Original 11' Star Trek Enterprise Model Being Restored Again 99
NormalVisual (565491) writes The original 11-foot U.S.S. Enterprise studio model from the original series has gone back into the shop again. The Smithsonian owns the model and has had it on display in a gift shop at the National Air and Space Museum for the last 13 years, but will be placed on display in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall in 2016, to coincide with the museum's 40th anniversary. In the meantime, the model will be undergoing its fourth restoration to address a number of issues. The last restoration in 1991 was performed by Ed Miarecki, a professional modelmaker well known for his work in "Star Trek: The Next Generation", as well as films such as "Event Horizon". This previous restoration had Trek fans up in arms owing to the paint job, which many feel doesn't represent the way the model looked originally. Hopefully this next restoration will bring her back to her former glory.
Saw it at the Smithsonian a few years ago (Score:5, Informative)
We took the family to DC for a vacation, and of course one of the things I had to see was Smithsonian Air and Space. I didn't know that the original Enterprise model was there, and was surprised to see it on the lower floor.
The next surprise was that the model was never finished. One side had all of the lights, striping, and everything. The other side had a little striping, and was otherwise pretty much blank. I remembered reading that in one of those books, and how all shots were of the finished side, or mirrored in post-processing.
Re:Saw it at the Smithsonian a few years ago (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Saw it at the Smithsonian a few years ago (Score:5, Funny)
If Lucas had created Star Trek; Uhura would've have been a northern European princess, Chekov a darkside villain, Kirk a 20 something whiny white boy, Spock a droid, and Scotty an ethnically insulting alien based on Mexican stereo types.
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So, what you're saying is, Lucas is making the new Star Trek films?
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I havent kept up with it but the trailers were enough to convince me the rot had set in
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Sounds a lot like JJTrek to be honest.
Re:Saw it at the Smithsonian a few years ago (Score:5, Funny)
...Kirk never shoots first.
Uhura might have something to say about that...
Kirk: This sort of thing . . . has never . . . happened . . . to me . . . before!
Uhura: I just wish you could have held out until I removed my uniform...
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"Harcourt Fenton Mudd!"
"Meesa run from meesa wives!"
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Hate to disappoint you, but names of vessels are italicised.
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu... [commnet.edu]
Cheers.
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Many manuals of style indicate italicizing for names of vessels
Re: Saw it at the Smithsonian a few years ago (Score:1)
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They give out .edu domains to "some random guy" now? Do tell.
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I hate to disappoint you further, but we were in fact talking about a vessel. If you've veered off topic, that sounds like your problem, not ours.
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I saw it there around 1980, probably before the first restoration. It was great to see it but it was pretty dirty and didn't look very well kept. I hope this new guy takes good care of it.
Re:Saw it at the Smithsonian a few years ago (Score:4, Informative)
The restorations took place in 1974, 1980, and 1991. I agree that the pre-1991 treatment the model got wasn't that good. As I remember they just hung it from the ceiling and mostly ignored it afterwards. The model had some major structural issues when Ed got hold of it, mostly because the model was designed to be mounted on a stand and couldn't deal well with the stresses from being suspended from above.
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Hmmmmm.... interesting, I'm not sure if I saw it before or after the 1980 restoration and it was just hung from the ceiling at the time (in the gift shop if I remember) but if it was after I don't know what the restorer did to it but it looked like it was about to fall apart. I remember seeing pictures in the "Making of Star Trek" book where it was on a floor mounted stand like you say, it's never occurred to me that it wasn't designed to withstand being suspended by wires.
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Simpsons 2F17, Radioactive Man [snpp.com]:
Nelson, Ralph, and Martin watch a man paint black patches on a white horse.
Martin: Uh, Sir, why don't you just use real cows?
Painter: Cows don't look like cows on film. You gotta use horses.
Ralph: What do you do if you want something that looks like a horse?
Painter: Ehh, usually we just tape a bunch of cats together.
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I would pay to see a bunch of cats taped into the shape of a horse.
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Did you pay money to see the Lord of the Rings Trilogy? All its horses were cats taped together.
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Sorry, I phrased it wrong.
I would pay to see a bunch of cats being taped into the shape of a horse [in progress, not the final result].
Zoolander (Score:5, Funny)
What is this? A spaceship for ANTS?!
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Yes. I am the captain! :D
Cecilia Gimenez (Score:5, Funny)
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Event Horizon (Score:5, Funny)
One of the best science-fiction movie ever made, if you stop watching before it all goes to hell.
Re:Event Horizon (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, perhaps more objectively, one of the worst movies of all time.
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No, that title belongs to Battlefield Earth. Event Horizon had the great idea of dealing with the "nothingness" in-between jump points, but they chose to go with a horror theme for that and that's what ruined it for most of us. Still a great sci-fi/horror movie, because horror movies don't have to make any sense.
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You, SIr, have clearly not watched Manos: The Hands of Fate.
Battlefield Earth is what happens when a religion is built suddenly using the cathedral model rather than over millennia using the bazaar model. You need your mythos to evolve over time until it becomes so convoluted that millions of people literally kill each other to death over the minutiæ, ignoring the white elephant excrement in the room.
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Or, perhaps more subjectively, everyone is allowed to have their own opinion.
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I'm glad at least one moderator got the joke.
Re:Restoration (Score:4, Funny)
Why is it that if you copy something it's called a fake, but if you also destroy the original it's called restoration?
Interestingly, that's how transporters might eventually work:
Scan you, transmit scan data, reassemble you at the other end based on the data, confirm checksum, then destroy original.
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That won't work. Even if you create a will leaving everything to your clone-copy, anytime you travel your clone-heir would be stuck in probate for months afterward and the government would demand a huge cut of your net worth.
Re:Restoration (Score:4, Funny)
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What does this have to do with the clone-copy continuity problem?
To take the bait, though, how are libertarians of all people going to be seen as a source of oppression?
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Then you risk having two copies...
Scan you, destroy the original, transmit scan data, reassemble you at the other end. That's the only way to be sure... and would explain all the "transporter accidents"
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It takes that long because trying to keep every tiny porthole and edge in the exact same place, and the paint work the specific colour so that that geeks and nerds don't write up 1000 pages on their blog about the horrific damage and destruction.
It took a couple of weeks to build because the model maker had a rough guide of x decks and y windows and slapped it together from bits and pieces and painted it to work on the screen. The poor restorer has to keep that work accurate.
I'm just glad (Score:4, Funny)
I'm just glad all of us Atheists will now have our own religious symbol to hang on the wall and worship.
Crude? (Score:5, Interesting)
Judging from STTOS on TV, the original model was almost toy-like crude. The STTNG model was much more convincing, and that one already looks pretty crude compared to a good movie. The modelwork in 2001: A Space Odyssey stll impresses.
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What you say about 2001's models is true. The humans even seem life-like at times, which is no easy feat.
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Models built for TV in years past often weren't built with much detail, simply because it wouldn't show up on screen anyway. That said, the TOS Enterprise did have a lot more detail than one would expect for a TV show (there are markings and such that are too tiny to see on TV), but it pales when compared to the Enterprise built for "The Motion Picture" which has much, much finer detail.
This touches on something I've mentioned previously- namely, why older TV shows shot and mastered entirely on film still aren't necessarily "HD", even though the medium itself *happens* to be capable of resolving that much detail.
An HD production requires *everything* to have been done to HD standards. If not, it's quite possible that props, makeup et al that were only ever expected to look good on a standard-definition set of the time will show their deficiencies far more obviously under the scrutiny of
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The ones I was referring to specifically were props like phasers, tricorders, etc. that were used throughout the production run, but as you say, no studio wants to spend more money than absolutely necessary. If the prop guys can hack out 10 phasers in a day that will look acceptably on screen, instead of spending a day on each one making them museum-quality, it's not hard to figure out which route the studio will cho
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This is why they had to redo all of the special effects shots in the TNG Blu-Ray release. While the film had enough resolution for an HD transfer, all of the special effects shots (ie. warp stretch, light boom, etc.) were done on video tape.
That's correct. Though I intentionally left it out above of the above post (I'm longwinded enough and it was less relevant there), I've commented in the past (e.g. in this post [slashdot.org] and several others in that thread) that TNG's effects shots were at best (AFAIK) composited on SD video from film sources, if not entirely generated on SD video.
Hence a 100% authentic HD transfer of the original unmodified TNG episodes would be impossible, purely because certain shots only ever existed in SD.
(If they were to be
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Compare that to some of the ST:TNG props that I've seen that look fine on screen, but when examined closely look like someone gave a 5-year old a couple of shots of vodka and turned them loose with a paintbrush.
There's a certain wonder to that too.
I had the same reaction when I saw the ST:TNG props in person. You wouldn't buy a toy that looked that cheesy. The wonder of it is that the prop makers knew this piece of crap would look great onscreen. That's professional skill at work. Amateurs lavish loving care on stuff and overbuild them. Pros make them good enough, and put the extra effort into stuff that matters more.
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Yeah, and when you personally see the TOS model it actually is very crude. ...they had no idea that the film prints would be scanned for high-def TV eventually.
When I saw it around 2008 I had two thoughts:
1) Why is something so iconic being given such outcast treatment in the basement of the gift shop? Yes it wasn't actually a spacecraft, but still deserving of attention compared to some random ejection seat or circuit board designed for a space probe.
2) It was really crude.. Basic hardware-store type mat
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It was a hacked-up AMT model, just like you'd get at the local hobby store. More than you'd ever want to know about the AMT kit can be found here [culttvman.com].
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Smithsonian should commission a new model (Score:2)
It seems kind of contradictory to hang the TV production model in the A&S museum, where people will complain about how simplistic the model is without understanding the nature of a TV model (ie, not meant to be seen other than in controlled TV shots on 1960s standard def television).
The TV model should be restored as closely as possible to its TV version and then put in the Smithsonian wing that houses various forms of Americana so that it can be a proper historical relic.
Then they should build a new mo
Crude? (Score:1)
optimistic vision of a future (Score:4, Funny)
unique for its optimistic vision of a future where men and women of all races and ethnicities, not to mention non-humans,
Obviously created by a man whose "optimistic vision of a future" includes women wearing mini skirts and gogo boots.
Re:optimistic vision of a future (Score:5, Insightful)
whose "optimistic vision of a future" includes women wearing mini skirts and gogo boots.
To be fair, for a good many that's close to the very definition of an "optimistic vision".
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Obviously created by a man whose "optimistic vision of a future" includes women wearing mini skirts and gogo boots.
"I think I'm going to like History."
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Compare the role of women in I Love Lucy to that of Star Trek.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desilu_Productions
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> Obviously created by a man whose "optimistic vision of a future" includes women wearing mini skirts and gogo boots.
No, this [space-debris.com] was his vision of women in the future. The studio made him sex it up.
optimistic vision of a future (Score:1)
Pardon? (Score:1)
"The Smithsonian owns the model and has had it on display in a gift shop at the National Air and Space Museum for the last 13 years, but will be placed on display in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall in 2016, to coincide with the museum's 40th anniversary."
Milestones of Flight? A model of something which has never actually flown and which doesn't actually exist?
Ah well, I suppose it goes with those Creationist museums.....
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Nonsense of course. ST was westerns and court dramas with science fictionish props and sets. Terrible show, no coherent backstory. No consistent postulated tech who implications are considered. Whenever they run out of ideas they take one word from column A and one from column B and end the story with a new revolutionary technology never previously (or again) mentioned.
Roddenberry should have been kicked square in the nuts for doing it. Harlen Ellison was right. Just terrible.
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Verb tense too complicated for you?
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WTF (Score:1)
>but will be placed on display in the Boeing Milestones of Flight Hall in 2016
No. Fuck this. It's not a milestone of flight, and it doesn't belong there in the least.
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Shot in the same studios as the lunar landings!
Am I kidding?
Re:WTF (Score:4, Interesting)
No. Fuck this. It's not a milestone of flight, and it doesn't belong there in the least.
I disagree. The original Star Trek, which I watched as a child, was one of the inspirations for me getting into aerospace and later working on the actual Space Station. The milestone isn't a particular flight it performed, but how many people it inspired, who later achieved great things in aerospace. In a prior generation, Wernher von Braun read Astounding magazine *while working on the V2 rockets*. There has always been a strong connection between science fiction stories and bringing those stories to life later.
Paint job, or just looked different on TV? (Score:2)
This previous restoration had Trek fans up in arms owing to the paint job, which many feel doesn't represent the way the model looked originally.
Or did they feel it didn't represent the way it looked on TV?
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hang on a minute... (Score:3)
40th anniversary?
What is it commemorating, the animated series from the 70s?
The TV show begain in the 60s so the 40th anniversary was around 2006 (or earlier if you want to count the cage).
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