Hey, I never noticed that before....
- Thread starter Warped9
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In Tholian Web, on the Defiant, the director uses different camera angles. From the engineering side of the bridge we see the stations to the left of Spock's. The immediate one has one oblong display on top, like Scotty's. The one to the left of that has one square display the same size as one of the two displays atop Spock's and Uhura's stations. I assumed all the single-display stations had the oblong shape.
Apparently it was always like that. They just didn't shoot from that side very often:
http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/3x05hd/isthereintruthnobeautyhd0606.jpg
I think it was Justman and Solow who said that every director wanted to put in all the bridge stations at once and shoot the complete set from the inside, but nobody could get the shot to work. I wonder if they could have done it with a hand-held camera, like the one used in the "Tribbles" barroom brawl.
I also recall a comment from the production of a fan film, probably Star Trek Continues, indicating that when they enclosed the set with all stations in at once, the temperature soared in there.
Would that be because of the amount of lighting needed to film the full bridge? I'm assuming the set for the fan production didn't have a ceiling, just like the original bridge set.
Nice screen cap, Zap. That's a great shot. Is that the most bridge ceiling we ever see? And there are officers at those stations too: nice. One's nav and one's defense iirc from TMOST, but I don't remember which. The half-station one is defense? subsystems, right?
I guess so; it must have something to do with the fully-enclosed circle cutting off most of the air circulation. And maybe their sound stage had a lower ceiling than the one at Desilu.
I'm pretty sure Greg Schnitzer would know about it firsthand, if he drops in on this thread.
The most ceiling, for sure.
And I checked "The Doomsday Machine" to see if the smaller overhead monitor is there in S2, and it's there. The individual bridge stations were on little wheels for ease of moving them around, and it's obvious that care was taken to always put the same ones in the same bridge position. The seldom-used starboard stations were just kept aside, faithfully waiting for their occasional uses.
I never noticed in TOS that the Starfleet emblem wasn't actually the Starfleet emblem, but was instead the Enterprise emblem. Whenever we saw someone from another ship or Starfleet, they were sporting a different emblem. Case in point: Decker in the Doomsday Machine. Doesn't seem to be until the movies came out that it became the symbol for Starfleet.
Mostly, yes, and most of us think it was the intention to have a different emblem for each ship. But several episodes feature crew of other ships wearing the delta emblem, probably just because the costume dept didn't have time to come up with something new. So it's inconsistent.
It must have seem like a lot of work to come up with a new design for each new ship in the show.
They'd also already deviated for the Antares in "Charlie X." It could be that it wasn't understood that the Antares wasn't supposed to be a part of Starfleet. I could be mistaken, but I don't believe that there's any dialog in the episode that actually says that.
Also, the outpost uniform seen in "Balance of Terror" and "Arena" has yet another badge on it (the fish). So, counting the Starbase flower in "Court Martial" and "The Menagerie," the first season alone sported four different insignia designs on uniforms that look like Starfleet uniforms*. Theiss et al could hardly be faulted for extending that to six for the second season.
* - I'm not counting the hand and dove emblem on Dr. Adams' jumpsuit.
Do I vaguely recall that I'm a bit confused about that, every time I watch that opening scene? Maybe it's that they treat Antares in the story as if it's just some random ship that picked Charlie up, maybe some run of the mill freighter, but maybe they had a Starfleet-ish uniform insignia. By accident?
I have a vague memory that the Antares might have been intended to be part of the Merchant Service.
I guess it would help if I understood something about the real life equivalent of that.
Getting into the spirit of the 50th anniversary, I watched "The Man Trap" a few nights back. I hadn't seen it in years as it's frankly not one of the episodes I consider as being particularly good. I will admit however, that I thought it was better than I had remembered.
One odd thing, however. In the scene where Kirk tells Uhura that 'José can wait for his chili peppers (no stereotyping there, huh Gene?),' there's a brief (5 seconds or so) shot of Spock bending over his scanners. During this tight shot of Nimoy, it looks like he's chewing something... gum... his cud, something!
One odd thing, however. In the scene where Kirk tells Uhura that 'José can wait for his chili peppers (no stereotyping there, huh Gene?),' there's a brief (5 seconds or so) shot of Spock bending over his scanners. During this tight shot of Nimoy, it looks like he's chewing something... gum... his cud, something!
I first learned that that's what was intended when that memo about costuming mentioned upthread surfaced a few years back, which says that.
It was explicit enough in earlier script drafts that James Blish included it in his adaptation.
If you need an in-universe explanation, you could assume that up until a year or so before the Enterprise's five-year mission began, every starship did have its own emblem. Then Starfleet ordered that every ship use the delta. To make the transition easy, since they didn't have replicators then, they would change at the end of their mission during the refit period. The Enterprise just got hers, so they wore deltas; other Starfleet ships might or might not be using the delta depending on how long they had been on their missions.
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