I'm leaning more and more towards just saying there was a massive refit of the ship after TFF due to its many problems, which coincided with Starfleet's new aesthetic mandate, explaining the starkly different interior appearance in TUC. I think that solves the problem without injecting too much wild theorizing.
I sure like the Navy's bright-n-visible design ethos upthread. In music, SO many panels/knobs/jacks, everything is matte black and SO hard to read, esp if you're playing somewhere with dim light. Even in my music room yesterday, a bedroom w/ an overhead light, but unfortunately a window behind my "box" that goes to computer, I had to go get a flashlight to see where the level knobs were set.
Perhaps a bit of a tangent, but a google of "navy interior design" lead me to this article on the interior fittings of HMS Queen Elizabeth, the Royal Navy's equivilant of the E-D https://www.portsmouth.co.uk/busine...interiors-royal-navys-biggest-warship-1069939 dJE
The thing which bugged me about TUC Ent, was the change of Kirk's quarters, from the nice, pretty decent sized one in TMP/TWOK, to the cramped little cubby hole one he had here!
Yeah. I have similar feels, but it fits with the whole “submarine” aspect Nicholas Meyer was going for. A theory I have is that for whatever reason, perhaps more complex systems on the Ent-A requiring more crew members, the crew complement requirement has thus expanded, meaning for a downgrade in size for officer’s quarters.
The Hunt for Red October was definitely an influence but his aspect has always been Hornblower, and I also think Meyer wanted to distance his movie to TFF and started changing things just for the sake of changing things. Besides that, Donny, I think your stuff is incredible and wow the images are spot on and fantastic but I don't believe Meyer was a visual genius like you think he was.
I never said he was a visual genius? An amazing storyteller and a capable director. But I do like the aesthetics of the film, but I in now way attribute this solely to Meyer nor am I saying that the aesthetic is necessarily genius. It fits the tone of the film, and it’s one I particularly like, along with many other aesthetic directions across Trek from the 60s to the 90s.
From Meyer's entire resume he was capable but I understand you like his work very much and your images represents that and it is spot on.
Interesting to bring up The Hunt for Red October. Also a Paramount production and some Star Trek stuff featured throughout...those freezer spacers used all over modern Trek, the carafes from ST6 Starfleet briefing, Gates McFadden...
And on the flip-side of that you've got the Russian sub's radiation alarms which got scavenged by Mike Okuda after Red October wrapped and were later used in the cockpit of the Bajoran fighter in DS9 "The Siege":
I’m pretty sure TUC reused some of the sound effects for the October’s silent drive activating as the warm up sounds for the Enterprise when it goes to 1/4 impulse for the trip out of Spacedock.
Must be from those one of those little electric ones for kids. I’m surprised they’d be found objects, I’d think those things would be pretty expensive in 1990 (they’re pretty expensive now, for a toy for five-year-olds), but maybe somebody knew somebody at the factory and could get rejected parts for cheap.
I thought someone said on a commentary or something that it was the same quarters, they just didn't show as much of it.
Those quarters were a reuse of the junior officers quarters on TNG, but by the time you get to Season 4, they had extensively modified the set to the point where they were almost unrecognizable as Kirk's quarters from TMP and TWOK (whereas in the first two seasons its origins are pretty obvious, especially with the curved wall).
The set still had the same layout as in the early TOS movies and early seasons of TNG, but was split in two by the “replicator” wall they placed between the two halves of the set. The half we see representing Kirk and Spock’s cabins in is the “bedroom” half of the set, yet the “living room” half of the set became the crew bunk where the gravity boots are found and crewman Dax is confronted later in the film. I’ll post pics when I’m back at my PC later.
This seems the simplest and most logical explanation to me. I don't care for this, as there's no reference to them getting yet another ship between TFF and TUC. It also begs the questions of: 1) Why they didn't just call it the Enterprise-B and: 2) Why it was decommissioned after less than a decade's service, even with all of its damage. This explanation creates more problems than it solves, IMO. This requires to completely discount TFF, though... Wait, you know what? I'm actually okay with that. Glad to hear it. The simplest explanation is the best. Occam's Razor and all.
There's a passing resemblance to a Jeep grille, and maybe they were found objects, but not from a Power Wheels toy. None of the ones back in the 80s (or since) ever had a grille that looked like this. They always had more and longer vertical slots (like their real-life counterparts), and the headlights were flush with the grille rather than the grille sticking out in front of them.