Longtime “Star Trek” director Marc Daniels, who helmed 15 episodes of the original series, recalled in “Captains’ Logs” that “A Private Little War,” like many “Trek” outings, pushed up against the edges of its budget. Notably, he recalled the jacket incident with clarity, saying:
“I remember that episode also provided a problem in terms of wardrobe. The people on this planet were supposed to be dressed in prehistoric clothing, and we discovered that costuming them would cost a fortune. Bill Theiss, who was always adept at handling such crises, bought a bunch of cheap sheepskin jackets, cut off the sleeves and turned them inside out. We were always trying to work around things like that because of budgetary limitations.”
Anyone with hippie parents — parents who were teens in the late 1960s — likely recalls seeing similar sheepskin jackets in their parents’ childhood closets. Lightweight sheepskin was common youth wear in the late 1960s, and Bill Theiss could likely have merely walked a few blocks away from CBS Studios’ wardrobe building and purchased a pile of them on any random afternoon. The ultimate look of the Neurals is earthy and primitive, and weirdly convincing as the uniform of an agrarian society.
Naturally, actress Nancy Kovack, who played the Neural healer Nona, wore tight pleather pants and a fuzzy tube top, leaving her midriff bare. That’s old-fashioned Roddenberrian sexism at its plainest.