This reminds me of a neat 3d animation of a Excelsior from the 24th century going back to 23rd century and getting the eyes of Kirk, I wish I remembered what it was/if it's still up.
Why do they dismantle or destroy old Star Trek bridges?
- Thread starter Adam La Forge
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This reminds me of a neat 3d animation of a Excelsior from the 24th century going back to 23rd century and getting the eyes of Kirk, I wish I remembered what it was/if it's still up.
I'm pretty sure at least some of the former presidents had done so, just not the one he served under (at least according to him)
Yes. That was my basic point. Lots of other productions would have a use for an Oval Office set. A Star Trek bridge set? Not so much.
You actually reminded me that, according to The Official Batman Batbook, NBC expressed an interest in doing another season of Batman after ABC cancelled it in the third season. The reason it didn't happen was because they'd already torn down the Batcave set just a few days before, and it would've been way too expensive to rebuild it.
Similarly, I know that the Gotham City sets built in London for the 1989 Batman movie were left standing at Pinewood Studios for a while in anticipation of sequels, but they ended up shooting Batman Returns in L.A. instead of England, so the original sets were never used again. I don't think they ever popped up in any other productions, either.
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Yes. It is ridiculously, nearly prohibitively expensive to store sets. Sets don't get stored once a production is done. Most production companies don't want the expensive, period, especially if a production is not successful and won't go forward. Even in Star Wars Episode 1, the Jedi Council set was struck completely, and largely recreated digitally for the rest of the prequel films.
Ok, but that's not storage. That's an exhibit requiring time, money and staff to maintain. So even more expensive.
^^this
What's saddest of all is that - to compare - the BBC, for Blake's 7, for the ships they filmed*, despite having smaller budgets for the exterior shots, they had a field day with the pyrotechnics and destroying the interiors. The plotting around those ships' demises were a tad bit more exponentially stronger than GEN as well, rendering the scenes more emotionally impactful too. It takes a lot to have more memorable scenes despite a lesser budget (and corny incidental muzak too). Honorable mention to Red Dwarf, which destroyed the original model ship used for beauty shots, during the making of series 5 and yet they could have sufficed with a smaller and cheaper model...
* spoiler alert follows:
Liberator and Scorpio go all out with destruction, the former even had a situation leading to a not-dissimilar plot point in TNG ("Cost of Living", but TNG handled it too nonchalantly, despite having a higher budget to mop things up afterward, but this was being season 5 and all, too...) and the latter also had a crash scene that must have inspired GEN's, if any of the makers were as enthralled with B7 as they clearly were for Doctor Who (for which in-jokes on displays, callouts such as Argolis Array, Traken II, and so on sorta suggest, etc)... 
The saddest part about Scorpio is that it was a finely crafted 4-foot model, which even had a chainsaw applied to the model for the latter end of the crash scene...
The saddest part about Scorpio is that it was a finely crafted 4-foot model, which even had a chainsaw applied to the model for the latter end of the crash scene...
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It’s worth reading the articles surrounding the one from the link to see that it’s neither an “urban myth” nor “at any and all costs” (the latter presumes a duty to commit crimes and the former is an argument and potential legal strategy that lacks universal acceptance in legal terms).
As to the OP, storage costs, as has been pointed out several times, would be ruinous in the absence of certainty of a new production in the near future.
This is why I keep going on about Trek sets in dead malls. They can be taken care of by municipalities as museums, server farms in wings to keep a profit even if foot traffic is light…and no set ever need be torn down again. Had I Bezos money…I’d leave real space to Elon, and use my money to preserve the works of VFX guys the world over.
Not economically sustainable, nor should cash-strapped municipalities, of all places, be expected to “take care of” Trek museums.
Again, that way madness lies. Sets are not built to last or be preserved as historical relics.
And where do you stop? Should the LOST IN SPACE sets be preserved for posterity? The PLANET OF THE APES sets? The BATTLESTAR GALACTICA sets, original or reboot? FARSCAPE? BABYLON-5? THE X-FILES? THE BIG THEORY? Not everything can end up in the Smithsonian.
Heck, Kubrick famously destroyed the sets and spacesuits from "2001" because he didn't want to see them recycled endlessly in B-movies and TV shows the way the props and costumes from FORBIDDEN PLANET were. And Michael Landon blew up the sets for LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE for the finale, for similar reasons, I believe.
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Another thing to consider is that no matter how more advanced and shiny the sets from TNG and later shows look, they are made with the same wood and paint that the sets from TOS were. Over time, an unused set will begin to deteriorate and will have to be refurbished anyway, especially if they've been kept in storage for years if not decades.
Exactly.
Bottom line: Unless you have real reason to expect that that you're going to need it again in the immediate future, it's going to be cheaper and more cost-effective to rebuild a set than store it indefinitely on the off chance that you may need it again umpteen years down the road. Show business is a business after all.
Unless, of course, you're talking about something like a generic western saloon or downtown city street that you can recycle over and over again in lots of different productions, as opposed to something specific to one property like the Batcave or the bridge of the Enterprise.
God, can you imagine if the sets for the Batcave and Enterprise bridge had been preserved and ended up recycled in a million inferior productions the way the Forbidden Planet stuff was? The Batman and Star Trek shows wouldn't feel nearly as special anymore.
Speaking of sets being struck, I'm reminded of the time back in 1963 when Roger Corman finished shooting THE RAVEN a few days early, so he shot a whole other horror movie, THE TERROR, on the same sets while they were still standing. Reportedly, the cast and crew had to rush to stay one step ahead of the demolition crew, filming scenes right before the the sets got struck!
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Apparently that still goes on. See my Robert Picardo story on the previous page. I remember someone who worked for The Late Show with David Letterman saying that they started dismantling the sets right after they finished taping the finale in 2015. They saw set pieces in the dumpster either a few hours later or the next day.
A writer friend wrote a movie for Corman some years ago. According to him, he was given a title, a premise, and a list of sets left over from some Russian historical movie that had just wrapped production; Corman had done a deal to rent the sets before they were struck so my friend had to write a script to fit the sets.
Corman had done a deal to rent the sets before they were struck so my friend had to write a script to fit the sets.
Now that's art!
Haven’t rewatched any ENT since it ended in 2005, but wasn’t the NX-01 Enterprise bridge based around the USS Defiant bridge set?
Perhaps only in the sense there was a situation table in an open area behind the captain's chair where the senior officers could go over mission plans. Otherwise, the layouts are different (Enterprise's bridge featured a turbolift and captain's ready room, with everyone facing the captain--Defiant's bridge simply had a door to a corridor outside, and had everyone situated around in front and turned away from the captain).
In the real-world, the set for Enterprise's bridge was built on a soundstage that had never been used before in a Star Trek series or movie.
He must have missed the ape-men masks, one of which was supposedly used in 1970's Trog.
The literal Defiant bridge set (or parts thereof) was used for ships-of-the-week on VGR and ENT after DS9 ended.
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