Re: Any Philly Star Trek area fans? George Takei & Avery Brooks in tow
I went to the Exhibition at the Franklin today. Unless you've never seen any Trek props, costumes etc up close I'd say that the whole affair is close to a rip-off. It's the least impressive public collection of Star Trek "artifacts" I've ever seen, including the traveling "Federation Science" exhibit that visited the Franklin in the early 90s, the Smithsonian exhibition about TOS in 1992 and the traveling Trek exhibits at the Paramount theme parks of the same era.
It's twenty-four bucks per person to get in. Photography is not permitted inside, but they're happy to take your photo greenscreened into the TOS bridge or the TNG transporter room, or "live" in the TNG bridge replica, and sell it to you for around thirty bucks for starts.
The best thing about the Franklin exhibition is definitely the costumes - they all appear to be authentic. All but one or two of the set pieces are replicas, and most of them not particularly close copies. The "scorpion" from Nemesis, the "pool table" fron TNG Engineering and the Dabo table from Quark's bar were the only likely original set pieces I spotted - bear in mind that most of this stuff was either destroyed or auctioned off at Christies a couple of years ago.
I guess there's more than one "Star Trek The Exhibit" traveling around at a time, and the set pieces you see online in photographs are split up between them - the TOS bridge replica, for example, is not part of the Franklin exhibit. Franklin has the TNG bridge, which is a decent replica as far as the floor plan goes although the details - height of the rear platform, for example - are off. It looks like it was probably based on the Vegas "Experience" TNG bridge, which had a flatter layout for practical reasons.
There is nothing in the way of props, costumes or set pieces from "Star Trek Enterprise" nor are there many ship models - there was what I think was a small Cardassian ship, and a Nebula hung from the ceiling - the latter displayed in such a way that you could not get much of a look at it at all. There's what appears to be a Master Replica TOS Enterprise under a plastic dome with a collection of replica TOS hand props - nothing original in the bunch. Again, most of the shooting models from the Trek movies and TV series went to private collectors at the Christies auction.
There's a nice exhibit of five or six costumes and some hand props from the Abrams movie. All in all, however, the whole thing is way overpriced and offers too little.
