Puh-lease - I mean, who can get enough of "Line-by-line" threads? 
What is it about TOS that makes it look so distinctly 1960s?
- Thread starter Captain Al
- Start date
Well, in a sense. Adamski’s famous “UFO” photo is actually the top of a canister vacuum cleaner sitting on a chicken egg incubator — both of which may very well be patented.
I wonder if the George Adamski saucer is patented or trademarked?
The Eastern Bloc often had greater creativity than their western counterparts in production design. The Cosmostrator was one of the best interior designs of the the 50-70s.
RAMA
Last edited:
Doesn't minimalism imply intent? I assume jeffries and co. did as much as they could to simulate what they thought ship interiors, computers, etc. would really look like.
Computers in that day mid-60s were big, architecturally plain boxes with banks of blinking lights, right? Picture NASA's control room I grew up seeing every now an then, or their clean rooms (white guys in white suits with little furniture in a bright, white room).
The bridge, the set where they invested so much, and for good reason, is really quite detailed.
I haven't read that article in eons, so maybe I am off on a wrong tack, but I think where Trek is minimalistic, it was not intentional artisitic choice (as it is in, say, Glass' music of the '80s), but result of budget constraint or modeling the future on the look of the present, as all sci fi does.
Computers in that day mid-60s were big, architecturally plain boxes with banks of blinking lights, right? Picture NASA's control room I grew up seeing every now an then, or their clean rooms (white guys in white suits with little furniture in a bright, white room).
The bridge, the set where they invested so much, and for good reason, is really quite detailed.
I haven't read that article in eons, so maybe I am off on a wrong tack, but I think where Trek is minimalistic, it was not intentional artisitic choice (as it is in, say, Glass' music of the '80s), but result of budget constraint or modeling the future on the look of the present, as all sci fi does.
No, they did what they could to design sets and props that they thought would look good on a television show. While they were certainly informed by what they thought would be plausible, they were also informed by their aesthetic tastes, since they were creating an artistic work, not a technical reference. The Star Trek design style is heavily influenced by the design sensibilities of the '50s and '60s, not just minimalism but Art Deco and the "Googie" architectural style prominent in the 1964 New York World's Fair.
And of course the technology they were emulating had its own designers whose choices were influenced by the design sensibilities of the era.
Yes, and you can see real computers from the period used as props in '60s shows like The Time Tunnel as well as Lost in Space and Batman.
Why should those be mutually exclusive? Modeling the future on the present is an artistic choice, and so is designing with budget limitations in mind. It's natural that a designer would choose a design style that suits the materials and resources at hand. The budget limitations were naturally a factor in the choice to employ minimalism, but that doesn't mean they were the only reason, or that Jefferies and his staff somehow didn't know they were being minimalist.
I mean, look at "Spectre of the Gun" or "The Empath," the gorgeous theatrical look of those sets. Yes, clearly they were adapting to a tightly restricted budget, but they didn't just slap things together at random to make them look that compelling. They consciously designed sets around the idea of minimalism and stylization. They were unquestionably embracing minimalism as a design style, and the fact that they had to do so doesn't invalidate the creativity and aesthetic judgment that went into it. I've seen similarly minimalist sets that simply didn't look as good, like in the third season of Batman in the same year, where new sets built for an episode tended to be just assorted set pieces against a vacant black background. The principle was much like that in "The Empath," but it looked crude by comparison. Or maybe it's just that it was out of place in Batman, a show whose previously established design sensibilities were so anti-minimalist, so garish and psychedelic and elaborate. But Star Trek was minimalist from the start, even when it had more money to work with, so the third-season sets still worked in the context of the show's established look. Design still matters even when -- especially when -- budget is limited.
Besides, a lot of the stuff discussed in that Nicholson article about minimalism in Trek has little to do with budget. Like when he talks about the lighting, the decision to paint the walls of a set in a single dominant color rather than a bunch of different colors. It wouldn't have cost any more money to do the latter -- they would've just had to put differently-colored gels in the various lights rather than the same color in all of them. Or when he talks about the shot composition and deliberate theatricality of the show. I do think Nicholson overreaches at times, tries too hard to force all the facts to fit into his thesis, but there's merit to his basic idea.
Faced with extreme limitations, though, an artist can choose to either knock something off in the simplest way to meet a deadline or to address the problem in the context of his/her training, stylistic and aesthetic sensibility.
Jefferies clearly strained to invest his work with as much interesting design elements as he could as his working budget was reduced season after season. Look at the interiors for planets-of-the-week - The Cloud Minders is a good example - which continued to feature interesting arches, textures, scultural details and other architectural elements at a point when the underfunded, failing show's production designer would have been justified in phoning in some wall flats and rectangular doorways available from stock.
I don't doubt for a moment that Jefferies gave some thought to the design framework which would provide a guide or reference for making the most striking and satisfying use of his limited materials - most good designers do.
I actually think the choice to paint the walls with light instead of chromatic paint WAS in part a budgetary choice. It's easier to make the same sets look different if you can change the color on the fly, and it's certainly cheaper to slap gels on some lights than to repaint the flats for a given scene.
If there was one thing that Matt Jefferies and his team demonstrated repeatedly, it's that they could get complicated if the need arose, usually by raiding Mission: Impossible's trash dumpsters or the studio commissary, or taking some props already on hand and doing some kitbashing.
I'd say their attempts at minimalism was as much an aesthetic choice as it was a budgetary one. After all, "Spectre of the Gun" could just as easily have been shot on a western backlot (Did Paramount still have the 40 Acres lot, or did they sell it off by this point?).
I'd say their attempts at minimalism was as much an aesthetic choice as it was a budgetary one. After all, "Spectre of the Gun" could just as easily have been shot on a western backlot (Did Paramount still have the 40 Acres lot, or did they sell it off by this point?).
BOY did I communicate poorly, I think. I'll try points. I get wordy somtimes.
1. Of course MJ was artistic and made artistic decisions.
2. I am skeptical he chose to have simple looking sets, esp. some ship interiors and computer consoles, just to be simple.
3. "Minimalism" implies deliberately being simple as a reaction (rejection) of the more complex that came before. Hemingway's prose in your line of work, Christopher. Or Miles Davis's cool period reacting to the muchness that was bebop.
4. Spectre is minimalist and surreal. I love it. Empath is minimalist, but the show wants you to believe the place "really" looks that way. These are obviously exceptions to the overall look of the show. A minimalist set would be the bridge, say, with plain chairs and boards meant to stand in for the "real" things we'd be left to imagine.
To summarize, some of Trek is kinda bare bones, but just doesn't seem minimalistic to me (deliberate simplity as a reaction to complexity).
But that's just me. And I still love the look regardless of intent. All hail Matt Jeffries and other designers!
1. Of course MJ was artistic and made artistic decisions.
2. I am skeptical he chose to have simple looking sets, esp. some ship interiors and computer consoles, just to be simple.
3. "Minimalism" implies deliberately being simple as a reaction (rejection) of the more complex that came before. Hemingway's prose in your line of work, Christopher. Or Miles Davis's cool period reacting to the muchness that was bebop.
4. Spectre is minimalist and surreal. I love it. Empath is minimalist, but the show wants you to believe the place "really" looks that way. These are obviously exceptions to the overall look of the show. A minimalist set would be the bridge, say, with plain chairs and boards meant to stand in for the "real" things we'd be left to imagine.
To summarize, some of Trek is kinda bare bones, but just doesn't seem minimalistic to me (deliberate simplity as a reaction to complexity).
But that's just me. And I still love the look regardless of intent. All hail Matt Jeffries and other designers!
Last edited:
No, you're missing my (and Nicholson's) point. Yes, obviously using light to make the same set look like different sets at different times was a budgetary choice, but that's not the issue here. What Nicholson was saying was that the choice to light a single use of a given set with a single color, rather than a mix of different colors, was a minimalist choice. I.e. the entire room is lit orange, or blue, or green, but not orange on one wall, blue on a second, and green on a third at the same time.
Paramount sold off the 40 Acres backlot in 1968, but I'm not sure if it was before or after May, when "Spectre" was filmed. But I think that, backlot or no, location filming would be costlier than indoors filming.
According to Star Trek 365, the script that became "Spectre" was under consideration as early as the first season, but "traveling to a rented western town location was deemed too costly." I'm not sure why that would've been seen as costlier than shooting on the 40 Acres lot for "Miri" or "City on the Edge." Maybe they didn't think 40 Acres' Western-town section suited their needs.
Jefferies believed in a clean design style. For instance, he chose to make the outer hull of the Enterprise smooth and solid because he believed a starship would be designed so that all its components could be maintained from the inside. He never would've gone for the proliferation of hatches and textured details that are all over modern spaceship designs. He certainly could've applied a similar sensibility to the interior design. And there's certainly merit to that idea. I'm looking at my new laptop right now, which is closed and has my keyboard and desk monitor plugged into it, and aside from the various ports on the sides, it's an extremely simple design, very smooth and featureless. Same with my DVD player -- older models had all sorts of lights and buttons and display panels, but my current one is a small, slim black box that's nearly featureless. A lot of designers today make technology look extremely "simple" in design. So why is it hard to believe that Matt Jefferies might have done the same as a conscious choice?
I'm uneasy with the idea that a thing should be defined only by what it's opposed to. That might be part of the motivation for the style's initial emergence, but how sad it would be if it never had any purpose beyond being against something. If something has merit, it should be a positive statement in its own right, not merely a protest of something else.
I don't entirely agree. Yes, within the story, it was supposed to be a real location, but the presentation of the story was blatantly theatrical. When watching a stage play, you don't take the set literally, but accept it as a way of presenting an idea, an aspect of the performance. You differentiate between the manner of expression and the underlying "reality" it's expressing.
Not entirely. An adaptation to the restricted budget, yes, but one that still fits within the established theatricality that was to be found in the series on multiple levels -- the staging, the acting, the dialogue.
To a great extent "minimalism" was dictated by budget. I would guarantee the discussion would be over if they had even 50% more budget...because of course the production would have been more elaborate. That's a given. I can recall many times in certain printed accounts of the show where more expensive designs by Jeffries were trimmed or eliminated for the budget.
RAMA
RAMA
^But even a more expensive design could have minimalist elements for reasons that have nothing to do with budget. For instance, what I said above about Jefferies wanting starship hulls to be smooth. Nobody has denied that the budget contributed to the minimalist look, but I think it's premature to assume that was the exclusive factor behind it. No counterfactual assertion is "a given." It's just a conjecture.
"The City of the Edge of Forever" was the most expensive episode of the first season (and the series, I think), so it's not really a great episode for budgetary comparison. I'm not sure about "Miri," though.
Well, they used the same backlot...
Which meant they did a lot of bottle shows to save up for "The Paradise Syndrome".
Kinda the other way around, since TPS was only the third episode produced that season. So it's more like they blew their location budget right up front and had to make do with cheaper studio shoots for the rest of the season.
It'd probably be more accurate to say it's a little of both, considering how far in advance the season has to be planned out.
Not a problem. I think any fan of SF should listen to Dimension X and X-Minus One. They were some of the best shows of the day, not to mention the best SF.
Our fathers' and now grandfathers' era of fan listened to these two shows just as religiously as we watch Doctor Who or Battlestar Galactica, after all. Even modern Star Trek, when it's been worth it ...
But the Internet Archive really is your friend if you're into OTR or want to hear more of it. Most of the shows are now in the public domain, which means the Archive has an enormous collection.
It's not all great. There was a lot of low-budget stuff produced with just an organ for music and one over-worked sound effects guy who was so dedicated that he rarely missed a cue. It's like any other medium, with it's crap along with its genius.
In fact, in the larger genre of OTR I'd categorize Dimension X and X-Minus One not as genius radio, but a solid, well-executed and produced stories. They always had an orchestra, they had well-thought-out sound effects that helped tell the story. A few of the episodes were great radio, but not all of them.
They didn't push any boundaries of the medium, but told great stories.
Dragnet, on the other hand, features some serious genius in action. I recommend any two-part episode you see.
There's always a good chance that any random episode will be pretty damned good radio -- but Webb knew a really good story when he saw one. The two-parters were all really good stories.
Try "The Big Man": Friday goes undercover for six months to break a narcotics ring. He completely insinuates himself into a local gang in part 1 (resulting in their apprehension), then goes onto an undercover surveilance detail to catch the kingpin in part 2.
Fantastic radio: if the seagulls don't convince you that Friday and his men are eating lunch at the coast, nothing will. Listen to the scene carefully (you'll know which one) and see everything Webb put into it. The location, the dialog (some of which is very minor personal stuff that's brilliantly understated characterization) ... everything you hear puts you into an undercover surveillance detail who are now bored stiff from watching their little chunk of the real estate around the kingpin's house. Nobody says they're bored stiff because professional cops like Friday never bellyached about the downside of the job. Stakeouts were boring, and that was that.
But you can hear it in their voices, their conversation, the way they talk to the Captain when he comes to debrief them about the day's activities, hoping he'll bring news of some movement that will take them off surveillance. Yet right along with it, he's slipped in a ton of exposition about why they're doing the surveillance and how it fits into the bigger plan. Yet none of it ever seems forced. You're given all this stuff, layers, really, but it sounds perfectly natural.
Great story, brilliant radio. There's a reason Dragnet ran 314 episodes, the overwhelming majority produced concurrent with the weekly TV series. It's just that good. Plus, Jack Webb loved radio and resisted giving it up until 1957. He was one of the last major hold-outs.
Of course, there's a lot of OTR. Sit-coms, movie adaptations featuring the original casts, stand-up comedy, daytime soaps, detective shows, police shows, spy dramas, screwball comedies, thrillers ... it was an entire industry that young people today know almost nothing about. It was literally the broadcast television of its day, with thousands of hours' of airtime.
Most of it didn't survive, of course. Only rich listeners could afford the cutting-edge equipment to actually record what came over the radio, and even then they made pre-vinyl 78RPM record albums. What's left is mostly from affilliate stations that made recordings for delayed or later broadcast (again, pre-vinyl 78RPMs).
Of course, "high-tech" at the time meant you plopped the recorder's microphone in front of the speaker from your network feed and told everybody to shut up for the next half hour. Not exactly hi-fidelity.
Very occasionally, a network kept the original recordings, usually on well-preserved pre-vinyl 78s. You can usually tell those, as they lack the sound deficiencies you sort of come to expect of OTR. It gives you an idea of just how good these must have sounded when they first aired and with good reception.
Thankfully, a fair number of Dragnet survived that way -- some Dimension X/X-Minus One, too. I think "Green Hills" is one of those. The sound quality is very, very good for OTR.
Almost all of it is in the public domain and can be downloaded or streamed for free.
As I say, a bit of a passion of mine ... hope you get some fun from the links.
Dakota Smith
Excellent post! I discovered Internet Archive a few years ago, while looking for music from the '20's, and find I visit it more and more lately. While I had heard "X Minus 1" once or twice, I thought it more like a radio version of "Twilight Zone"....alot of present day, Earth based stuff with an alien or gadget thrown in.
I think it was "The Roads Must Roll", a story set on Earth, but in the future, that really made me take notice. I liked the description of The Roads and the world. I didn't realize that the next story (that would become my favorite) took place in the same fictional universe..."The Green Hills Of Earth". I was impressed that it was set exclusively on various ships and planets, and never once on Earth.
So I started listening to more eps, and found "Dimension X" as well. Loved that there is a 50's adaptation of Asimov's Empire story "Pebble In The Sky", but surprised that there's no "Foundation" stories since they seem like they'd be easier to adapt.
As for "Dragnet"....as a t.v. show I dismissed it as boring, years ago. But I've been listening to Radio Classics on Sirius, and they've aired some "Dragnet"....I've enjoyed the eps I've heard more than I ever thought I would.
Webb has a distinctive voice, and it really shines on radio, with no visual distractions. More nuanced than I recall.
I recently discovered Jack Webb in "Pat Novak...For Hire" and literally downloaded about five eps from Internet Archive last night. This show is the fucking best! You get Jack Webb playing a hard boiled noir guy with some of the best, over the top, noir dialogue!
Some examples from Wiki:
'The neighborhood was run down - the kind of place where the For Rent signs look like ransom notes.'
"...about as smart as teaching a cooking class to a group of cannibals".
Not the best of my faves, but I don't have any memorized just yet.
Would love a Star Trek radio show done as if Star Trek were a radio show that premiered in the late 40's, early 50's.
Now I also realize why TOS Enterprise is my favourite, it's not that it was the first, it's that it was part of the Minimalist style of the show! Clean lines, no ultra/over-textured hulls...
Wow, we REALLY lost something in the subsequent movies & series when Minimalist gave way to the busy-techie visual nonsense IMO.
Thank GOD(DESS) for Mike Okuda keeping with that Minimalist feel in the new FX for TOS' "special editions"!!
And too bad JJ Abrams did not set out to recapture that feel for his new movie (apart from costumes, which I felt were REALLY REALLY nice in that way!).
60's Trek was ONE OF A KIND.
I love classic 23rd century design. Black finish, silver highlights.
Similar threads
