The hidden hairline years.

Here on this blog, we have found many categories for the world of Bill Shatner's toupee. Now, we have a fresh one: 1969-1999, the hidden hairline years. The "Jim Kirk" look (1959-1969) allowed Shats to present to the world a visible hairline. The lace toupee attached to the front of the head was intended to show realistic hair that could be combed upwards away from the forehead. But after that, right until the "Denny Crane" look emerged, Shats' hairline was largely hidden either by bad wigs (1969-1976) or wonderfully coiffed curls (1976-1999).


So what weird and wonderful secrets were hidden behind those thick curls? The answer isn't always pretty. We've found two pictures where the line of a very noticeable hairpiece is visible on Shats. Of course, even toupee wearers are entitled to bad hair days, right?


By the way, thanks so much for your comments and tips - the latter of which we will certainly be following up on.

Toup on toup.

Just one toupee, despite the rumors.

There is a story that has circulated among some Star Trek fans that in the second season episode "The Deadly Years" (in which some members of the crew, including Captain Kirk, rapidly age - see above) Shatner wore an "old age" white-haired toup on top of his regular toupee. We are convinced that that story is simply not true - for the makeup department to do something like that would simply be ridiculous and totally pointless.


But we have found one such example that can be confirmed. Not sure what the above picture is, but we believe it is from an episode of Boston Legal (fans of the show, please help us out if you can). What we see is a toupee that is fake and supposed to be fake on top of a toupee (or plugs) that are fake but are supposed to be real. Shats should avoid such mind-bending stunts as they threaten the very fabric of the space-time continuum!

Outlier toupees.

We've established the basic toup timeline: the "Jim Kirk" style (1959-1969), the "Lost Years" (1969-1976), the "T.J. curly" or "Star Trek movie" look (1976-1999) and the "Denny Crane" look (1999-) - you can vote in our poll to choose your favorite. But there are also a few "outlier toupees" - ones that don't seem to conform to this basic timeline.

One example is the unknown picture above. It would appear to be an early "Denny Crane" look, but the hair is much longer and looks far more like a quite thick hairpiece. Any others you find, please let us know - of course the "Lost Years" (which seems the more accepted term rather than "Dark Ages") don't really count as they are one giant outlier, and the variances during the "Jim Kirk" era are also quite well documented. It is perhas the last two stages ("T.J." and "Denny") that could yield some really interesting and rare outliers!

CORRECTED UPDATE via a reader: "[The above] photo is from a game show Shat hosted called Show me the Money in 2006. It was part game show and part dance show, with Shat doing his rocketman dance every few minutes. The show bombed."

More flying toupees.

Previously, we brought you an extract from the William Shatner biography Captain Quirk that described a rather strange incident (See here for more from this book):

“Once while directing a scene [for Star Trek V, Shatner] got so worked up, he stumbled over a large rock and fell to the ground. The force of the fall flung his hairpiece across the set, and as the mortified director got back to his feet, a group of extras in the scene started laughing out loud. Shatner fired them all on the spot, with no further discussion.”

Well, there is another very brief flying toupee story mentioned in The Encyclopedia Shatnerica (we already looked at their "toupee" entry here). On page 118, author Robert Schnakenberg brings us this nugget in the "Line Counting" entry:

"The City on the Edge of Forever"

"In his 1996 account of the tortured birth of his 1966 [Star Trek first season] teleplay 'The City on the Edge of Forever,' writer Harlan Ellison talks about Shatner line counting the script in his Hollywood home, then lobbying for rewrites when he discovered that Spock had more lines than Kirk. (A corollary anecdote about Shatner's toupee falling off upon his arrival at Ellison's house has been relegated only for Star Trek convention audiences.)" (Emphasis ours).

This is a story that apparently only Star Trek convention-goers will be able to confirm for us. However, we did find this related, but entirely unconfirmed comment at mentalfloss.com (see here):

"Some time ago I had the opportunity to hear Harlan Ellison speak (he wrote “City on the Edge of Forever”–I think, I know he wrote the one that one the Hugo). He relayed the story of how they tied a fishing hook to an overhead boom and pulled Shatner’s toupee off in the middle of one of his (many) love scenes. Beautiful…

Posted by Jim on 8-25-2008 at 11:20 am"

So it seems that Harlan Ellison enjoys referring to Shatner's toupee quite often. Whether these stories are true or merely an act of retroactive spite, is difficult to say.

Temperamental author Harlan Ellison.

"M" is for mismatch.

During the second season of Star Trek, Bill Shatner's toupee was noticeably lighter than his own brown hair, resulting in an easily detectable mismatch. Toupologists are often fascinated to see where real and fake meet in the world of Shatner's hair. This particular mismatch makes that quest very easy. We can see that the toupee actually reaches slightly down to the sides of the hair in order to blend in better, rather than being attached at the natural hair parting, which would be far more awkward. Here are some images from the episode "The Immunity Syndrome":



If we enhance (thanks to NASA scientists - not really) the above images, the mismatch is even more pronounced:



Conversely, if we color-correct the toupee, we see a match far closer to Shatner's own hair.

Color-corrected toupee.

By the third season, this disparity was fixed and Shatner's toupee was made darker and thus closer to his real hair.

Star Trek Season 3 publicity photo.

PS: Thanks for all your comments. We love reading them, so don't be shy!