Hey, I never noticed that before....

The Mark of Gideon is one of the worst episodes of Season 3. Stupid plot. Ridiculously implausible considerations (i.e. complete fabrication of Enterprise interior on a planet with very limited space, all for the purpose of getting blood from Captain Kirk). But, the series does afford us some terrific shots of vacant portions of the ship, and Kirk walking about it alone. One I'd forgotten about was this really fascinating viewpoint on the bridge:



Notice the top portion... there's some kind of "faux" barrier in place to hide the top end of the set and the light rigging. They used some red trim that matches the railing. I don't think this kind of shot appears in any other episode. Very cool.

 

^^^ That photo has a couple more things I at least never noticed about the TOS Bridge:

It has actual steps to get to the upper platform level. Future Bridges has steps build into the next level.

And the chairs appears to just have four legs like a normal chair, yet I don't recall seeing a chair falling over when the ship shook.

 

There is an episode where a bridge chair eithers falls or gets knocked over, and the upper black back cushion flies off. I'll have to identify and locate the episode screen cap.

 

@tharpdevenport You're kidding -- you never noticed the steps? If you look in many previous episodes you'll see the actors movement "level up" twice from the flooring around the center command & control platform, telegraphing their rising 2 steps up to the upper deck of the bridge. But yes, visually you very rarely see them, and most of the time it's just a quick glimpse.

The chairs have one center post (not 4 legs)... but they have a "plus sign" support bottom to them, for stability. I believe they were of popular 1960's Danish design.

Btw, in that photo, notice the railing in immediate view is slightly askew, not following the upper deck outer edge like the others do.

 

It's probably multiple episodes. I seem to remember one where Kirk picks up the navigator's chair for him. Immunity Syndrome, perhaps. I wouldn't be surprised if Uhura's chair took a spill now and then too.

 

I think they put the camera under a section of a station. It happened to be where there's a corner, and the wide angle lens makes it look odd. Also, they had to raise the station so the camera would fit. Notice that it's higher than the chair!

 

Maybe not on the ship, but a similar trick was used to hide 20th century infrastructure in the distance on Cestus III. Some crumpled metal wreckage overhangs the shot:
http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x18/Arena_017.JPG

TOS-R fixed it for us:
http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x18hd/arenahd019.jpg

On "Metamorphosis," director Ralph Senensky was surprised at how tiny the planet set was. He had to use the foreground-covering trick a lot:
http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/2x09/Metamorphosis_022.JPG
http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/2x09/Metamorphosis_033.JPG
http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/2x09/Metamorphosis_035.JPG

I can't agree with that. As you noted, the fake overhang is too high to be the underside of a workstation control panel. And it's too low to be the overhead lighting alcove. But I think it's a rough, hasty attempt to look like the overhead alcove, while in fact it was a piece of wood cut and painted to fit in there and block our view.

This empty bridge shot is a nice one, too:
http://tos.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/1x24/thisideofparadise_348.jpg
By not going out as wide, they didn't have to hide the top.

 

IIRC, one of the production crew members said that the crumpled metal was used to obscure some houses or buildings in the distance. There is another high, wide shot where telephone/power poles are visible behind the fort on Cestus III.

 

You will also notice that the whole foreground section and rail is at an oddball angle to the rest of the set. It appears they wheeled in one or two of the "wild" sections normally pushed aside and didn't bother to line it up with the rest of the set.

 

Yep I'd spotted that as well (earlier post, #1570)

One thing that really cracked me up one time was when Kirk and Spock walked in front of the main view screen on the bridge. And production didn't bother to spend the money to green-screen it... instead for the view they employed a matte painting of static stars. You could see the overhead lights shining on it.

 

Gonna have to go full pedant here. hee hee

• Greenscreens were not used for traveling mattes for film; bluescreens were the main choice for photo-optical processes (unless you were Disney and used their one-of-a-kind sodium vapor process).
• Even if they'd wanted to, if the camera was panning they could not have blue screened the starfield into the viewer. It would have been next to impossible to move the starfield image to match the camera move. It would have slipped and slid in the viewer frame.
• A matte painting is a painted added optically or maybe via a glass shot, and generally an element placed over the live action. Assuming you mean "The Doomsday Machine" the image on the viewer was either a static backdrop or rear projected, aka a scenic painting or backdrop.

/pedant

 

Yes, if an image was going to be matted into the bridge viewscreen in post-production, the camera had to be locked down and stationary, and the scene had to be blocked so the actors' movements didn't obscure any part of the screen. In "Spock's Brain" (and maybe one or two other episodes, I don't recall off the top of my head), the main bridge viewer was rigged for live rear projection. That meant the actors could freely walk back and forth in front of the screen, and they did -- a lot!

(And you're not being a pedant -- you're just being a film geek!)

 

It was just a painting framed in the view screen. And for the brief walk in front of it, it worked great, especially in the days of standard def on a CRT tube.

They did use the rear-screen projector method in "Spock's Brain" though, and it was terrific.

 

Yep, it sure looked like a matte painting affixed to the view screen set cut-out. Had they coated it with a different treatment, there would have been less light reflection and then it would've looked more authentic. But as you mentioned, you'd likely not pick up on this detail considering the CRT tube displays of the day, and even the resolution on VHS. I still have a couple VHS copies of Star Trek TOS episodes and recently watched one for the heck of it. What a difference from today's remastered copies! There's just enough detail diffused to "protect" the visual flaws and artifacts. And I'm sure that the production crew worked with that in mind (why expend tremendous effort to hide what won't be seen anyway?).

Btw, another "Hey, I never noticed..."
In almost all of the remastered episodes, the credits segment shows stills from various episodes and the remastering effort did not address the specks of dust. Some of them are glaringly obvious. But that's OK. It's just a trailer, right? Well, they missed that dust in other places. In "The Mark of Gideon," when Spock is having a dialog with Hodin, the Gideon ambassador, you can see the still frame cut-out on the screen has a number of very obvious black flecks. Really distracting. I'm surprised that at least this wasn't cleaned up. I guess this episode was a low priority.

 

Oh, I know it had a second level -- all the series Bridges had a second level by way ot stepping up (except TNG, which had slopes), but I never looked at those little set of separate steps.

 

I got you now, individual step planks versus built-in steps. Yep, it's easy to miss, but they are there in a few episodes if you look for them .

It's funny... the TOS bridge didn't really feel all that "aged" to me until Voyager. Somehow TNG, while certainly more modern, didn't quite displace it for me. The huge step up was LCARS. Doing away with those pointless, stupid looking flashing squares of color exhibited in TOS. It's all legacy from the early 1960's and prior, where sci-fi productions made little flashing lights everywhere to make things look "busy" and "computing"... What really bugged me was how in the TOS movies, they really didn't upgrade sufficiently from that until the Enterprise B in Generations. At least LCARS made some sensible logic out of the graphical displays (although it too had some issues, namely too much real estate taken up by colored separators).

 

That Which Survives....during the earthquake, the plants and rocks that Kirk and crew are standing on shake, rattle and roll, but the plants in the foreground don't move at all.

 

Helmsman and navigator chairs both go over when Chekov loses it in "The Tholian Web."

 

Man did those need to be bolted down.