BEHIND-THE-SCENES MICHAEL WESTMORE'S MAKE-UP MAGIC TUVOK, NEELIX AND TORRES words are by Michael Westmore

With [Star Trek Voyager], like other shows, we start off from square one with every single character and figure out what we're going to do with them. We got the captain out of the way, and Robert Picardo came in and he was going to be himself, and Robbie and Garrett. And Tim Russ was going to be a Vulcan and was going to have his own skintone, so it was a matter of taking a cast of Tim's ears and making his own Vulcan ears up for him that he would wear for the next seven years. Behind-the-scenes: Tuvok's Vulcan ears

But with Neelix, and I wanted a free mind for that which is why I left it till last, and I had just seen 'The Lion King' and I was really impressed with all of those characters running around. And I got the idea that the two characters people loved were the meerkat and the warthog, and I said I'm going to design an alien that brings out the characteristics of those two characters, and that's what I did and what I based the Neelix character on. The little teeny eyebrows that sprouted out, the thing where he could do this (waggle eyebrows up and down) and it was almost like a little dog, or the eyebrows would work.

The hair on his head was actually made of goat hair. It was very stiff hair and I bleached the ends of it and dyed the roots of it so it was a blending of a mane of hair that went down his back. And then we made him into an alien by using the spots, and the colouring to change him from something that would be found on Earth, but the character was a blending of those two characters I thought the audience would wind up loving. And the contact lenses... I really wanted to bring his eyes out, so I designed a contact lens that was orangey and yellow and bright, and so when he put his eyes in he would be this total friendly individual, along with even his cheeks that were rubber were sculpted and designed so that they had these little 'apples' on, really smiley. He would be, you know...you'd want to hug him.

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Westmore indicates the cheeks when talking about making 'apples' for Neelix's face

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Behind-the-scenes: Turn Me Into A Talaxian

I knew with Roxann (Roxann Dawson, who plays Torres) we did a lot of tests with her Klingon make-up. Since she was going to be a female we started off with doing what I thought - forehead, nose, teeth. Why are we hiring a beautiful girl to destroy her?! And she wanted to be pretty, too. So it meant let's get rid of the nose, let's get rid of the teeth, let's redesign the forehead and soften it down. So finally we made a very soft forehead with some 'seagulls' that gave her some small light ridges, but next to René (René Auberjonois, who plays the changeling Odo in [DS9]) as Odo, I would say remaking her foreheads, to get it just right, it was done many many times to satisfy everybody that they were happy with the final design. And then it was very difficult to redesign it.

Neelix and Torres in [#52 Warlord]; this may be a cut shot as this close-up does not seem to occur in the aired episode

It was so soft that when the moulds started to wear out and we had to resculpt it, it took calipers to sit there to try and get those 'seagulls' just right, because when you put it on her forehead you would know right away and it meant going right back to the lab and doing it again.