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Gauging Interest: Saving The Enterprise-A Filming Model

The refit Enterprise is a beautiful design and hugely influential within the franchise, but it’s nowhere near as culturally significant as the original. The original series Enterprise is the symbol of Star Trek and one of the most iconic images in all of science fiction.

Why should it be a competition? The Smithsonian already has multiple Trek items in its collection, including the encased Enterprise pendant from "Catspaw" and an AMT Enterprise model kit donated by the retired Naval officer who assembled it (according to the book Inspired Enterprise, which we're discussing in this thread). Since when was a museum only allowed to have one object associated with a given artist or topic? Exploring how a cultural idea or an artist's body of work evolves over time is part of a museum's function.

And so is preserving historical artifacts, whether they're publicly displayed or not. The refit Enterprise is just sitting out in the open in a lobby, not protected from deterioration. Why should its preservation be dependent on whether it meets some threshold of "cultural significance"? That's not how museum staffs or historians think. They want to preserve as much of the past as they can, not just the parts someone arbitrarily says are more "important" than others. After all, those decisions are inevitably biased, and different generations and subcultures won't agree on what parts of a culture "deserve" to be remembered by history. Any part of the past ceasing to exist through neglect or deliberate destruction is a loss to history.
 
Paramount chose to put the model up for sale, as was their right. Bezos made a legal purchase of it, as was his right. Like it or not, the model now belongs to Bezos and as his property he can do with it as he pleases. I see no reason to get worked up over this, especially now, close to twenty years after the model was sold.
 
Paramount chose to put the model up for sale, as was their right. Bezos made a legal purchase of it, as was his right. Like it or not, the model now belongs to Bezos and as his property he can do with it as he pleases. I see no reason to get worked up over this, especially now, close to twenty years after the model was sold.

I don't think anyone is unaware of how property works. But rich people can often be persuaded to make donations, whether out of altruism (as rare as that is among non-fictional billionaires) or a desire for good PR or because it gets them a tax write-off. If Bezos is enough of a fan to want to own the miniature, maybe he's enough of one that he could be persuaded it would be better off in a museum where it could be preserved. There's no harm in asking.
 
Get the best craftspeople to do an exacting copy. Offer Bezos a trade. If he accepts, great. If not, there would be something to display for the general public....until such time as he changed his mind or his heirs could be convinced.

What happened to the previous one....the one they were going to use, but didn't? It did appear in all kinds of promotional pics, on magazine and book covers, etc. I lost track of the story on that one.
 
"It belongs in a museum!"
Alright, who had page one on the betting pool?
Paramount chose to put the model up for sale, as was their right. Bezos made a legal purchase of it, as was his right. Like it or not, the model now belongs to Bezos and as his property he can do with it as he pleases. I see no reason to get worked up over this, especially now, close to twenty years after the model was sold.
"Shaina, they bought their tickets. They knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash."
 
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