Why do they dismantle or destroy old Star Trek bridges?

It was wonderful and impressive to see how the bridge of the Enterprise D was rebuilt for the 3rd season of Star Trek Picard. However, I am wondering why the set of the Enterprise D bridge had been dismantled (and apparently largely destroyed) in the first place. This was also reported in a documentary and in interviews, but the reason was not revealed. Is it actually so expensive to keep the bridge set - or at least to store the items somewhere else? I am sure that there are a lot of fans (perhaps including myself) who would pay for a visit to the original set. So, it could also pay off financially. In addition, as history has shown, it can always happen that writers want to include old bridges in a new series.

I also read that the bridge from the Original Series had soon been dismantled and destroyed, as well. For the TNG episode "Relics", they used blue screen technique to make the original bridge appear and rebuilt only a small part of it. Here again, I am wondering why they did not keep the original set or at least the items.

And will they also dismantle and destroy the newly rebuilt Enterprise D bridge? This would be a large mistake, I think!

 

Yes.

It was already dismantled a year ago.

 

That bridge was destroyed when they filmed Generations. They didn't build a separate set to blow up, but destroyed the original in the crash scene.

 

Money: it’s pretty expensive to keep a set like this built on the soundstage and destroying it and rebuilding it afterwards is cheaper than dismantling it and rebuilding it if you need it again. usually but not always anyway: if I remember correctly the Enterprise-E bridge was stored between films and reassembled with some refurbishing for each movie while the AbramsVerse one was rebuilt from scratch each time.

The downside of this reasoning is that you rebuild it only if you REALLY need it, which leads to using for example the wrong engineering or transporters set in the last TOS movies (“close enough”!) since the original sets no longer existed and the TNG ones where ready to be used, while the TNG bridge would have been too obviously wrong and they had to rebuild a TOS-style one for STV.

I read that they took provisions to save this new bridge, hope it’s true.

 

Basically, yes. Plus you have to consider the historical context of the time. DS9 was still in production and had built a number of new sets for its third season. In addition to the new sets being built for the Defiant, DS9 S3 also introduced the station's wardroom. And Voyager was going into production, needing a bunch of new sets for that. It simply made no sense to hold onto the Enterprise D's bridge, particularly since there was a studio mandate in place to have the ship destroyed in Generations so they could introduce a whole new Enterprise in the next movie. Studios don't hold onto sets they don't plan on using.

Why would they have kept the TOS bridge? In 1969, TOS was essentially considered a finished TV series. No one knew it would develop a large following in syndicated reruns in the 1970s, which would lead to an eventual revival. As far as anyone was concerned in 1969, Star Trek was done and it was time to move on. There was no practical reason to hold onto any of its sets. At all.

Even today with popular shows, all sets get destroyed when the show is done. In some cases, like Nu BSG, the sets were "digitally mapped" so that they could be accurately rebuilt in the event of a revival, but the sets themselves were still destroyed.

Already dismantled, though I believe it is currently being held in storage.

 

The stages for TNG had to be repurposed for Voyager. Indeed, a number of sets, including the bridge, reworked elements of the older sets.

The Paramount lot is large, but it cannot expand. It was built when Los Angeles could still be described as a medium size city with orchards and large unused tracts. Now that it is 4 million people, most land is developed. Indeed, most usable land in the county-twice the size as Delaware--is developed. Keeping old sets or even storing them within Southern California is probably prohibitive.

 

Let me add: for a number of years, fans could see a set that was a simplification of the D bridge at Star Trek: The Experience until it was lost due to mismanagement. Maybe it wasn't the precise set, but it was arguably sufficient and better oriented toward extracting fan dollars.

 

I loved star trek the experience at the (then ) Hilton. When out in work, I’d always go and hang out at quarks bar. For many years the Star Trek insignia outline could still be seen on the side of the building like a ghost when you took the tram.

haven’t been to Vegas in years no so can’t confirm if it’s still there

 

But the parts like consoles, chairs, etc are in storage somewhere, not discarded

But yes, sets are discarded when a show ends...Even of tv shows that are more popular to the generic masses.

 

Because it isn't really worth the time or space required. Nobody ever asks about Voyager or DS9 sets. The TNG sets were destroyed, but the set for Picard apparently was saved in parts.

 

The Voyager sets were the TNG sets, which were the sets for the first four movies before that. In Voyager's case, their sets were destroyed rather than being recycled again for Enterprise in part because they were more than twenty years old, and had been built for a TV show that, in the most wildly successful imagining, would've lasted half that long (and instead ended up being a series of movies). The wood was starting to rot in some places.

Another thing to remember is all of these sets are skin-deep. Ones like the bridge or the corridors that are going to be built to last and to handle a lot of use, but they're still, in the end, temporary facades. The only look more solid than painted wood, even though that's what tehy are.

 

It seems like with all the nuTrek being made, it would make sense to at least store a galaxy class bridge for use in an episode down the line. If nothing else, they could use it for those supplemental talk shows Wheaton does.

 

If it were me, I’d use a LED wall and some foreground pieces (chairs, railings, consoles) and have virtual sets for ships of the week that are only seen through a viewscreen or in one or two shots. They already use tight, restricted angles on guest ships, either to hide that it’s the hero bridge, or that there’s no bridge at all, why not do the exact same thing but not have the out-of-focus bridge in the background obviously be the Enterprise-E or Shenzhou or Discovery or Stargazer or a single vaguely railing-shaped flat?

Shatner’s recent Roddenberry Archive interview is basically a proof-of-concept for this approach.

 

Something to bear in mind is that corporations are required by law to maximize share value for stockholders. That means they are required by law to take any action possible to maximize profits -- which means, among other things, that it's a breach of fiduciary responsibility for a corporation to deliberately undertake expenses that will not result in increased profits. (Corporations will justify things like charitable donations as resulting in increased profits in the long term as a result of increased public approval.)

So, unless Paramount was expecting that the cost of storing a set would somehow lead to increased profits down the line, it would have actually been illegal to just hold onto a set because they wanted to, with no expectation of future profit.

 

there are no shows set in the 2360s, that could be a very long line.

 

That's an urban legend developed to promote practices that are lucrative in the short-term and ultimately harmful. Corporations' actual legal obligations are far more abstract and wishy-washy, and could easily justify keeping sets and props archived or stored-in-place.

 

Interesting! I was taking that my cue from the 2003 documentary The Corporation, co-written by University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan:



I wonder why these two professors have such radically different interpretations of the legal obligations of corporations.

 

It doesn't have to be seen in the 2360s. We just saw one in 2401. They could have it used as another Galaxy Class starship, or have it show up in Discovery as a museum piece, or in SNW with an episode filled with scenes set into their future.... like TATV, only better.

 

It was still there in late 2018