Crazily shaped assignment patches

Discussion in 'Star Trek - The Original & Animated Series' started by Captain Jed R., Oct 26, 2013.

  1. jpv2000

    jpv2000 Captain Captain

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    Indeed, it was.

    I disagree with Justman's decision, however. I really enjoyed seeing different patches for the various ships.
     
  2. Ssosmcin

    Ssosmcin Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    The Defiant did come from the "prime" universe and slipped into the mirror universe. It's the same ship from The Tholian Web.
     
  3. Shawnster

    Shawnster Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I'm 41 years old and have been a fan of Trek all my life. I'm still learning new things. I thought those memos and conversations were all very enlightening.
     
  4. T'Girl

    T'Girl Vice Admiral Admiral

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    [​IMG]
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    In the episode The Tholian Web, the Defiant crew were wearing the insignia above. In In A Mirror Darkly, the Defiant crew had the insignia below.
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    Two different Defiants. From two different universe, the Defiant from "Web" isn't the Defiant that traveled to the Mirror universe.


    :)
     
  5. CorporalCaptain

    CorporalCaptain Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    There's a lot in Star Trek that wasn't intended to be nitpicked at HD resolution. This is one of those things.
     
  6. ZapBrannigan

    ZapBrannigan Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    But it's still a little sad that ENT got it wrong.
     
  7. CorporalCaptain

    CorporalCaptain Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Yeah, but I don't think ENT necessarily "got it wrong".

    I'd like to know why so many shots in The Tholian Web on the Defiant, in which the resolution is such that one would make out the emblems on TV's of the day, seem so cleverly staged as to cover them up. If the intent was for the Defiant crew to have an arrowhead emblem, then why all seeming efforts to hide the emblems? Did some costumes not have any emblems sewn on them at all? I guess that could be a reason, but then why sew any on for any of the Defiant crew? Why not just have the crew all face down or away from the camera, or otherwise hide that part of the costume?

    Sure, we've seen the Justman memo, but a) the ship on uniform emblems had already sailed by then (ha ha), and b) Justman's memo is from the second season, but Justman had a different role on the third season than he did on the second. Is it possible that he changed his mind by then, or that there was a different policy then, or that he just didn't care anymore?
     
  8. GSchnitzer

    GSchnitzer Co-Executive Producer In Memoriam

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    I suspect it was trying to have their cake and eat it too.

    Having let two occasions go by with ship-specific patches and with the edict from Roddenberry and Justman to not repeat the "mistake" in the future, they might have split the difference. They used the arrowhead patch like they were supposed to, but then tried to obfuscate the issue.
     
  9. ZapBrannigan

    ZapBrannigan Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    That's probably right. It makes the most sense.
     
  10. T'Girl

    T'Girl Vice Admiral Admiral

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    The photos of TOS are from screen capture of a DVD, not a HD Blu-ray.

    We've seen multiple example of alternate universes in Star Trek, the mirror universe itself is one example. Given the difference in insignia , why the insistence that the Defiant in TTW and IAMD are the same ship?

    :)
     
  11. Therin of Andor

    Therin of Andor Admiral Moderator

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    Because that was the writers' intention, going from interviews of the day.

    They figured the panning shots in "The Tholian Web" were so brief that no one would notice the Enterprise insignia on the uniforms.
     
  12. GSchnitzer

    GSchnitzer Co-Executive Producer In Memoriam

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    It's an interesting theory.

    Is there any evidence that the Defiant in IAMD is *not* the Defiant from the Prime universe? (Well, I mean evidence other than this costuming glitch.)
     
  13. T'Girl

    T'Girl Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Meaningless, it's what appeared on screen and in the sound tract that matters.


    :)
     
  14. F. King Daniel

    F. King Daniel Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    The word is "retcon"

    By these ultra-nitpicky standards, every episode of TOS exists in its own separate universe. James R. Kirk? Hand lasers? Antimatter destroying the universe? How many brothers does Kirk have?

    It's a television show, not a history exam.
     
  15. CorporalCaptain

    CorporalCaptain Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Yes, that sounds good.

    Right.

    HD, DVD, whatever. The point is that it is doubtful that they could have been definitively made out during the original broadcast on TV's of the day. I know that I couldn't make them out in the 1970's. Although we didn't have a VCR then, our TV wasn't exactly substandard either. What I do remember, though, is all the actors seemingly posed to hide the emblem in shots when they would have been unmistakable.

    You may as well be asking, given that Kirk's middle initial is shown as an R., why the insistence that WNMHGB occurred in the Prime Universe?
     
  16. Sir Rhosis

    Sir Rhosis Commodore Commodore

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    I don't think anything has ever appeared on a sound tract.
     
  17. Nerys Myk

    Nerys Myk A Spock and a smile Premium Member

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    What appeared on screen was influenced by the idea that each ship had its own patch. Which was a commonly held idea for decades.
     
  18. YJAGG

    YJAGG Captain Captain

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    I was hoping they would of changed the patches in Court Marshal in the Trek Redux
     
  19. CorporalCaptain

    CorporalCaptain Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    That secretary, or whatever she was, at Starbase 11 in The Menagerie also has an arrowhead emblem. Given that Miss Piper quite clearly has a flower emblem, it gives a great deal of weight to the idea that at least some uses of the arrowhead on non-Enterprise personnel were costuming errors, either that just fell through the cracks or that were deemed too marginal by the production staff to justify the expense of correcting.

    I would have at least liked to have seen that secretary's emblem turned into a flower for TOS-R. Perhaps it would have been too expensive an operation for convincingly "repairing" just a few seconds of footage, even in 2006, assuming the production staff even noticed it.

    Lucasfilm had demonstrated the viability of doing this sort of thing a couple of years earlier, when they fixed Admiral Piett's mirror-reversed badge near the end of The Empire Strikes Back for the 2004 DVD release. Unfortunately, for some reason, they didn't fix a similar problem with Lando in the Rebel cruiser hangar in Return of the Jedi (I speculate that they deemed it much less noticeable and/or it would have entailed too much expense to fix, much more than fixing the Piett segment in Empire cost). It's also worth noting that while they did a pretty good job fixing Admiral Piett's badge, it still looks a little fake.
     
  20. LMFAOschwarz

    LMFAOschwarz Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    I suppose if they started fixing stuff like that, the natural question might be to ask is, where should they stop? When Spock stuns that guard in Whom Gods Destroy, the wall wobbles a bit when he falls. Should they fix that? I have no answer or opinion, I'm just wondering aloud... :)