Stillborn Sulu Show

[Maurice]

Here's Tom's reply re the model in question:

Ed and I started building it in the 80s just for ourselves. We had the bulk of the part patterns made […] we poured the silicone glove molds probably around 1988. I don't recall Ed saying anything at the time, but Paramount wanted an Excelsior that could be used as kind of a targeting proxy -- and easily filmed, so I think Ed just painted it white and shipped it to them.

I'll reach out to Ed to see what he recalls.

Sadly, I got busy and never got a set of finished parts, so I don't have one. It was a beauty, about 3 feet long.

 

[Hal Jordan]

Here's Tom's reply re the model in question:

Okay, I think that sort of tracks with the backstory I got. Allowing for thirty-five years of advancing mental decline.

 

[Maurice]

For your amusement, here's that ca. 1992 Excelsior mesh with all the colors gone wonky in the file conversion/recovery process.

 

[Nerys Myk]

For your amusement, here's that ca. 1992 Excelsior mesh with all the colors gone wonky in the file conversion/recovery process.

That's a lot of LDS

 

[korblborp]

For your amusement, here's that ca. 1992 Excelsior mesh with all the colors gone wonky in the file conversion/recovery process.

the amazing technicolor bathtub

 

[Firebird]

That's a lot of LDS

It's his way...

 

[Maurice]

Different 3D file viewer, different colors, way too much smoothing. Bits look a tad melted.

Looking at it again, I'm starting to remember my thinking when modeling it. In those days, rendering was beyond slow, so I'd do a lot to limit the number of triangles to get the thing to render faster, including a lot of manual work placing vertices and building triangles. The mesh is 3,656 Vertices and 6,721 Faces.

This was initially built for an Atari ST software suite, which did not have texture mapping as we know it and could only display 16 colors at a time out of a palette of 512, so if you wanted different parts of an object to be different colors, you assigned colors to the triangles, or you made those different areas into separate objects.

I don't know how accurate their model was to the ILM hero miniature, but this mesh is very accurate to the plans of their model, as I really sweated the proportions. Since there's nothing in the opening under the tail, I'm assuming the plans Tom sent me didn't include anything for that.

 

[Qonundrum]

(Sorry for the alliteration). All the talk of Scott bakula and a show for him, combined with the vitrol over kurtzman trek , had me thinking about counterfactual scenarios….

Given all we know now, what are your thoughts on a stand alone Sulu TV show after The Undiscovered Country?

Observations:
- The TNG cast had essentially transitioned to the big screen by then
- the latter Berman Trek shows were “unsteady” in their writing and creativity.

Position:
I would argue that a TV show with some of the B team actors would have actually breathed some new life into the franchise. It would leverage existing and beloved characters and be a counter to the Berman burnout

What are your thoughts?

I vaguely recall that there was an idea or something, but all ditched apparently in favor of VOY, where "unsteady" definitely defines it, but with enough good stories to compensate for the disappointing ones, it was good enough and we got stellar character archetypes with Janeway, Seven, and Tuvok (with or without "The Odd Couple, In Space" double-act with Neelix) especially.

The show would have to be ensemble because one person could not be able to carry it on their own. Even TOS had three effective co-leads. TNG got lucky with Patrick Stewart, but written as an ensemble and the bridge crew all got to do much more than the non-big-three in TOS, it's too iconic. The Sulu show would be no less ensemble.

The remaining elephant in that bright shade of pink* goes right back to the scripts and tone. Who's making the show and would they capture the late-23rd century style of TWOK-TVH**, the mid-23rd that TOS (and TFF) had***, something completely different? Fun example, when Scotty was spouting treknobabble during the action scene early in GEN, that's TNG dialogue that feels distinctly out of seasons six or seven.

* An allusion more toward drunkenness regarding excessive alcohol, and not as much so as the popular liquid bismuth salicylate, even if it can assist if having just drank too much booze a few minutes/hours earlier.)​

** which would be the only style that would come close to working at the time, since I am not aware of any TV show made to predict what audiences might want to see 5 or 10+ years later, they make shows to fit what they predict the current moment is to most viewers across the spectrum (lowest common denominator, if I recall, but not so least that the show loses itself in the process - there's nothing more basic than a blank piece of paper and people generally don't gawk at one all day)​

*** Which, years if not decades on can be appreciated more as TFF channels the TOS feel but with excess comedy, but in the late-80s Trek moviegoers were used to the style of II-IV, noting that the 23rd century scenes in TVH were largely kept serious**** and the comedy cavalcade took place in the 20th century time zone​

**** the pompous (heiney) shout aside, which apparently was an ad-lib that doesn't do much except to create a narrative mess​

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[Maurice]

You know you're in trouble when you end-note and end-note.*

*