...and the director of AF wasn’t invited back to TOS. I guess the production staff looked at the finished product and had the same reaction I had : WTH is this?!?!?
Big Budget TOS Episode
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...and the director of AF wasn’t invited back to TOS. I guess the production staff looked at the finished product and had the same reaction I had : WTH is this?!?!?
Part of TOS’ challenge was a lack of time along with a bit more money. More time could have allowed for more elaborate sets and f/x.
Still, you were never going to see cgi level f/x like today. Not even feature films of the period managed that. But some of the better of the ‘60s films show you what might have been in reach with a bit more time.
Still, you were never going to see cgi level f/x like today. Not even feature films of the period managed that. But some of the better of the ‘60s films show you what might have been in reach with a bit more time.
When I first saw 2001 : A Space Odyssey as a kid, the special effects were so good that I really thought that they had filmed the movie in space. Silly kid.
2001 is as good as it could get in the 1960s. Another example, in terms of makeup and sets, was Planet Of The Apes. Both films came out in 1968. I’m not saying TOS could have reached those levels, but it shows you what was possible then.When I first saw 2001 : A Space Odyssey as a kid, the special effects were so good that I really thought that they had filmed the movie in space. Silly kid.
The 20th Century Fox execs were worried that people might break out in hysterical laughter when they first viewed the ape makeup, but John Chambers and his crew did a masterful job.
I come back to the issue of time. They often didn’t have enough time to come up with possibly better and more polished f/x solutions. We didn’t get a greater variety of spaceships as we would have liked simply because they were too pressed for time.
I have no doubt Matt Jefferies could have come up with other Starfleet and other alien ship designs, but the poor guy had a crushing workload as it was. Ditto with sets.
Mind you sometimes being desperate works. The lack of a visible beam from Scotty’s phaser as he is cutting open the bulkhead in the original version of “The Naked Time” always struck me as much cooler and credible looking than having a visible beam cgi-ed in like in TOS-R. Not showing the Enterprise flying around like a fighter plane also worked. Not having all sorts of glitzy lighting effects along the Enterprise’s nacelles also looked more believable to me than what was done in later series as I imagined all those exotic fields and energies being invisible to the naked eye just as gravity and magnetism are invisible to the naked eye. We see the effects, but not the fields themselves.
I have no doubt Matt Jefferies could have come up with other Starfleet and other alien ship designs, but the poor guy had a crushing workload as it was. Ditto with sets.
Mind you sometimes being desperate works. The lack of a visible beam from Scotty’s phaser as he is cutting open the bulkhead in the original version of “The Naked Time” always struck me as much cooler and credible looking than having a visible beam cgi-ed in like in TOS-R. Not showing the Enterprise flying around like a fighter plane also worked. Not having all sorts of glitzy lighting effects along the Enterprise’s nacelles also looked more believable to me than what was done in later series as I imagined all those exotic fields and energies being invisible to the naked eye just as gravity and magnetism are invisible to the naked eye. We see the effects, but not the fields themselves.
Too late!
A fact that should always place TOS in a different category. This was not prop house production, and nearly every device, set or recurring set fixture (with the exception of the modified chairs) had to be created, and made to appear plausible. TOS was the first sci-fi series to achieve consistent, visual world building without the audience automatically thinking they have seen "the future" on a dozen other productions...a superhero's cave...a nuclear submarine set in the 70s...a colonization spaceship from 1997...yes, I'm talking about what happened at the 20th Century Fox lot.
Agreed.
No "improvements" would have served an already great story, which set up so much not only for the franchise going forward, but the continued character development of Kirk and Spock.
It's all relative. The lack of technology at the time, available materials of the time, the perception of sci-fi of the time, the number of bottle shows also revealing budget crunches...
Also of note is that $190,000 per episode (average) is, when adjusted for inflation, almost $1.4 million. Noting how much per-episode average TNG cost (TOS was shy of it, believe it or not)... And about 1/6th per ep if DSC requires $8 to $10 mil for each episode and it certainly looks it...
So proponents of either "it's expensive" and "it's cheap" are both not incorrect.
And, of course, existing technology being lower in price (e.g. fluorescent bulbs and fixtures) as well as being smaller and easier to use in more specialized fixtures of varying sizes and shapes...
Additionally, the average episode budget is also whittled down via amortization of larger reused sets (e.g. the Bridge set cost $x,xxx,xxx to build so they took a bit of that out of each produced episode. Trek was the most expensive show pilot of the time, which is also a reason why they did the then-unprecedented step of making a second pilot... otherwise the entire budget plonked into a failed pilot would be a HUGE loss. Sci-fi was a bigger gamble back then and it's harder to recycle props between productions - noting how often the reverse was true each time the Enterprise got caught up in some affair with a creature that was related to the Greeks or Romans...
TNG really had the best of both worlds in that regard, the cost of goodies and making nominal budgets look bigger. And without resorting to raiding other genres' wardrobes or use "parallel Earth development" to cut corners.
But both shows had some first rate bottle shows.
Additionally, the average episode budget is also whittled down via amortization of larger reused sets (e.g. the Bridge set cost $x,xxx,xxx to build so they took a bit of that out of each produced episode. Trek was the most expensive show pilot of the time, which is also a reason why they did the then-unprecedented step of making a second pilot... otherwise the entire budget plonked into a failed pilot would be a HUGE loss. Sci-fi was a bigger gamble back then and it's harder to recycle props between productions - noting how often the reverse was true each time the Enterprise got caught up in some affair with a creature that was related to the Greeks or Romans...
TNG really had the best of both worlds in that regard, the cost of goodies and making nominal budgets look bigger. And without resorting to raiding other genres' wardrobes or use "parallel Earth development" to cut corners.
But both shows had some first rate bottle shows.
The main thing wrong with "All Our Yesterdays" is that Kirk's adventure is weak sauce.
The trouble with comparing budgets between different studios is that each uses different bookkeeping methods. Trek got charged to its budget a lot of things that weren't line items in series budgets over at Fox, like meals. So it's really impossible to draw anything like a 1:1 comparison. That said, at Desilu/Paramount the studio spent more on shows like Mission: Impossible and Mannix, but both of those were for CBS, which loved Lucy and thus probably got higher network licensing fees. Even with that caveat, Star Trek's budget seems to have been decent for a primetime show, but Desilu was a pretty rinky-dink operation compared to Fox and didn't have as extensive a scene dock of elements which could be cheaply repurposed.
As @Harvey has said many times, NBC's licensing fee went up every season, but Star Trek's fixed costs, notably cast salaries, went up every year, eating up some of that increase, and the studio cut the budget back every year to try to ameliorate their deficit financing. This led to the 3rd season situation re the "radio show" budget.
Not your fault that this popularly repeated story is not actually correct. They never went to the city and there were never any statues, just annnnnncient men. To wit:
From the 1966-5-13 treatment (emphasis mine):
[...]They strike out toward the source of the radiation and in the far distance see a series of great mountains peaks, rising up like shards of glass from an ocean of silver. They get a distant impression of a great city on the furthest of those peaks, a series of spires that tower into the cadaverous grey skies without warmth or welcome.
[...]Soon they find themselves on a mountain top near the city. As they top a rise [...] they are astonished to see a group of men...but such men as the explorers from Earth have never know:[...]
The Ellison script drafts all conform to this, except that after the 1st draft the Guardians plural become a Guardian singular, and then a disembodied voice coming, as per the final episode.
A good point. However as the bridge and the transporter were built for the very expensive pilots with their much higher fees from NBC, the other standing sets are probably a better example of costs which could be amortized over the course of a season. In the Roddenberry letter to Paramount re the show's costs he suggests they can make better use of their budget if they can do more shipboard episodes and urges the studio to fight for that with NBC (which constantly pressed Trek to deliver on its promised "strange new worlds" format). Sadly, there's not a document trail we're aware of to support if Paramount did this (and I've never done a breakdown of the average number of bottle shows per season to test this idea).
Well.... according to Trek people, anyway. There's some evidence that the "No Place to Hide" pilot for Lost In Space might've been even more expensive than "The Cage" (see previous caveats about comparing budgets between studios). As to the "unprecedented" claim re the 2nd pilot @Harvey pretty thoroughly debunked this on his Star Trek Fact Check blog (link).
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It's always amazed me that that director -- Gerd Oswald -- did such a beautiful job directing "The Conscience of the King" and then did "The Alternative Factor." WTF indeed.
Oswald did stellar work on THE OUTER LIMITS. His "Corpus Earthing" is just about my favorite hour of '60s television, period.
I watched "The Magic Mirror" this weekend as a tribute to Michael J. Pollard. Great cinematography in that -- not by Polito, but by Charles Clarke who filled in for him on a couple of episodes. The set for inside the mirror is actually modest, but Clarke's photography makes it seem grander. The Blu-ray really shows off how good the photography is on first season Lost in Space.
It’s funny...Leo Penn did a good job directing 2 Kirks in The Enemy Within, but Gerd Oswald ran into big trouble with 2 Lazarus.
Worth remembering that AF lost two major plot elements that overlapped with other scripts, and might have been better with them. BUT... Gene Coon probably took them out of AF rather than the others as it wasn't worth handicapping two stronger episodes to improve one that was going to be lucky to even be mediocre.
Which two plot elements? Was one an alternate Kirk?
Romance between Marsters and Lazarus (overlapped with Space Seed, though now I check AF was shot first, just held back till almost the season end) and Kirk visiting the other universe Enterprise (City, which like AF was an early commission that wasn't made till the back 13, though it was taken out of that too, possibly because Coon realised the idea was worth a full episode, not just a sub-plot).
Bluntly, AF feels a bit "We are committed to delivering so many episodes, there is no money for new scripts, which of the existing scripts is closest to being useable? Maybe a strong guest star could make it viewable?" Of course we know how the guest star bit worked out...
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Interesting... Was much described about the other universe Enterprise?
I'd have to check, ages since I read the script page or outline, but as I recall it was pretty similar, just served to convince Kirk that he'd crossed into another universe.
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