Commercially available chairs in Star Trek
ex-astris-scientia.org
ex-astris-scientia.org
- In Luke's home in Star Wars IV there's a lot of Tupperware - https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2014/02/in-praise-of-t...
- In Alien, Ripley drinks from a Tupperware mug - https://twitter.com/EverRotating/status/1156650673972363264
https://www.reddit.com/r/Thatsabooklight/comments/bf20dp/i_p...
I just found that link through Google, but that is apparently a whole subreddit devoted to this type of use of modern objects getting repurposed as some fantastical movie/TV props.
To take an example from Aliens, the ship is only seen from one side, so the model only has one finished painted side, and the interior sets scavenge loads of bits and pieces from computer cases and whatever.
You also shouldn’t underestimate the tradition of hiding Easter eggs in models and sets.
Did you know that the SpaceMouse got developed by the German Aerospace Center (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt) as DLR SpaceMouse for controlling robot arms in space?
https://www.dlr.de/rm-neu/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-3808/
50 credits, transportable anywhere in the Sol cluster
I've always liked to imagine any similarities between Star Wars and humanity on Earth is because Star Wars is set so indeterminately long ago that it seems 'plausible' that Star Wars is all really true, and if we build the right telescope and point it at the right galaxy, perhaps we can watch the Rebels fight the Empire IRL!
We are strongly led to believe we are alone in the universe, and that we are the first human like specie in the whole universe and our solar system to ever have existed. Believing otherwise is pure heresy. What is left for us to contact part of the world that we know exist but that "can't be real because that would be heresy" ?
Science-fiction, fantasy.
Pike grew up on a ranch in Montana, where his family used Lodge cast iron pans. Cast iron isn't perfect for cooking - the heat distribution is mediocre - but one thing you can say about it is that it will outlive you.
Even if it gets rusty from neglect, you can sand it down, re-season it, and it will be as good as new!
I don't know if they make it explicit in the show, but I have a feeling that Captain Pike's pans were handed down from generation to generation, so naturally he brought his family's old cast iron pans with him on the Enterprise.
https://www.foodandwine.com/star-trek-strange-new-worlds-kit...
a sous vide bath of vacuum sealed meat is rather dull in comparison to a good sear
"Little Tikes kid’s Apollo Space Capsule Toy Chest." - https://third-wave-design.com/2018/11/30/houston-we-dont-hav...
It also pops up in a ton of other places.
This isn’t a matter of time period, it’s skill and attention. At the time of the Bond films it was well-known how to do good lighting, and people had been doing it for decades. Contrast the crappy Bond films with any beautiful old movie, like “The Third Man” or “Citizen Kane,” still legendary for great cinematography.
As a side note, my mom was an accountant at Paramount who handled residuals for Shatner, et al. She briefly dated Harlan Ellison before marrying my father, which might have explained his aversion to Star Trek and my banishment to the Black and White TVs while watching it. (When I was twelve or thirteen and got really into Ellison's fiction, she got alarmed and told me Harlan was "a creep" and left it there).
The upshot was I got to go onto the TNG set when I was a kid... which was both wildly exciting and sort of disappointing as it wasn't an actual starship. All I wanted was to be Wesley Crusher.
But yeah, we watched TOS in b&w.
[edit] even funnier side note, I used to tape Star Trek TOS on reruns while I was at school so I could watch it later on the color tv. I had figured out how to work the VCR timer by the time I was 11 or so. But there weren't any blank VHS tapes lying around. My dad had a collection of 100 or so tapes of movies from TV, with commercials and everything. Down near the bottom of the stacks were a bunch of tapes labeled "dirty movies 3,4,5" which I thought just meant they were bad recordings. So I was like, I can record over those, they won't notice.
My dad apparently tried to play his porn tapes and found a bunch of star trek videos and came to my bedroom in a rage, but then couldn't explain to me why "dirty movies" didn't mean "bad VHS recordings". Took me awhile to figure out since I'd never actually watched whatever was on the tapes first ;)
If anyone wants to take a look, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has some great examples.
of the scanlines wink
I thought it was specifically because of (1) the color film process used at the time required it for faithful (-ish) reproduction, and (2) the need to make something that looked good on both black and white and color TVs, as lots of people were still using black and white.
For example sky can be any colour except blue, and doors can open every which way (except downwards, because that would require digging a hole in the set) and they make all sorts of sounds – as long as they're not "just" doors (they're "alien" doors!) They used those awkward holsters for phasers because pockets looked too "common".
Other more technical factors probably played a factor as well, but this also worked two ways and limited creativity: IIRC the origin skin colour for Vulcans was supposed to be red, but was changed to the off-white because the red didn't work on B&W.
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/mudds-gobos.276831/#post-113...
https://startrektour.com/photo-gallery/our-beautifully-recre...
and you can take the above tour and see them in use yourself. They were made of metal because the lights were hot. Some sources for them, if you want to play with your own, are old metal pot holders and small cast iron table tops. They usually welded a rod to them to attach them to the light fixtures using standard lighting rod clamps so they'd be stable. Cast iron is heavy, aluminum pot holders are preferred and they disippate heat better.
It reminds me how the "chair" is one of those objects supposedly so hard to classify for things like machines, a little easier for humans. Although may of these designs cause even my brain to struggle with, "Is that a chair?" Some reminded me of the Wood Allen bit from Sleeper:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wardroom
:-)
And yes, this is the same Dominion War that was referenced in the last season of the Picard series.
OTOH, DS9 is the only Star Trek that my wife will willingly watch with me; she finds the others too campy. As another data-point she likes the dominion war arc as much or more than B5, which was her favorite sci-fi series previously.
I might also be slightly biased in favor of cardassian plots and actors, if only for Stewart's acting in Chain of Command.
The dominion and bjoran plots didn't really resonate with me at all, unfortunately.
Even saying that though, I don’t think you can say one is better than the other. I can see why your wife likes them both though.
I know; they were even aired in the same timeslot (IIRC Wednesdays at 7) where I lived, and I had a prior engagement on Wednesday nights and only one VCR, so I had to pick which one to record. I settled on B5.
I didn't watch all of DS9 until it was on Netflix.
Their story arcs were known from the outset. Each (main) character has their own hero's journey and side quests. Both had satisfying endings.
Also, officially, Capt Sisko is the GOAT. With Capt Janeway placing a strong 2nd. Though Capt Pike (Strange New Worlds) is quite promising, but only time will tell.
Whereas Voyager has most of my most favorite episodes, esp wrt Ensign Kim, DS9's characters are legend, esp Quark. I couldn't pick a favorite DS9 character (or story), even on pain of death, because I cherish them all equally.
One of the reasons the original series had so many episodes where they went to a planet that was just like Earth in some specific time period was the availability of props, costumes, and even sets. Entire episodes were written around this conceit: there's the episode where they land on a Nazi planet, the episode where they land on a Roman Empire planet, another episode where they meet an alien who turns out to be the literal Greek god Apollo, an episode where they land on the planet of the Prohibition-era mobsters, and an OK Corral episode just to name a few. From TNG onwards, the holodeck was used for similar purposes.
The whole noir thing was way overdone in Star Trek. Seems like there was one in every season of every show.
Made no sense to me: you're paying me to build you a custom object, why would I want it back? Until I realized that so much stuff in movies is just rented: they wouldn't even have a place to store it after the production is over.
(That's what came to mind from a few years ago, and I see in the credits this page was inspired/originates from it)
The mug itself (a Thermos mug from the 90s) is an absolute pain to find anywhere, but I've managed to secure two of them last year (with shipping prices that would embarrass even a Ferengi) and did the necessary conversions:
https://fosstodon.org/@temporal/109690528747856580
https://fosstodon.org/@temporal/109677869270157594
I gave one out as a gift, the other I've been using every day for over a year now. Got so used to it, I don't know how I'll ever be able to replace it.
On the other hand, I suppose there could be a "Chairs of Star Trek" design handbook within the organization. This would be under the "Weird Shit" section.
It's a tall chair and one must climb it, then you can look at the other people from above. Not uncomfortable but not comfortable too. We call it the Klingon Chair.
Or some space space suits, proper footware for away missions. Alongside clothing...
> The United Federation of "hold my beer, I got this"
Unlike the OSHA be damned Death Star.
That is, sometimes equipment has its fuses bypassed because under battle conditions it is better to have the equipment working in a dangerous state, than not working at all.
So when the ship goes to red alert all the major systems are automatically put in battleshort mode. So a couple of ensigns die rather then the weapons stop working because a fuse blew.
It might be on there, it’s a huge list, but I could not find it.
I’ll need to do some digging through the episode when I’m out of this meeting!
This podcast was inspired by the chain in The Drumhead
https://trekmovie.com/2021/06/02/the-shuttle-pod-crew-takes-...
I was tickled when I saw two red-uniform officers carrying them around on TNG.
If the new ones are still made like that, I'd love a few more at that price. But I have a feeling the plastic's been CAD'd down to as thin as possible to meet some minimum spec, like with everything else.
[EDIT] Oh, mine's slightly different: the handles aren't a molded element of the outside, but holes through the box itself, with finger-shaped curves. They're great, very secure to hold, though that does mean small stuff can fall out, and they can be tricky if the thing's packed too full.
I would guess that at least for the most used chairs, like the Captain's chair and the other chairs on the bridge, they had an overall look they were going for on those sets and picked chairs specifically for that.
Did they also do that for all those other chairs, or if they needed to have say a meeting take place on some new planet with a new race and needed 5 chairs did they just send someone off with instructions to go round up 5 identical chairs, maybe adding that they should look futuristic or something like that?
Did they have chair rules, like this species likes round chairs and that species likes angular chairs?
[1] https://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Main_Page
[2] https://letterboxd.com/lubber/list/split-diopter-shots/page/...
https://star-trek.design/glassware/octime-double-old-fashion...
I have a hard time believing anything from IKEA not have fallen apart in a couple of centuries.
- Get rid of the Thermos logo (surprisingly, the weird Internet advice to rub it off with sugar turns out to be 100% correct);
- Apply the decals
- Enjoy
EDIT: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37933834 for photos.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Star-Trek-Designing-t...
By itself, this is uncharacteristically dystopian for Star Trek because it suggests people will relax so much less that arm rests are unnecessary. Strange because Star Trek usually presents a more optimistic picture of the future.
That futuristic look is more important.
Starfleet, despite the ranks, authority structure, style of discipline, use of “courts-martial”, and the fact it fights wars, is not, as Starfleet personnel are eager to point out, a military force. Also, usually, Starfleet doesn't run diplomacy, they provide transport for diplomats.
They do sometimes fill in when the transported diplomats become unavailable, when an emergent needs happens without time to dispatch a diplomat, or when an individual Starfleet officer is requested by tbe parties to a dispute (where the Federation is a neutral mediator) or the other party (where the Federation is a party), but all of those are implicitly exceptional events that disproportionately happen to the particular officers on whom the franchise focuses.
Regarding diplomacy:
- Kithomer Accords, re-established between Cpt. Sisko and Chancellor Gowron, the first accords were Picard's job (could be wrong about that)
- everything Bajor related, despite the planet being the most strategic important one in the Alpha Quadrant there was never an official embassy mentioned, everything was run by Sisko
- the Alliance with the Romulans during the Dominion war, again by Sisko and this Admiral
- the ultimate peace treaty between the Dominion and the Federation
- every first contact mission (understandable, Starfleet is the exploration arm of the Federation with a clear charter here) but also every follow-up mission (see Lower Decks)
Just from top of my head, all major diplomatic treaties have been negotiated by Starfleet personell. In a sensey Starfleet is a state-within-a-state, running crucial functions of the larger state with little to no oversight.
Everything not shown on screen, or explained / hinted at, is not necessarily canon.
I assume there is a misspelling one place or another there, but, yes, much of that introductory paragraph was pointing out that fairly canonically Starfleet (or, extracanonically, Star Trek's creators) are in deep denial about the nature of Starfleet.
> Kithomer Accords, re-established between Cpt. Sisko and Chancellor Gowron, the first accords were Picard's job (could be wrong about that)
The First Khitomer Accords were negotiated between the civilian leadership of the Federation and the Klingon Empire in the wake of the disaster created by the explosion of Praxis; there was a conspiracy involving the highest levels of both Starfleet (led by Admiral Cartwright, the CinC Starfleet) and the Klingon military (led by General Chang [0]) to sabotage the negotiations, foiled by (among others) the crew of the about-to-be-decommissioned USS Enterprise-A under Captain Kirk, after he was rescued by his crew from his imprisonment on Rura Penthe, having been framed by the conspirators for the murder of the Klingon Chancellor Gorkon, who the Enterprise was to be escorting to the negotiations originally planned to be on Earth, which were secretly rescheduled and moved to Khitomer after Gorkon's assassination. (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
> everything Bajor related, despite the planet being the most strategic important one in the Alpha Quadrant there was never an official embassy mentioned, everything was run by Sisko
Sisko's adoption by the Bajoran religion as the Emissary of the Prophets was frequently referred to as an issue with forced Starfleet and the Federation more broadly to deal with Bajor other than the way they would prefer to.
> - the ultimate peace treaty between the Dominion and the Federation
The Treaty of Bajor was very much setup (while the substantive content was not at all similar) to be an analog of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, signed for the US by Gen. MacArthur. (To the point of Admiral Ross directly quoting MacArthur.)
> Just from top of my head, all major diplomatic treaties have been negotiated by Starfleet personell.
Clearly not, aside from the Khitomer accords, just a couple examples of many: In "Journey to Babel" (TOS), the Enterprise is transporting ambassadors from several Federation worlds to a conference on the admission of Coridian to the federation; the Treaty of Alliance between the Klingons and the Federation had Ambassador Sarek of Vulcan as the lead Federation diplomat, referenced in "Sarek" (TNG), etc.
[0] A clearly senior military officer described by Chancellor Gorkon as "my chief of staff", but I don't think its clear whether he was the Chancellor's CoS in a sense analogous to the White House Chief of Staff to a US President or whether his role was as a military CoS, or whether the distinction between the roles is foreign to the Klingon system of the time.
Ah, I never watched TOS much, I had some vague, and obviousoy wrong, memory aeound Picard's and Woef's involvement leading to a treaty between the Federation and the Klingons.
Agree on the denial part, especially the authors. It shows in little stuff, like episodes in which Starfleet would extradite one of their officers to a nation they are at war with, no thought about any other function than officers...
I still love it, especially DS9. But there are some aspects that just rubb me the wrong way now that didn't bother me back the day.
IIRC, and I'd have to research the details, but the existing Treaty of Alliance between the Federation and the Klingon Empire (something much later than the Khitomer Accords, back-figured from other references to be ca. 10-20 years pre-TNG, IIRC) and the need to save it was used as leverage to get Picard involved as Arbiter of the Succession, and so tied into that whole Picard/Worf storyline.
Or they relax SO often, that they don't need arm rests (because their arms are never tired, because they aren't working much)
I mean, there's an entire TNG episode about how Picard begrudgingly takes a vacation on the tropical "pleasure planet" of Risa and is completely miserable until he gets caught up in a wacky Indiana Jones type adventure. And an entire DS9 episode where Worf goes to Risa and decides he'd rather help some nutjobs sabotage the weather control system. These are not people who like to relax!
Also I think the last scene in that youtube link is from the 7th season (looks like the admiral from The Pegasus) so I'd hope any uniform issues would be fixed by then.
It shows what a risk it is to specialize in acting. Studying it doesn't convey a lot of skills transferable to other areas.
Apparently some people do!
I have an exceptionally tall torso and normal arms though so it’s quite rare for my elbow to actually reach an arm rest.
Helps you not fall out of the chair when you doze off.
At least now I can put a name to 'What the frak is Worf sitting on?'
Kudos.
I remember quite vividly a Geocities page that had wiring diagrams for a ton of Realistic brand CB radios my friend and I used to build an adapter for the DIN microphone.
(Every time Teal'c says the word "Indeed" throughout Stargate SG-1)
For a solid decade it was like all Star Trek ships felt like some "alternate timeline" from Next Generation in which the Federation is an endless war, and the ships are all dim and militaristic.
A huge part of the show was about exploration. And doing it in style. I love that about Strange New Worlds. It has captured a lot of great elements — another notable mention being the more episodic nature, and a return to more diplomatic narratives.
Is it like the Orville where it tones down the comedy a bit later on? Orville felt like a parody of trek for the first few episodes, then just became trek for the rest of its runtime.
I get that not everything is for everyone, but I really love Lower Decks. It's terrific Trek, even if it is a comedy.