Original bridge screen graphics lost?

[ZapBrannigan]

Scripts are just starting points for a longer process. The panel in the photo appears in an insert shot, and it does not correspond to any actual component of the shuttle control panel that Latimer was looking at when he said the indicator was going crazy. So clearly the director and editor decided to stick in a close-up of some random display at that point, to illustrate the plot beat better. It would hardly be the only time that happened in TV or movies.

As a kid, I always wanted to see what was going on in Spock's hooded viewer. But the whole reason for having a hooded viewer was to spare the need for data graphics, which were a heavier lift in the Sixties.

Then came TAS, and I think there was a time or two when they had an insert shot for Spock's viewer. And that's when you realize there is nothing that viewer could show that couldn't be displayed on an open monitor. [I hope someone recalls a specific example so I can see it at TrekCore.]

The only real-world justification for the hood would be if it's an instrument only one person at a time can see, in the manner of a periscope, but in Star Trek's case, more like a dim 3D hologram that has to be shaded from ambient light. For in-universe plausibility, that's our last hope.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Then came TAS, and I think there was a time or two when they had an insert shot for Spock's viewer. And that's when you realize there is nothing that viewer could show that couldn't be displayed on an open monitor. [I hope someone recalls a specific example so I can see it at TrekCore.]

"Beyond the Farthest Star"

https://tas.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/blu-ray/101-BR/beyondthefartheststarhd0301.jpg
https://tas.trekcore.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=41&page=17

 

[Maurice]

Scripts are just starting points for a longer process. The panel in the photo appears in an insert shot, and it does not correspond to any actual component of the shuttle control panel that Latimer was looking at when he said the indicator was going crazy. So clearly the director and editor decided to stick in a close-up of some random display at that point, to illustrate the plot beat better. It would hardly be the only time that happened in TV or movies.

Or Justman or a producer like Roddenberry. There are editing notes from him in the archives.

 

[Phaser Two]

I'm not sure of a scene where we can see it very clearly but here is one that you can make out the blocks of color on the display.
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x14hd/balanceofterrorhd239.jpg
and of Sulu and another helmsman looking at the display
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x01-2-hd/themantraphd004.jpg
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x10hd/thecorbomitemaneuverhd018.jpg
You can see the display replaced with the twin doors in S3
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/3x05hd/isthereintruthnobeautyhd0620.jpg
But they re-use a shot from S1 in S3's "Lights of Zetar" so the display is back on the helm control panel...
https://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/3x18hd/thelightsofzetarhd0035.jpg

Ah, right you are! Well done. Thanks. I forgot that Sulu's not-a-screen prior to the popup looked much like some of the displays on the LC station, or the transporter console. And I think I learned that from feek's site, not from watching any S1 ep. Good eye!

Love that S3 shot with rarely seen bridge stations looking so nice.

I was just about to type the same thing! And manned! I think my favorite station is engineering, but the weapons and navigation stations are so rarely seen that they always look great.

And @ZapBrannigan - the images from the hoods couldn't necessarily be projected on a screen if the viewer worked like a microscope. (Optics isn't my field so I won't go too far down that road.) Also, at least the LC station has tuning controls of some sort (or Nimoy made it appear so), so it might be easier to zoom in, pan and scan (heh), overlay data, switch sensing methods, etc. if the operator can focus on a narrow area rather than be distracted by other visual stimuli. By the time of the refit for The Motion Picture and Wrath of Khan, they decided that it didn't need to be a hood, but it was still a screen that Spock alone could see, and which conveyed the impression of a closed-off display.

 

[Richard S. Ta]

I don't think they would've seen it that way in the sixties.

Citation needed.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

And a display is not a control

You're speaking in the present tense, so that's demonstratively untrue; see the screens of smartphones and other touchscreens.

At the time TOS was made, you are correct that the distinction generally existed in the real world because of technical limitations.

By the time TNG rolled around, that was no longer the case, and the real world technical advancement was incorporated in-universe into the starship consoles [https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Control_interface#Touch-sensitive].

 

[Christopher]

Citation needed.

I explained my reasoning in the part you didn't quote. And "I don't think" does not require a citation, because it's not a claim of fact. I'm just suggesting ideas for consideration. One of the first things I learned as a history major was the importance of recognizing that people in earlier times didn't have the same viewpoint and experiences that we do, and thus they might not have defined concepts in the same way that we do. So it's important to take nothing for granted, to be aware of our own preconceptions and how they're shaped by our own experience, and how the experiences of people in the past might have shaped their beliefs and definitions differently. It's not about asserting certainty -- it's about recognizing that there's room for doubt. We can never absolutely know what people in the past thought of things. All we can do is resist our own assumptions and try to keep an open mind.

 

[Neopeius]

Wading in pedantically, since editing out anachronistic use of words has been my job for the past decade, with an emphasis on the 50s and 60s...

I think folks are talking past each other. The modern use of "screen", as in "cutting down your kids' screen time" is, indeed, anachronistic to the 60s. "Screen time" in 1967 refers to when a movie is going to be on, or the allocation of movies to a certain type/nationality ("In Russia, most screen-time is devoted to Communist films".) No one would use "screen" as a synonym for "computer" or in a collective form to refer to televisions and pocket computers.

But that's not the usage we're talking about. In Trek and other contemporary shows, we have copious use of the word "screen" as in "put it on screen" referring to view screens, large and small. The visual component of Bell's PicturePhone, which debuted in '64, was the "view screen". There were also "radar screens", common since the start of WW2 (fun fact: my grandpa spent the war looking at the screen of a radar on the smallest ship in the navy...when he wasn't sitting on the bow shooting at Japanese soldiers -- it was a amphibious support rocket ship, and it hit the beaches before the Marines.)

So between radar screens and view screens, it absolutely makes sense for a writer of the time to refer to a dedicated monitoring device as a "screen". The other option might be "display" although the modern usage where it's a noun by itself is, like screen, anachronistic. IBM terminals were "Display Stations" with "Display Controls". In the 1960s, "display" as an adjective and a verb, not a noun by itself.

In fact, the term I'd use for generic computer/device readouts would be "Display Screen", which is in very common usage by 1967. Which one could plausibly shorten to just "screen" since everyone would know the context.

 

[Christopher]

So between radar screens and view screens, it absolutely makes sense for a writer of the time to refer to a dedicated monitoring device as a "screen". The other option might be "display" although the modern usage where it's a noun by itself is, like screen, anachronistic. IBM terminals were "Display Stations" with "Display Controls". In the 1960s, "display" as an adjective and a verb, not a noun by itself.

Yes, of course. Obviously there were many things on the bridge that were meant to be screens and were called screens. All I'm saying is that not all of the displays were screens. Some were, some were not. The type shown in the first post of this thread was not a screen, but a panel of mechanical/lighted indicators.

 

[Neopeius]

Yes, of course. Obviously there were many things on the bridge that were meant to be screens and were called screens. All I'm saying is that not all of the displays were screens. Some were, some were not. The type shown in the first post of this thread was not a screen, but a panel of mechanical/lighted indicators.

Something like that might be a "board" or "indicators" or "readouts" I guess.

Another word for "screen" that might be more common if their information was dedicated would be "'scope".

 

[ZapBrannigan]

I'm 60, and for my whole life we referred to our "TV screens." How is this even a question?

 

[Phaser Two]

Something like that might be a "board" or "indicators" or "readouts" I guess.

Another word for "screen" that might be more common if their information was dedicated would be "'scope".

Agreed and good post; I particularly enjoyed the story about your grandfather. Offhand, I do not remember any references in Star Trek to "scopes," but the Star Wars installments IV through VI - naturally a decade-plus later and RUN FOR THE HILLS I JUST MENTIONED STAR WARS - referred to "scopes" from time to time. I believe one of the Imperial officers reporting to Vader via hologram when searching for the Falcon in the asteroid field makes a "scopes" reference. Again, 1980 as opposed to the late 60s, but perhaps interesting.

 

[Christopher]

Offhand, I do not remember any references in Star Trek to "scopes,"

In TOS/TAS, only two, in the sense of a viewing device (and two uses of "scope" in the sense of magnitude or range). One was a 20th-century radar scope in "Tomorow is Yesterday"; the other was Jaeger in "The Squire of Gothos" talking about what you might see looking at Earth through a "viewing scope" (i.e. a telescope, but they probably wanted to make it sound futuristic).

More generally, VGR: "One Small Step" mentions the Ares IV disappearing "off NASA's LIDAR scopes." And Discovery: "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad" mentions "pulse scope rifles," which I assume are pulse rifles with an aiming scope on them, but that's an odd way of putting it.

Another word for "screen" that might be more common if their information was dedicated would be "'scope".

A scope would probably be something like Spock's hooded viewer or Sulu's gooseneck viewer, by analogy with a periscope. Although it could also apply to something like a radar screen, e.g. maybe the swirly moire thingy on Spock's console. Or something like an oscilloscope.

 

[Neopeius]

A scope would probably be something like Spock's hooded viewer or Sulu's gooseneck viewer, by analogy with a periscope. Although it could also apply to something like a radar screen, e.g. maybe the swirly moire thingy on Spock's console. Or something like an oscilloscope.

I was thinking more the latter use. Periscope is very specialized.

This sort of thing is a lot of fun for me. A friend did a great story for our in-period Trekzine The Tricorder, and it read very modern in subtle ways. My challenge was, without changing the story at all, making it read like it was written in 1967.

 

[Phaser Two]

In TOS/TAS, only two, in the sense of a viewing device (and two uses of "scope" in the sense of magnitude or range). One was a 20th-century radar scope in "Tomorow is Yesterday"; the other was Jaeger in "The Squire of Gothos" talking about what you might see looking at Earth through a "viewing scope" (i.e. a telescope, but they probably wanted to make it sound futuristic).

Thanks, Christopher. I did not have time to check Chrissie's site. Glad to see my recollection was more or less correct.

 

[Christopher]

I was thinking more the latter use. Periscope is very specialized.

Periscope, telescope, microscope, rifle scope -- the word has long been used to mean a device you place your eyes against (or place against your eyes) to look through. Its use for an electronic display device such as an oscilloscope or radar scope is, of course, a far more recent broadening of the definition.

This sort of thing is a lot of fun for me. A friend did a great story for our in-period Trekzine The Tricorder, and it read very modern in subtle ways. My challenge was, without changing the story at all, making it read like it was written in 1967.

That can be tricky, to avoid anachronistic word usages. I just saw an episode of Wynonna Earp in which Doc Holliday (who in the show has been revived in the present day and still talks and acts like he's from the 19th century) said "I highly doubt" (something), which jarred me, since it's a phrase that's only become common in this century. The phrase always strikes me as wrong, since "highly" is usually used to modify adjectives, not verbs. I figure it's a back-formation from "highly doubtful." Back in Doc Holliday's, err, day, I suspect the usage would've been more like "I greatly doubt it" (which was far more common in the 19th century than the 20th) or "I gravely doubt it" (which was on the upswing in Doc's time).

A few years back, I copyedited a Western, and I did a lot of research to try to figure out whether certain words and phrases were in use at the time the book was set. It was an interesting challenge, but it was a lot of work.

Thanks, Christopher. I did not have time to check Chrissie's site. Glad to see my recollection was more or less correct.

I miss that page that searched the Trek transcripts for you. Once that went under, I had to go back to Google "site:" searches.

 

[alchemist]

Scripts are just starting points for a longer process.

That's a pretty broad statement. An outline or a first draft script is a starting point for a longer process but, by the time of the shooting draft, there's been a lot of input from the production personnel, including department heads, so the process is far along.

 

[Christopher]

That's a pretty broad statement. An outline or a first draft script is a starting point for a longer process but, by the time of the shooting draft, there's been a lot of input from the production personnel, including department heads, so the process is far along.

Yes, but we're talking about a specific insert shot that doesn't even match the console it's supposed to represent, which suggests it was added as a pickup shot after principal photography, or perhaps might even have been a stock element added in editing.

 

[Maurice]

I left off computer screen and microscope and telescope because they spike so high you can't really make out the rest of the chart.

Also "radar screen" could mean "screen" in a detection sense, like enemy bombers passing through a radar screen.

 

[Maurice]

Yes, but we're talking about a specific insert shot that doesn't even match the console it's supposed to represent, which suggests it was added as a pickup shot after principal photography, or perhaps might even have been a stock element added in editing.

Just admit you went overbroad already.