Studio Eps that Needed Outdoor Shoot

Agreed. Had to be. No way they went out somewhere in LA with a fog machine for a minute-long scene. It's really effective, though. I totally buy it as outdoors.

 

Both Kirk and Sulu fire their phaser into the soil at different times in the episode.





Later, Sulu shoots Losira in her belly button.

 

Oh, that's right. Kirk is digging a grave for poor D'Amato, I think. But nice screen cap showing Sulu phasering into the planet's flammable soil. Given my username I really should know these things.

 

The Booth for you....Full Duration.

 

Well-earned

 

Move over, Chekov. Phaser Two is coming in.

 

So Kalandans have their navels where their livers should be?

 

^ Yup, according to Grey's Alien Anatomy. I guess that's better than having your alien gonads on your alien kneecap. Ouch!

 

This was a set, built and filmed on Desilu Stage 10. "Wolf in the Fold" was done entirely on a sound stage.

 

In a way, that frame of Losira almost looks as though she is firing a beam from her thumb!

 

Fake "exterior" sets have always looked fake, whether on the big movie screen or the old NTSC 525-line television screen. Compare these two shots from the 1964 comedy Man's Favorite Sport and tell me which is outdoors and which is an exterior set on a soundstage.

 

The first image is definitely outdoors, on-location. The second photo is obviously a sound stage. The first shows a hint of airborne road dust in the distance behind the old Jeep wagon. The sunlight and shadows in the first photo also make it a dead giveaway that would be extremely hard to create on a sound stage.

I doubt TOS could've done any more location shooting than it did, given the legends of constrained budgets for TOS, but a boy can dream...

"The Man Trap" would be an excellent candidate for a location shoot is a sufficiently desolate desert-like place could be used. It would have to be different than the locations used for "The Alternative Factor", "Shore Leave", and "Bread and Circuses".

Funny thing about the unnamed Kalaandan outpost in "That Which Survives"; the planet is presented to us as an artificial construct. I don't know if that makes any sense (why not just terraform an existing planetoid, instead of the zillions of gigatons of material needed to create an entirely new one?), but that's what the characters keep saying. Given this strange artificial planet, all bets are off as to what the environment would be like. It would be neat to fantasize about a location shoot in Australia or Africa, though...