If barely legible writing on doors and things are canon, when they were never intended to be seen clearly, we have to accept signs that say "Close cover before striking", "Do not remove tag under penalty of law", and "No user serviceable parts inside". Then there are the dedication plaques. USS Brattain: "...a three hour tour, a three hour tour." USS Excelsior, USS Hathaway, and USS Phoenix: "No matter where you go, there you are." USS Odyssey: "Its origin and purpose, still a total mystery." USS Sutherland: "There will be an answer, let it be..." There's also supposed to be a statistic on one of Beverly's overhead medical scanners identified as "Med Ins Rem" for "medical insurance remaining".
Lot of in jokes from the graphics department, you will never find a more wretched hive of nerds and geekery.
Except the intention of viewscreen graphics meant to be glimpsed in the background for a fraction of a second was not to be an integral part of a story, but just to be something that looked vaguely like it meant something. Film is about illusion. It's about creating an impression, and the details of what's used to create that impression may actually spoil the illusion if you look too closely. There's nothing to respect or disrespect. It's simply a matter of definition. Canon is the overall body of a work of fiction. It's not about every last obsessive detail, because the details are subordinate to the overall illusion or impression being created. What we're doing is enjoying a work of entertainment. Which is supposed to be fun and relaxing. Anyone who knows me or my Trek novels at all knows that I'm an obsessive researcher who often builds elements of my stories around extremely obscure details. Heck, I was the first novelist to mention Admiral Robert Comsol in a Star Trek novel, something you should appreciate. But I also understand the difference between fiction and reality, and I understand the degree to which the former is mutable and built around illusion. I can be obsessive about detail when it suits my purposes, but here's the thing: I can turn it off. Except it doesn't make sense to treat an incidental detail like a bit of joke text a set decorator put onto a screen as being equal in importance to actual scripted characterization or dialogue. The core of the work is the story and the characterization. That's important. That's the stuff you want to keep consistent. Set decoration only exists to support that, to be in the background and not get in the way of it. Sometimes the set decorators can put loving care and detail into it, and sometimes they'll just type up a bunch of lorem ipsum, and 99 percent of the audience will never know the difference, because it's just supposed to be background texture. If they do their job right, the audience won't even give it a thought. What matters is the impression, the illusion, the work as a whole. Right. Roddenberry was the one who redesigned the Klingons for TMP and asked audiences to accept that they'd always looked that way but TOS just hadn't had the budget to show them correctly. (I think he once proposed that the "transmissions from the future" were distorted.) He's also the one who, in his TMP novelization, treated TOS as a fictional 23rd-century series based on Kirk's real adventures and apologized for its inaccuracies and exaggerations. As I've pointed out before, what ends up onscreen isn't exactly what the creators wanted; it's just the best compromise they could manage with the time, budget, and resources available. Creators are almost never satisfied with the final version of their work, and almost always wish they could've done some things better or differently. So treating every last tiny detail as the creators' pure and holy intent is just ridiculous, and the creators themselves would be the first to laugh out loud at such an assumption.
Is it canon when the reflection of a cameraman is visible onscreen ("Unification II", IIRC)? Then there's Tasha waving at the camera in her last shot of her last filmed episode. And there's a Season 1 episode when Picard makes an odd mouth movement while walking into a turbolift...I think Patrick Stewart was puffing the door open, and didn't realize that it would be visible at that angle.
I almost forgot the increasingly-obvious use of stunt doubles in TOS! Is it canon that Spock's hair turns curly when he fights?
Canon considerations should be as directly related to the legibility of the graphics. For example, with the release of TNG on Bluray, a lot of screen details just went from "suspected canon" to "supercanon."
Who's to say that there isn't a large duck on the Enterprise? It could be the kiddie swimming pool with a slide down the neck. No reason there couldn't be. Some people, like Christopher, go for the broad strokes approach. The stories play out pretty much as we see but some of the details are a little fuzzy. Me, I prefer the "everything happened as we saw it" approach. Just because we can't work out all the hows and whys doesn't mean that we have to gloss over parts of it. ""It's a big galaxy Mr. Scott" Expand that idea to a multiverse and there's more than enough room for all the various stories, even the ones that appear to be contradictory. No need to rewrite the past. Make a copy and make your changes there. Was Khan a product of eugenics or genetic engineering? Yes to both, depending on which universe you're in. Why did the Enterprise-A travel to the center of the galaxy in a matter of hours or days when it would take Voyager decades to travel the same distance. Different universe with different laws of physics, at least where FTL travel is concerned. The whole idea of a prime universe which somehow sits above all the others is so limiting. No version of approved Star Trek is better or worse, more valid or important than any other. Enjoy your episodes, movies, comics and books. Fit it together however you like and don't worry about what someone decides is or isn't part of the whole tapestry.
I prefer the "if I don't think about it, the details don't hurt as much," approach. Though I do believe in the duck. The duck has gotta exist. If you can believe there's a superpowered Android, a functioning holodeck, warp drive and all the other magic, a giant duck is completely conceivable. Don't contradictions appear in real life as well?