Is the bridge at a funny angle?

It's a dolly move and then they scaled the end on an optical printer, which accounts for the weird angles.

 

Ya, but it looks slidier than in the original. To me. But mirror images hit yer brain different.

 

This shot was from “Dagger of the Mind” and I believe it was never used again. The reversed decals were used on the starboard side. The slide and scaling, as Maurice said, was done with an optical printer. I think he suggested that it was a straightforward dolly shot as originally filmed.

This is speculation, but I recall seeing a memo (in TMoST?), complaining about the awkwardness of the Delta Vega approach shot. The same planet model seems to be used here and in the completed version of WNMHGB, as well as the first season main title. My surmise is that the DotM approach was intended, but not used, for the second pilot.

 

Yikes. My memory was bad. Forgot there was another slide, thank you. That’s a lot of trouble to go through w the reverse decals.

 

When you take a sobriety test with a buzz and then take one sober.

 

Sometime back it was suggested that the reverse shot of the ship used in Mirror Mirror would have had to be filmed during the second pilot and then just never used, due to the detail changes in the model. The alternative would have been to have reverted the model to its pilot appearance along with changing the decals for the Mirror Mirror shot.

So I think you are probably right: It seems that either the general pressures of the first season, or the fact that the ship was flying the other way here, probably means this is a shot that was unused from the second pilot.

 

They really hit the wall with the VFX pipeline early on and we know Justman said they cobbled together the titles with the shots they had on hand. I bet they went through a lot of the scrapped 2nd pilot effects looking for anything they could put to use.

 

I'm going to throw this out here, but please feel free to ignore any or all of this.

There really weren't any discarded effects shots from the second pilot. Once they had the model set up in the studio, they filmed the shots they needed, and then continued on taking a ton of additional generic footage to start building up an effects library. That extra footage was considered an investment for the series if picked up.

So, how important was that additional pilot footage? When funding became available to improve the studio models for the series, modifications were limited to things that wouldn't make the pilot footage unusable in the series. This was part of the reason Jefferies' idea of replacing the cylindrical engines was shot down by Roddenberry.

And while I'm sure that Justman said they cobbled together shots to make the original title sequence... it should be noted that the primary difference between the first season's title sequence and the second and third season's title sequences is that the latter used exclusively shots from the pilots (and none from the series). The single shot of the series version of the Enterprise in the first season's title sequence was replaced with a similar shot of the pilot version in its place.

The 11 foot model wasn't easy to film. Setting it up took a lot of effort, so anytime it was ready to be filmed, extra footage was shot to add to the library. And they were so effective at it that the 11 foot model wasn't filmed again after the mid point of the second season.

 

WHAAAT? The series model is in S1, but not in latter seasons? I never noticed. As we say up here in da UP, Holy Wah!!

The things ya learn here. Shades of Rumsfeld, I wonder what else I don’t know I don’t know.

 

Ironically, until discussions like these and related articles about TOS-R revealed the order that these effects were shot, I associated the larger deflector dish with the 2nd and 3rd seasons, due to the way it was used in the main title. I know that the smaller dish was used for new shots like the phasers firing from below that still get used on a lot of marketing, but it seems that way anyway.

In a similar fashion, the shot of the "smaller deflector" ship was so often combined with a following shot showing the "louver-ed" nacelle endcaps, that I thought that was the way the model was set up. The "balls" on the nacelle endcaps are so often shown in orbit that I thought the "louvers" were covered up when the ship was not using them.

 

There are some things I don't know and I don't want to know about them.

But huh, yeah. I never noticed a change in nearly 20 years as a fan.

I like the TOS remaster but we lose things like that in the process of all the FX being standardised.

 

TOS-R kept the tall bridge dome, oversized deflector dish, and nacelle spikes for "The Cage" and WNMHGB. Also, the louver'ed end caps can be still seen in WNMHGB. And these were all brought back for the I.S.S. Enterprise in "Mirror, Mirror."

 

I used to think the balls on the end caps were retractable. *shrug*

 

I never thought the spheres retracted or otherwise moved. I just figured the shots used different nacelle models and the effects limitations of the 1960s were why they came and went so often. My head canon had the spheres there all the time anyways, at least during the regular series.

 

Same here with the exception of "The Cage" Enterprise. I've only seen in that episode the vertical piece on the end cap which doesn't appear in any of the other episodes AFAIK.

 

Really?

That is sweet that they went to the trouble of doing that.

 

Only when the water was really cold.