Wah Chang

Wah Ming Chang (August 2, 1917 – December 22, 2003) was an American designer, sculptor, and artist. With the encouragement of his adoptive father, James Blanding Sloan, he began exhibiting his prints and watercolors at the age of seven to highly favorable reviews. Chang worked with Sloan on several theatre productions and in the 1940s, they briefly created their own studio to produce films. He is known later in life for his sculpture and the props he designed for Star Trek: The Original Series, including the tricorder and communicator.

The Chang family moved from Honolulu, Hawaii to San Francisco, California and about 1920 opened the Ho-Ho Tea Room on Sutter Street, which became a favorite venue for the city's Bohemian artists. Wah-Ming's mother, Fai Sue Chang, was a graduate of Berkeley's California School of Arts and Crafts (today's California College of the Arts), where she specialized in fashion design and etching.

After she died in 1927, her husband persuaded Wah Ming Chang's art teacher and family friend James Blanding Sloan, and his wife Mildred Taylor, to become his son's legal guardians. Sloan exhibited Wah Ming's etchings and watercolors in public exhibitions as early as 1925 to favorable reviews in the San Francisco Bay Area and later in the largest art colony on the Pacific Coast, Carmel-by-the-Sea. The child became part of Sloan's family, traveled in 1926 to Taos, New Mexico, for the on-site study of American Indian culture, and in 1928 displayed his block prints in joint exhibitions with Sloan at the prestigious Philadelphia Print Club and in Pasadena, California.

He became a valued assistant in several of Sloan's marionette theatres as well as in productions for the Hollywood Bowl Ballet and the "Cavalcade of Texas." In 1939, he became the youngest member of Disney's Effects and Model Department. In the mid-1940s Chang formed a joint studio business with Sloan, The East-West Film Company, and produced such memorable films as Pick a Bale of Cotton (an interview and performance with the legendary blues and folk singer Lead Belly in 1944) and the highly controversial anti-war short, The Way of Peace (1946–47), created in part with elaborate miniature sets and puppets in stop-motion.

For Star Trek, Chang built costumes for the salt vampire ("The Man Trap"), the Gorn ("Arena") and Balok's false image ("The Corbomite Maneuver"). He created tribbles by using artificial fur stuffed with foam, the Neanderthals in "The Galileo Seven", the Romulan Bird of Prey ("Balance of Terror"), and the Vulcan harp first seen in "Charlie X" and later seen in "The Conscience of the King", "Amok Time", "The Way to Eden"; and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Chang is mistakenly credited with having designed the phaser; it was actually designed by the art director of the original series, Matt Jefferies. The Desilu prop department prepared a single "hero" working model phaser, deemed unacceptable by Gene Roddenberry; Wah Chang prepared additional working and dummy mockups of the phaser, as well as other principal props. A Desilu invoice dated August 22, 1966, shows Chang "reworking phasers" for $520.00.

Chang's communicator design has been credited as an inspiration for modern flip-type cell phones and the 1960s Grillo folding telephone. His Balok effigy was used in "The Corbomite Maneuver" Star Trek episode — and at the conclusion of many closing credits sequences of the series.

His other film credits include sculpting the maquette of Pinocchio which was used as the reference for the animators of the classic Walt Disney feature, and articulated deer models for Bambi. He designed the headdress worn by Elizabeth Taylor in the feature film Cleopatra. Other work included building the time machine and sphinx from 1960s movie The Time Machine, and the dragon (seen only in the English-dubbed version) of Goliath and the Dragon (1960). Chang's firm, Project Unlimited, Inc., would win Academy Award recognition for its special effects, but Chang was not listed on the award, due to the way the credits were submitted to the academy. Film historian Bob Burns reported that Chang did not object to this. "He was the most humble, gentle man I've ever known in my life," Burns said. "He never boasted about anything he did, and he just did remarkable stuff."

In addition, Chang built the artificial creature in "The Architects of Fear" episode of the original The Outer Limits, and also sculpted the Zanti aliens in “The Zanti Misfits” because the Project Unlimited crew were told by producer Joseph Stefano that the aliens were “not pretty enough”, he also created props for the original Planet of the Apes film, the frightening skeleton animated in The Power, the flying machine in The Master of the World, and the dinosaurs in Land of the Lost.