It looked exactly like the chair in "Dagger of the Mind"...
Yes, but you shouldn't put too much faith in props, costumes, and sets.
Do you know what the frame story of
Star Trek is? No, because there hsn't ever been one, and probably never will.
But whenever someone suspends disbelief in a
Star Trek production and sort of half believes it is real future events, they sort of have to accept that there is some sort of frame story (that no one has ever hearde of) explaining how knowledge of future events has travelled centuries into the past, into our era.
One possible frame story for
Star Trek would be that the visual records - menioned in
The Menagerie and used in
Court Martial - of various events have been sent back to our era somehow.. Thus possibly we could be seeing edited versions of the actual record tapes of various missions. And thus the look and sound of
Star Trek would be 100 percent accurate, except when there are visual contradictions.
Another possible frame story for
Star Trek would be that the official written reports of varius events have been sent back in time to our era. Those reports would be the basis ofthe scripts which would beused to film movies andepisodes with actors using props,costumes, and sets built in our era. So anything which is specified in a script, and finds its way into dialo gin an episode or movie, should be from the mission records sent bck in time to our era. But all the visual details would be result of people in our era uising their imaginations to depict a future world witout knowing what it looks like.
And in that case you couldn't trust that anything in any production would look like it does on screen. You can accep that the prop master would only make new props when they had to, and save money by reusing props stored from previous productions, even if the previouss users of a prop came from an entirely different culture than the ones using it in the more recent production.
And until we know the frame story of
Star Trek, which may never happen, we should go with a minimalist interpretation, that the plot but not the visual details is based on knowledge of the future.
For example, one episode of TNG used a modified version of a matte painting used in an episode of
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1981), so fans who assume that the visual sare accurate could come up with complex theories about how the two shows could be shoehorned somehow into the same ficitonal universe!
One of my other interests in the winning of the US west in real history and in reel history, and comparing the two.
The film
The Tall Men (1955) opens with a scene in a snow covered winter landscape. A title card indentifies it as Montana in 1866. There are many later scenes where the weather is much warmer. If the winter weather was in January to March, 1866, the scenes in warmer weather would be later in 1866. If the winter weather is October to December, 1866, the warmer weather later would be in 1867. So the only question about the fictional date is whether the whole movie happens in 1866 or whether it happens in 1866 and 1867.
In this thread
https://moviechat.org/tt0048691/The-Tall-Men/58c7221e5ec57f0478eb91b2/Date-not-even-close someone asks why the film is set in 1866 when all lhe weapons used are 1873 models. And other persons answered
that the prop master probably just got a bunch of guns from older western movies out of storage insted of making new guns for
The Tall Men (1955). That would save money and the prop master probably thought that only a few viewers would notice guns which were anachronistic especially if they were less than 10 years off the fictional date.
The wild west of ficiton is based on a real historic era.
The Tall Men (1955), and the novel it is based on, is set in a not totally historic time and place - all the characters and their doings are fictional for example, even though some of what they do would get them mentioned in the history books and old court documents if it was real - but is definately more historical than simply "The Wild West". When the cattle drive approches Montana, soldiers warn them that the route they plan to take, the Bozeman Trail, has been closed for travel, due to the danger from attacks by the Sioux led by Red Cloud.
(Bozeman, Montana mentioned in
Star Trek: Generations is named after John Bozeman, who blazed the Bozeman Trail, and the USS
Bozeman in TNG "Cause and Effect" is named after the town.)
The protagonists sneak onto the Bozeman Trail instead of taking the safer Bridger Trail. And that plot point sets the
The Tall Men (1955) firmly during the historic Red Cloud's War of 1866-1868, when Sioux attacks on travellers on the Bozeman Trail caused its abandonment, a quite famous event in the history of the west..
Obviously the fictional date was specified in the original novel to fit in with the historic Red Coud's War, and the script of the movie follwed it - because why go to the trouble of choosing a non historic date for the events - and so no doubt the stript specified that the title card would say:
Montana Territory - 1866. They came from the South, headed for the goldfields... Ben and Clint Allison, lonely and desperate men. Riding away from a heartbreak memory of Gettysburg. Looking for a new life. A story of tall men - and long shadows.
.
Because that was the intention of the main creators of the film. But I'm sure the script didn't specify what type of guns would be used and that decision was left to the prop master.
So to me it seems to be rather dubious to deduce anything from the reuse of a prop in
Star Trek. It would be vary rare for a script to specify which individual prop from any earlier episode would be used, and so that is very unlikely to be a detail from official reports of Captain Kirk sent back in time to our era, which is probalby the frame story that fans should use to avoid assuming too much about visuals of the era of TOS.
