The Excelsior Bridge Looks So Much Cooler in III Than VI

Fine by me, as the STVI bridge is also one of my favorites. A huge step up from the underwhelming bridge set for STV.

 

I'd say the thing that sticks out to me about the SFS bridge is the Captain's chair. Maybe it was a budgetary constraint like a lot of other things in the movie, but I typically expect the Captain to have a unique looking chair compared to the rest of the bridge. As primitave as it was on a TV budget, Kirk's chair at least looked like it offered benefits to the person sitting in it. They could record logs, issue alerts, use the built in communicator, and a couple of other things I'm probably not remembering right now. With its elevated position it gives an unimpeded view of everything and everyone on the bridge. Even Voyager's captain chair looked better and that was something I've always said had the aesthestics of a jump seat in the cockpit of an airliner, though Janeway and Chakotay at least got a personal display to use.

The chair in TSFS just sits on the floor in the middle of the room and is exactly the same as every other chair on the bridge. It sits there all alone like it's calling out to a desk just so it will look complete. Maybe the Excelsior design team had every other part of the ship done and realized they only had five minutes to finish the bridge before submitting it to Starfleet for final approval. From the way Styles talks it sounds as though the ship is pretty much complete so it can begin its transwarp engine trials. I can't imagine someone at Starfleet going, "Eh, we'll fix that later," when it comes to the most important part of the ship. They defintely made everything better in TUC.

 

I'm not sure what context you mean here. The TSFS Excelsior chair is elevated above every other chair on the bridge, has an unimpeded view, and the forward console is split in half down the middle arguably giving him an even better view of the room. His chair does have controls in it, allowing him to contact the Enterprise bridge by using a SINGLE BUTTON, not even needing a comms officer to establish a connection..!

Meanwhile over on the ship they're chasing, Kirk is sitting one step DOWN from everyone else (except the Helm/Nav guys), the front console is a solid block in his eyeline, and he need Chekov to relay every detail of who's yelling at him at any given point. All of this was carried over from the series, except of course Kirk had Uhura in his ear at the time, and his console communication's doodad was more for shipwide addresses than anything else.

I'm being sarcastic, but the bridges (and their chairs) are more analogous than you may think at first blush. In the previous movies, the Enterprise captain's chair is more or less identical to the other chairs on the bridge, featuring that cool lap belt feature, size and shape; the Excelsior does the same thing - and I do recognize you're talking more about the TOS series bridge. But even the E-A retains this concept, though they give Kirk his own different chair merely weeks later, and finally remember the ergonomics of everyone else not having their chairs nailed to the ground when reaching for their consoles.

Mark

PS - Oh, and the Voyager command chairs! Cool and sleek they may be, but they have the WORST ergonomics of any command station. Both Janeway and Chakotay spend seven years leaning to one side and craning their neck to get a decent look at their shared console, which is offset from their natural angle of looking at something. You also can't press a button on the opposite side of the console without scooching over. Ouch.

 

It also looked like one long wall as opposed to a circular set.

Otherwise, yeah, the colorful backdrop, ALERT indicators by the turbolift, seat harnesses, glowing chair supports... crew looking busy to make up for what was sparse... there was a lot to like about Excelsior in III.

Great question! Maybe the Excelsior sets had been scuppered, thrown away. III's version conceptually looked far better but it did look like a long wall as opposed to a more confined circular setting.

 

Oh, the TSFS Exclesior bridge wall WAS curved. Just not very much... It was to the point that if it was allowed to form a full circle, the bridge set would have been very, VERY big. Impractically so, I'd wager, so it's even possible that the bridge may not have been a fully circular layout.



Mark

 

Styles probably didn't spend much time in the chair anyway. He looks like he's one to walk around whacking people with his swagger stick.

 

$20 says he was fired because he tried to dremmel a hole in his command chair for said baton.

Mark

 

I love the Excelsior bridge in TUC. It fits that era's aesthetic perfectly, as far as I'm concerned. One of my favorite bridges all around, too.

 

From the drawing of the SFS bridge it appears to be sitting level with every single other chair in the room and is exactly identical to the rest. I guess I just find it unimpressive and not unique, though that could all probably be chalked up to budget issues as was mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Still better than the Ambassador bridge which has a console right front of the viewscreen for some unexplained reason. I forgot that the TOS bridge had the pit so you've got me on that one. And like I said, the command chairs looks like jump seats ripped out of a 747's cockpit and covered in pleather. Nothing remotely remarkable about them.

 

As stated, the drawing is wrong. The captain's chair and the helm and nav consoles were up on a platform. If you watch the scene that still is from you can see Styles step up onto it when he enters the bridge.

 

You're right. I can see it in the still because that woman's boots are cutoff above the ankle. I'll have to watch the movies again to refresh my knowledge.

 

The TSFS version of the bridge was perfect for the Excelsior. It conveyed size, power, and a step in a different direction from the standard bridges we'd seen on the Constitutions and Mirandas (and Oberths in the same movie) up to that point.

The TUC bridge just looked like another bridge of that era...except it had a nice place for Sulu's tea and chairs on wheels for when the inertial dampeners fail and all hell breaks loose.

 

I thought it was perfect for another reason.

That bridge is the epitome of 80s cheese, right down to the illumination in the chair bases which seem to serve no function other than to look cool. I mean, come on, it almost looks like a leftover from the V Miniseries. The only interior design cheesier is the Kelvin-verse stuff.

I think they went out of their way to go over-the-top just to make you view the new kid on the block as tacky and tasteless in its bling vs. the graceful old-world charm of the refit Enterprise, which by that time was just starting to show its dated 70s heritage.

When Sulu took over, the Excelsior is not supposed to be the object of ridicule anymore. We're supposed to finally embrace it, and while the exterior didn't change, they at least toned down the bridge (although I'm sure they also didn't have the budget to recreate the SFS bridge if they had wanted to.)

 

Every frame of the Excelsior bridge in TSFS is here, waiting to be dissected:

[youtube] [/youtube]

I have to agree that they the interior sets of the Excelsior - shiny, new, huge - were meant to convey that the ship was supposed to be in every way better than poor old Enterprise, for the singular purpose of conveying how much more awesome our hero ship and her crew are by defeating the effective replacement. I know that movie exec producer Harve Bennett's main idea was to ultimately put Kirk in command of the Excelsior by the end of the following film (which they did for a while in the comics) and that it was overridden.. One wonders if he'd been allowed to do that, they'd have kept that bridge set..?

Mark

 

The Excelsior bridge looks like a prototype for the STV: TFF bridge, I imagine that's what they'd have used. The lighting and way it was shot made the V bridge look wide and open whereas the Nick Meyer STVI version of the same set looks cramped and dark.

 

It's the paint job as much as the lighting. The pale, reflective beige versus the light-absorbing dark blue and grey make a big difference. Even so, I like the controls in TUC much more than in TFF.

And I think they raised the steps and upper level. The TUC bridge looks deeper than the TFF bridge.

 

I doubt it. They even redesigned the Klingon Bird of Prey bridge between films.

 

I agree with this. Even when I first saw the movie, I remember thinking that the bridge was intentionally made to look over-the-top and borderline gaudy - swaggering annoyingly just as her captain does; cold in a department store sort of way. We're not supposed to like the Excelsior very much, so we can cheer when our heroes disable her.

 

I like the large set they built for STIII. It looks more advanced than the STTMP era consoles and screens, which is what it was designed to do. I also like the blue scheme of the STVI set, but I have to give the edge to the attempt to make a bigger, more impressive set than the redress of the Enterprise set in VI.

RAMA

 

Obviously it was the cold cup which the one he was handed was intended to replace. They didn't invent self warming mugs till the 24th century......

Oh screw these convoluted attempts to find an in universe explanation, it's a continuity error and I'm boycotting .