picture below, we see our male protagonist, Freder, pampered son of an elite capitalist, in the Garden of the Sons, a sort of leisure facility for men like him:

There’s a few things to observe here. One of them is that Freder’s own futuristic businesswear, with the natty jodhpurs, has ironically aged far less well than the 18th-century-inspired gear of the courtesans around him (supporting last week’s point). The other, though, is that the period chosen is more than a little appropriate: if you want a complex of symbols associated with decadence and sexual license, with an added dollop of twee pastoralism, you could do far worse than raid the closets of the Ancien Regime.

Now the story’s female protagonist, Maria. She’s kitted out in a costume evoking medieval peasant garb to evoke the fact that she comes from the poor labouring classes of Metropolis, as well as providing a counterpoint to the Ancien Regime costumes of the courtesans (since, like the peasantry of France, Maria, or [spoilers] her doppelgänger, will later stage a revolution to overthrow the aristocrats):

And the story’s anti-hero, mad scientist Rotwang, wearing a flowing black robe over his work coveralls, evoking medieval wizards alongside industrial imagery (not incidentally evoking the Industrial Revolution which was also kicking off in the 18th century):

So, one could say the use of a particular period aesthetic is appropriate because Maria is, symbolically, a peasant girl and Rotwang, also symbolically, a wizard (and the aristocracy they both severally oppose evokes the French nobility). But it goes further than that. This is a publicity picture from FW Murnau’s film version of Faust, showing Camilla Horn playing Gretchen:

Note the resemblance to Maria’s costume. Gretchen is also a simple, good soul who remains pure despite the trials life throws at her, and, like Maria, winds up at the hands of a mob determined to burn her at the stake. Faust also revolves around the activities of a magician who is drawn to do evil. So Maria’s costume doesn’t just evoke the peasantry, but provides its German audience with a complex of fictional symbols they would instantly recognise.

So what happens when you start evoking the wrong symbols, or evoking them to little purpose? Here we need to return to Star Wars, and take a look at the Prequel Trilogy. Here’s Padme Amidala, from the first film (one example will suffice):

The costume’s certainly pretty, and certainly looks ceremonial. The film is also heavily based on Kurosawa’s The Hidden Fortress, so a Japanese aesthetic is, seemingly, appropriate. However, if you start to think about what it’s referencing, it’s not necessarily where you want to go. Padme’s hairstyles and makeup continually evoke apprentice geisha (rather than the tomboy princess who is the heroine of The Hidden Fortress), giving an undertone of sexuality that’s arguably not appropriate for a character who’s defined more by falling in love with the wrong man than by providing entertainment and sex to male audiences.

Another of her costumes appears to borrow heavily from one of the characters in Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen:

 

The character in question, though, is Kriemhild:

Kriemhild is a woman who avenges her husband’s death at the hands of her brother by calculatedly marrying her brother’s enemy, luring her brother and his men into a trap and burning a fortress down around their ears.

Kriemhild is one of my favourite characters in cinema, so actually I’d’ve liked a Padme Amidala who’s both a cultured and sophisticated woman and a calculating schemer who uses her sexuality and her power to wreak a terrible revenge on the people who wronged her doomed husband. But since that’s not the Padme Amidala we got, there’s a cognitive dissonance to the way she’s dressed.

Next time: cowboys in space.

The Colour Out of Space Opera Part Nine: Nostalgia By Stealth

Welcome back to The Colour Out of Space Opera (links to previous instalments: one two three four five six seven eight). One of my long-standing holiday traditions is to re-watch as many of the Star Wars movies as I can manage, which brings me nicely to the subject of the next couple of instalments: raiding the past.

From the first moment SF moved into the visual media, designers have made heavy use of the practice of evoking the future through, symbolically, evoking the past. The idea is that viewers may find it alienating when confronted with costume and styling meant to evoke a different, future society:

While on the other hand, costumes which evoke a past era, give the viewer a set of symbolic cues to work from:

You can see how it works. The first image, from Aelita, Queen of Mars, is based on constructivist art, and consequently leaves us with a blank canvas, meaning the viewer is forced to learn about the society from other symbolic clues. The second, from Blade Runner, evokes the 1940s (while being different enough from actual 1940s fashions to tell us this is the future not the past); straight away the viewer can reach for a palette of associations about the 1940s to sketch in the background to the society (it’s probably repressive, hierarchical, subject to rampant surveillance and violent criminal activity, and with an undercurrent of misogyny. There you go, and Sean Young hasn’t said a word yet). As with our subconscious approaches to colour, filmmakers can use our associations about the past as a quick and dirty way of introducing us to a society in the future.

However, it’s a little more complicated than that. This image looks like it’s got more in common with Aelita‘s constructivism than Blade Runner‘s nostalgia:

However, Milla Jovovitch’s costume is actually based on a piece of early 1970s kinetic art by Rebecca Horn:

So what we have is a costume which seems to evoke an alienating future society, but in fact evokes late Sixties pop-art, giving us a palette of associations: decadence, drugs, way too much day-go plastic.

The costume design of The Fifth Element more generally plays with this, usually giving us enough retro costume elements to evoke a mood or style, while changing them enough to remind us that this is the future, and keep us off balance:

The mixing of periods also tells us something. Note the use of 1940s elements as in Blade Runner, but a shift towards a Sixties pop-art colour palette, and hairstyles more associated with the 1920s and 1930s. So what we get is not a straight set of associations, as in Blade Runner, but a mix: we can expect a society that’s repressive, hierarchical, fascist and over-surveilled, but also one with heavy elements of commercialism, of psychedelia, of decadence. By mixing elements of the past, you can develop complicated background world building.

So what does this have to do with Star Wars? Mainly that the early films are textbook examples in how to evoke the past, evoke the past by stealth, and mix the palette.

Dressing Alec Guinness in a gi, for instance, evokes associations to do with Japanese martial arts: skill, codes of honour, feudalism, hierarchies, self-control to the point of (in the movies, at least) feats of magic. Which takes the curse off the fact that he’s also wearing a wizard’s cloak, and means that, although we still have that association, it’s buried beneath, and mixed with, the other associations.

We’re so busy thinking of him as General Makabe Rokurōta, that we’ve forgotten he’s actually mostly Gandalf.

Next time! Carrying on with Star Wars, and considering what makes retro-futurism work (and what makes it fail).

The Colour Out of Space Opera Part Eight: What Colour Is The Sky On Your Planet?

Welcome back to The Colour Out of Space Opera! As promised last time (catch-up links: one two three four five six seven), this episode will take a quick look at the problem of planets.

As we’ve seen extensively, one of the crucial issues in space opera is how to differentiate characters, and ideally give the audience some understanding of who they are and what their role is, in a quick and easy way that can help casual viewers tuning in to the series, while not alienating or boring regulars.

However, another crucial issue is that space operas require characters to visit different planets on a near-weekly basis. Which presents a twofold problem: first, how to make a landscape look convincingly alien on a budget– and, second, how to disguise the fact that the same location usually has to stand in for several planets?

(as an aside, I’d like to stamp very thoroughly on the idea that this is the result of space operas being done on the cheap. This is a problem that affects all space operas, from the genuinely low-budget Blake’s 7 through to original series Battlestar Galactica, at the time the single most expensive TV programme ever made. Because it doesn’t matter if you have the resources of a small multinational corporation, that budget still has limits– and, even if your budget was completley unlimited, physical and logistical considerations also mean your choice of locations is not infinite).

One easy, cheap and effective way of doing this is through lens filters. A simple filming or post-production effect can make a normal Earth landscape look alien, as in Battlestar Galactica‘s War of the Gods:

This particular effect clearly led to problems, as in the same story vis-FX shots including laser beams and the revelation of Count Iblis’ demonic forms were incompatible with it and had to be shot in conventional colours. Nonetheless, for the audience, the planet has been established as alien.

Blake’s 7, on more of a budget, used a red lens filter instead in Time Squad to make the planet look more alien and less Southeast England, without the troublesome vis-FX problem (sometimes simpler is best):

Which is rendered even more effective by the social and emotional connotations of the colour red, giving the adventure a sense of urgency and danger. Similarly, in Cygnus Alpha, the titular planet’s superstitious theocracy is highlighted early on by having the exteriors set in darkness:

Colour and filtering can also be used to drive the audiences’ emotions regarding the setting more subtly. For instance in the New Caprica story arc of reimagined Battlestar Galactica, the lighting and post-production teams indicate the sense of frustration, monotony and despair associated with the colony and its later occupation by giving it a grey, rainy tone throughout:

But, in the episode Unfinished Business, as characters remember happier days on New Caprica, the planet is seen in unexpectedly brilliant sunshine, reflecting how it can look with the rose-tinted glasses on:

Finally, the Eye of Jupiter story arc shows us how lens filters and visual effects can be used to achieve multiple ends at once. The use of lens filters, first, disguises the fact that the team are filming in Kamloops (handy for Vancouver and nicely rugged) yet again, and sets up a harsh, bleak, washed-out emotional tone reflecting the characters’ increasingly frayed relationships as well as their feelings about the planet:

And, when the revelation in the temple is about to unfold, visual effects can change the sky and the landscape to something more suitably terrifying and apocalyptic:

Next time: A shift back to costuming, and how to get historical referencing right… and hilariously wrong.

 

The Colour Out Of Space Opera Part Seven: White Hat Hackers

Welcome back to The Colour Out Of Space Opera, a blog post series on the uses of colour and style in many familiar space opera series! Here are the catch-up links if you need them: one two three four five six

The last two installments focused on the use of colour in Blake’s 7, to colour-code the heroes for quick characterisation, and also to show characterisation arcs. This time, let’s turn back to Battlestar Galactica, Blake’s 7‘s near-contemporary.

One particular use of colour in 1970s Battlestar Galactica is the use of white as a shorthand for villainy. This appears to start as a sly political dig. The series itself generally followed a strongly neoconservative line, to the effect that politicians are untrustworthy, pacifists are naive, and governance is best done by reluctant leaders who swoop in, solve your problems, and go away quickly. In the pilot episode, the Council of Twelve (or Quorum) ruling the Colonies appear dressed in Roman-style white senatorial robes. Naturally, one of the Quorum is a traitor to his species, and the rest are naive idiots who basically let him get away with it:

However, there’s another referent. The 1970s saw a renewed dialogue over the history of slavery and its fallout in the USA, so what’s a better shorthand for villainy in a multiethnic neoconservative series than a costume recalling, white-clad, plantation owners:

The re-use of this trope also gives us white-clad corrupt politicians (again) in The Gun on Ice Planet Zero, white-helmeted prison guards in The Long Patrol… and this guy.

In one of the more interesting, and subtle, uses of this trope, Count Iblis in War of the Gods first appears to the Fleet as a man wearing a uniform not unlike Adama’s, but white. This appears like a way of inspiring trust while also subtly hinting at Iblis’ supernatural, “angelic” nature… but, if you’ve been following the series, also a hint that he’s the anti-Adama, who will potentially lead the Fleet to destruction. And then, in the same story, we meet the Lightship People:

Angelic creatures, also dressed in white. Seemingly benign figures who can even restore the dead– but who are also plainly working to their own agenda and not necessarily the good of the Fleet.

This is echoed later in their implied messenger, “John,” an ambivalent figure who Starbuck and Apollo find less than trustworthy:

And, while the re-use of the white uniforms in the godawful Galactica 1980 was, on one level, simply a way of saving money, it could also be taken as a sign that something in the series has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

What about the new series? The colour-coding comes in first of all as a way of differentiating individual Cylons, perhaps most obviously in the case of burgundy-Doral and teal-Doral, identified by jacket colour:

 

 

Given that the series sets up a nature/protagonist, culture/antagonist differentiation early on, though, we can also see styles, rather than colour per se, used to set up the opposing characters of Sweet Eight (nature) and Hard Eight (culture) in The Face of the Enemy.

As with Blake’s 7, though, reimagined Battlestar Galactica also uses changes in colour and style to show the journeys of various characters. Leoben, for instance, starts out as a fanatic, obsessed with Starbuck and what he believes to be her spiritual destiny:

As this obsession leads him into darker, sadder areas, he abandons the rough bright colours and wears black. Significantly this is also true of the Head-Leoben who appears to Starbuck in her visions, symbolising his role in allowing her to come to terms with her destructive nature and her own death:

One of the more interesting examples comes with another of the Head People, in this case Head Six who appears to Baltar throughout the story. When she first appears, it’s in a red dress, symbolising her connection to the Cylons but also seduction, destruction and conflict…

(…as a side point, note that a red dress is also, so to speak, a red flag about the true nature of Ellen Tigh…)

During the Pegasus story arc, though, Head Six dresses in darker colours, as Baltar has to confront and navigate the abuses perpetuated by humans on Cylons (and on each other):

Later, as Baltar becomes a spiritual leader to the Fleet and begins encoding the monotheistic religion that Head Six has been encouraging him towards, she varies her colour scheme somewhat:

Significantly, when she is most encouraging Baltar towards his spiritual role (at the end of the first season, and later on after Baltar’s cult forms), she dresses in white:

Which, of course, has connotations of spirituality and angelic nature, and weddings, and other positive associations that one might expect.

But let’s not forget: right from the start, a white costume in Battlestar Galactica marks you out as, at least to some degree, a villain.

Next time: a step away from costume and a look at how to differentiate your planets.

The Colour Out Of Space Opera Part Six: The Anti-Hero’s Journey

Welcome back to “The Colour Out Of Space Opera”! Here are the links for people wanting to catch up: one two three four five

Also a more-than-usually-massive spoiler warning for Blake’s 7.

Before we go on, a question from Pat McMurray:

“How conscious was all this?”

The answer is, it’s complicated. I do very much doubt that the costume and set designers were going out there armed with copies of Levi-Strauss when they made their designs. However, they did all have a specific task, to wit, evoking a particular emotion relative to a character (or group of characters) quickly and unobtrusively. Meaning they were probably looking for something that “feels right,” leading to the sort of imagery we’re seeing in the space operas we’ve been looking at so far.

For example: if you look at the pilot of Star Trek, they clearly aren’t there yet with the primary-colour functional scheme, but they’re also just as clearly putting a lot of thought into the task of making the characters and their roles instantly recognisable in a way that they aren’t in Forbidden Planet, which will eventually evolve into the distinctive three-colour uniform scheme.

It’s worth noting as relevant to last post’s topic that in this case they’re clearly not just differentiating characters through costume, but through recognisable distinctive physical traits; you’re not going to get those three chaps in blue confused in the way that you might the officers in Forbidden Planet.

Furthermore, Farah Mendlesohn also commented that colour-coding as a deliberate strategy was very much in vogue in the 1970s, citing, among others, the acclaimed school production of “King” (later filmed by Channel 4), which used yellow and red T-shirts to symbolic effect.

Sometimes we have documentary evidence of how and why certain colours were chosen: outside of genre, the designers on Breaking Bad have been quite forthright about their use of colour coding to define characters. Other times, there’s a clear thought process going on but it’s harder to define the inspiration.

This post’s main topic, however, is to look at another distinctive use of colour: namely, to illustrate the emotional or narrative arc of a character or characters (something else for which Breaking Bad and its prequel series Better Call Saul provide a high-profile recent case). For this blog, though, we’ll return to Blake’s 7 for our first example.

Servalan, the titular rebels’ antagonist, starts the series with an all-white colour pallette. This makes her stand out visually against the, usually black-clad, Federation troops and our multi-coloured heroes. It also continues even after June Hudson takes over as designer and our heroes lose the colour-coding.

And then, in Season Three, she switches to black. For those unfamilliar with the story, the shift comes in the episode “Children of Auron”, in which she attempts, and fails, to have herself cloned. As Jacqueline Pearce explained it, after that point she’s always a little bit in mourning for her loss, and so this continues to be her colour palette long after the events of “Children of Auron” are of immediate relevance to the storyline.

The only story where Servalan isn’t in either white or black is “Gambit”, where she wears red– and significantly, in “Gambit”, her presence is entirely unofficial and the activities illicit, so the red highlights for the viewer the fact that she’s off the record.

Servalan isn’t the only character this happens for, though. Dayna Mellanby undergoes a mini-arc from her wild and free days as the daughter of a rebel who has fled to a primitive backwater:

To her re-absorption back into society as a gunslinger and weapons expert. Note her colour palette is bright and youthful and the cut of her clothes recalls the Greek tunic she wears in her first story (and she’s wearing her now-deceased father’s medallion, symbolising her sworn quest for revenge against Servalan):

In the final season, after the Liberator is destroyed and the titular rebels have largely given up their political activities, she adopts a much more austere look (and lost the medallion):

Also note that, at this point, our heroes are generally clad in shades of black, white and grey, rather than the bright colours of earlier seasons:

This is more than a little significant, given what we were talking about before regarding nature and culture imagery. At this point, there is no longer an opposition between Blake’s rebels/nature and the Federation/culture, so the heroes’ colour palettes become more and more culture-aligned, and much more along the lines of the Federation’s own monochrome palettes.

Which brings us to the most significant example of the way this happens in Blake’s 7. We’ve had a look at some of Avon’s earlier costumes in the last installment, but what’s worth noting is that from Season Three onwards he goes from grey:

To more and more black (with occasional silver and white bits):

So there’s a few things to notice. One, his palette is becoming more and more cultural, and more and more aligned with the Federation, as Avon himself becomes more and more of an anti-hero. Second, that as he becomes the focus of the series in Season Four, his costume makes him stand out very clearly against the muted greys of the rest of the crew. And finally, it makes the last scene of Blake’s 7 very much not just a victory of the Federation over the rebels, but a victory of culture over nature. Watch who dies first, and watch who’s standing at the end:

Next post, a look at how Battlestar Galactica does something rather similar.

The Colour Out of Space Opera Part Five: Blake’s 7 and the Colour Coded Universe

Welcome back to The Colour Out of Space Opera, a serial essay on colour symbolism, structuralism, and their uses in space opera television series (links to parts one, two, three and four for those of you just joining us).

This instalment: Blake’s 7. Like original Star Wars, and both series of Battlestar Galactica, there’s a clear nature/culture divide. Because it’s 1978, we get organic, warm nature on the side of our protagonists (they’re not exactly heroic), with their partly-living ship and green-clad leader:

And cool, technological culture is on the side of our antagonists, with a minimalist aesthetic straight out of Gary Numan’s stage performances:

In Season Four, our heroes take on a more technical/cultural aesthetic (more on why next episode) but it’s worth noting that they still keep touches of nature symbolism, for instance the lush houseplants around Xenon Base:

What Blake’s 7 also does, though, is something else you see colour doing in space operas. Take a look at this picture from Forbidden Planet, and see if you can tell, based on it, anything at all about the characters’ individual jobs:

Apart from the man at third from left, who’s clearly the cook (and also, just as clearly, going to be the comedy figure), nothing. You can’t tell at a glance who’s the doctor, who’s the captain, who’s the engineer, whatever. Which is problematic enough in Forbidden Planet, where your audience only has to keep everyone straight for ninety minutes, but it’s likely to be absolute murder for a television space opera, where casual and intermittent viewers will be tuning in all the time, and to keep them from tuning out again just as quickly, you need an easy way of differentiating characters and jobs. But you also can’t make it obvious and laboured, or you’ll alienate your regular viewers. Hence:

With the addition of a simple colour palette, it’s plain just from looking at the picture that we’ve got three groups of people, differentiated somehow, but probably by function. After a few minutes of watching, viewers should be able to have a rough idea of what the classifications are (blue is science/medicine; yellow for command and navigation; red for engineering and getting shot at by aliens). Regular viewers, though, aren’t being constantly whacked over the head with the distinctions. Much better.

Blake’s 7 used this sort of device to differentiate its human characters according to the functions and emotions we associate with different colours. Take a look at Season One’s space-anorak getups: dark green for our Space Robin Hood, Blake; paler green for telepathic nature-girl Cally; brown for earthy strongman Gan; pink for femme-fatale Jenna; blue for computer-expert sociopath Avon (not pictured: Vila, the comedy thief, in orange):

Later, when June Hudson takes over, she eschews the colour-palette symbolism, but does much the same sort of thing using clothing styles. Spot the Robin Hood, the femme fatale, the strongman, the telepath, the comedy thief, and the sociopath:

Finally, in the Season Three surrealist tour-de-force Sarcophagus, the characters’ alignment with their archetypes (musician, magician, priestess, warrior and death-bringer) is again symbolised through their colours:

Blake’s 7 does something else with colour and costume, though, which we’ll look more closely at next episode.