Star Trek Owes Anime For Its Coolest Design

For this tale of East meets West to make sense, you need to know a bit more about this episode. In “Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad,” Harry Mudd returns, and he’s got an ambitious plan: he traps Discovery in a time loop so he can unlock the mysteries of the spore drive and later sell the advanced vessel to the Klingons. When Mudd first appears onscreen, it is treated as a big reveal because his head is covered by a space helmet clearly designed for an Andorian.

This helmet was designed by Ray Lai and Mario Moreira, who knocked this assignment out of the park. This Star Trek helmet looks unlike anything else in the franchise, and it had multiple inspirations, including anime. This was revealed on the After Trek for this episode, where we also find out the helmet was also inspired by a disguised Orion in The Original Series episode “Journey to Babel.”

At this point, you might be asking why a Star Trek anime helmet modeled after an Andorian could be inspired by an Orion. In that classic episode, there is an antagonistic Andorian named Thelev, but we later find out he’s secretly an Orion. He was surgically altered so he could pass for an Andorian, and he infiltrated the Enterprise to make the various Starfleet members and Federation ambassadors aboard suspicious of each other to weaken them ahead of an attack by an Orion vessel.

The Andorians have played an increasingly prominent part of the franchise since then, with Jeffrey Combs’ Shran becoming a fan-favorite member of this race on Enterprise.

While the helmet designers didn’t explicitly mention this, they were most likely taking their Andorian design cues more from The Original Series than Enterprise because Discovery is meant to initially take place about 10 years before the adventures of Captain Kirk. In this way, the design was simultaneously inspired by the earliest Star Trek adventures as well as a very recognizable anime style.

In case you were curious, Star Trek has never had an anime series, but it does have a manga…specifically, four volumes of manga from Tokyopop. The first three volumes focus on The Original Series, and the last focuses on The Next Generation. While it isn’t the greatest manga ever created (that honor still goes to Akira), these comics remain the best way to see your favorite Star Trek heroes from two different generations get an adorable anime makeover.

Unless Star Trek decides to follow up on beloved series like Lower Decks and Prodigy by giving us a proper anime, we may never get to see truly kawaii Starfleet officers on the small screen. Fortunately, we can enjoy anime-inspired designs like Harry Mudd’s Andorian helmet whenever we want. Now, we can’t help but wonder…is Comic-Con still going on in the 23rd century, and will Mudd be entering the cosplay contest as “steampunk Andorian?”