Still waiting to receive Laura Banks’ book on the making of the film, and her affair with Shatner.
Star Trek: Questions you always wanted answers to
- Thread starter Riceball
- Start date
Still waiting to receive Laura Banks’ book on the making of the film, and her affair with Shatner.
So now I’ve watched Star Trek IV: the voyage home… and my main question would be “why do people like this one so much?”
No Enterprise!
I mean overall as a continuation of II and III it’s fine, but mostly just felt cheesy.
So far in order of entertaining:
1. Motion Picture
2. Search for Spock (liked the strategy/battle scenes)
3. Wrath of Kahn (maybe this is the real second place… I dunno it’s tough)
4. The Voyage to get Whales in a ship not the Enterprise.
No Enterprise!
I mean overall as a continuation of II and III it’s fine, but mostly just felt cheesy.
So far in order of entertaining:
1. Motion Picture
2. Search for Spock (liked the strategy/battle scenes)
3. Wrath of Kahn (maybe this is the real second place… I dunno it’s tough)
4. The Voyage to get Whales in a ship not the Enterprise.
The Motion Picture was Good™, with the potential to have been so much better if Gene and Harold hadn't been in all-out war with the scriptwriting, and if a bit more care had been taken with the production design (uniforms are awful, ship carries forward the undersizing artifact dating back to Matt designing a smaller ship for "The Cage" that never got upsized on paper, square-formatted graphics on round screens...), it would've been much better -- if still derivative of several TOS episodes ("The Changeling" leaps immediately to mind).
II/III/IV are a triptych. III doesn't work without II to set it up (Spock's death, the Enterprise's damage, David and Saavik, etc.). IV doesn't work except as resolution to all the loss of II and III. And, again, Good With the Missed Potential for More. I don't know why they dropped the bit in II that clarifies Saavik is half-Romulan. The TV edit and director's cut at least restore that the trainee who Scotty carried to the bridge was his nephew. There's a completely dropped bit where Sulu is waiting for his promotion to come through and get his first command (Bill kept deliberately flubbing the takes, until it had to be cut or go over -- he didn't want another Captain in his movies). I still feel it's creatively lazy to have shafted Khan and the open-ended nature of "Space Seed". "LOLJK most of them are dead and the planet's now a wasteland!" Weak.
II and III would've benefited from a slightly larger budget. The re-use of VFX footage from TMP in TWOK stands out -- especially if one watches II right after I. And the breakup of the Genesis Planet is soooo cheap-looking. Especially where Kirk and Kruge are fighting and the cliff edge doesn't break away so much as slither jerkily down the side of the set. The dropped element in III that I feel needed to be left in was that Kruge stole that Bird-of-Prey from the Romulans. This is, incidentally, why the bridge is so different in the very next film -- the Vulcans/Starfleet wanted to study the Romulan bridge, but had one from an earlier-captured Klingon one that they were done with.
IV left out that Saavik stayed on Vulcan because she was pregnant (she and Spock later marry, after she retires as Captain of the Enterprise-B, and a newly-graduated Jean-Luc Picard attends the wedding). I'm still not sure how I feel about Sulu running into his great-grandfather in '80s San Francisco. Might've been cute. Unfortunately, the mother of the child actor they got was every Domineering Asian Mother™ stereotype and they never got a good take. George was disappointed that had to be cut. Then there's the matter that, when they went to film, they discovered the Enterprise was out on maneuvers, so they had to use the Ranger instead. But the Enterprise was the only one of its class built, and no other carriers look like it. And, as mentioned previously, the ambiguity that made it into the final script as to Nichols' inventing of transparent aluminum.
There was a lot of subtext lost from either cut scenes or no overt commentary. I.e., it is in the script that it is Kirk's fiftieth birthday* in II -- Humans may live longer, but a half-century is still a big, self-evaluating milestone, and he was feeling it. Since he wrote the script, that's how Meyer directed it, and that's how Shatner played it. It's kinda important that Saavik is half-Romulan, and that Peter Preston was Scotty's nephew, and that Saavik was pregnant after Spock's pon farr on the Genesis Planet, and that that was a Romulan ship rather than a Klingon ship...
[*Which means that Kirk was born in 2235, not 2233. It also means that the official dates for TOS are way off. The Writers' Bible for season 2 says that Kirk is "about 34". I crunched the stardates elsewhere, but TOS runs from October 2268 (a year into the FYM) to around June of 2272 (including all of the animated episodes except "The Counter-clock Incident" and "B.E.M." as part of the FYM). TMP then takes place two and a half years later, in 2275. The Okudas were unconscionably lazy in their dating referents to use the amazing process of just adding three hundred years to the episodes' original airdates, rather than actually consulting the material that was right there.]
On to V now?
II/III/IV are a triptych. III doesn't work without II to set it up (Spock's death, the Enterprise's damage, David and Saavik, etc.). IV doesn't work except as resolution to all the loss of II and III. And, again, Good With the Missed Potential for More. I don't know why they dropped the bit in II that clarifies Saavik is half-Romulan. The TV edit and director's cut at least restore that the trainee who Scotty carried to the bridge was his nephew. There's a completely dropped bit where Sulu is waiting for his promotion to come through and get his first command (Bill kept deliberately flubbing the takes, until it had to be cut or go over -- he didn't want another Captain in his movies). I still feel it's creatively lazy to have shafted Khan and the open-ended nature of "Space Seed". "LOLJK most of them are dead and the planet's now a wasteland!" Weak.
II and III would've benefited from a slightly larger budget. The re-use of VFX footage from TMP in TWOK stands out -- especially if one watches II right after I. And the breakup of the Genesis Planet is soooo cheap-looking. Especially where Kirk and Kruge are fighting and the cliff edge doesn't break away so much as slither jerkily down the side of the set. The dropped element in III that I feel needed to be left in was that Kruge stole that Bird-of-Prey from the Romulans. This is, incidentally, why the bridge is so different in the very next film -- the Vulcans/Starfleet wanted to study the Romulan bridge, but had one from an earlier-captured Klingon one that they were done with.
IV left out that Saavik stayed on Vulcan because she was pregnant (she and Spock later marry, after she retires as Captain of the Enterprise-B, and a newly-graduated Jean-Luc Picard attends the wedding). I'm still not sure how I feel about Sulu running into his great-grandfather in '80s San Francisco. Might've been cute. Unfortunately, the mother of the child actor they got was every Domineering Asian Mother™ stereotype and they never got a good take. George was disappointed that had to be cut. Then there's the matter that, when they went to film, they discovered the Enterprise was out on maneuvers, so they had to use the Ranger instead. But the Enterprise was the only one of its class built, and no other carriers look like it. And, as mentioned previously, the ambiguity that made it into the final script as to Nichols' inventing of transparent aluminum.
There was a lot of subtext lost from either cut scenes or no overt commentary. I.e., it is in the script that it is Kirk's fiftieth birthday* in II -- Humans may live longer, but a half-century is still a big, self-evaluating milestone, and he was feeling it. Since he wrote the script, that's how Meyer directed it, and that's how Shatner played it. It's kinda important that Saavik is half-Romulan, and that Peter Preston was Scotty's nephew, and that Saavik was pregnant after Spock's pon farr on the Genesis Planet, and that that was a Romulan ship rather than a Klingon ship...
[*Which means that Kirk was born in 2235, not 2233. It also means that the official dates for TOS are way off. The Writers' Bible for season 2 says that Kirk is "about 34". I crunched the stardates elsewhere, but TOS runs from October 2268 (a year into the FYM) to around June of 2272 (including all of the animated episodes except "The Counter-clock Incident" and "B.E.M." as part of the FYM). TMP then takes place two and a half years later, in 2275. The Okudas were unconscionably lazy in their dating referents to use the amazing process of just adding three hundred years to the episodes' original airdates, rather than actually consulting the material that was right there.]
On to V now?
Lightning
Master Member
That's bad casting, the writing is fine.
So we know the villains in III were originally supposed to be Romulan, and after they switched to Kingons the idea it was a Romulan ship was eventually dropped entirely since it has so bearing on the story. But I seriously doubt the production team put any thought into in universe justification for the BoP bridge swap. That's an ease of filming change if I've ever seen one. Can't put Shatner on a literal pedistal.
You aren't actually counting that against the film are you? Top Gun had to do exactly the same thing (same two ships too).
Strikerkc
Sr Member
I guess I don't feel all that bothered by those kinds of "continuity issues" between movies, when it's done to service the current film. At the end of the day, a movie someone is making right now is their piece of art, is their expression. If tweaks or overhauls to sets or appearance, and things like that which facilitate the story telling, need to be changed, so be it. Directors and editors have even been known to select parts from one take of a scene and intermingle it with other takes from a different scene, that have continuity errors in it, because it was overall better for the scene.
Man, they delivered this line perfect, or ad-libbed something in a certain take, but they've took their sweater off earlier in this take, or they're not holding their coffee cup. **** it, the line is more important than the coffee cup.
Man, they delivered this line perfect, or ad-libbed something in a certain take, but they've took their sweater off earlier in this take, or they're not holding their coffee cup. **** it, the line is more important than the coffee cup.
Fair point. When the writer is also the director and one of the producers, I put more on them for catching such things.
I thought the villains were always Klingons. Klingon ships didn't originally have cloaking devices. That was the point of Kruge stealing a Romulan ship -- so he could get into Federation space undetected. The jump in design between '84 and '86 was absolutely left to us fans to rationalize. It is surmised that part of the TOS exchange between Romulans and Klingons was an older Romulan scoutship design swapped for Klingon techniques for building larger vessels. The Romulans most likely didn't give away their cloaking technology, but Klingons spies probably managed to secure one of the ones intended for that spaceframe.
I have seen it conjectured that only Houses in good with high command got cloaked BoP's, that the Klingons had built to their own æsthetic. Kruge, then, had to resort to subterfuge.
But yes -- nothing was put forward in official material regarding the abrupt and drastic change in sets or why Klingons were using feather-decorated ships with Romulan terminology and cloaking devices.
Supplemental ding.
It partly comes down to changed premises (resulting from their making things up as they went along), along with production/budget compromises.
I have no problem with Khan knowing Chekov in TWOK. That can easily be explained away.
I would have a big problem with, say, Kirk blowing away an enemy who declines an offer of aid after being defeated, a la the 2009 film.
Continuity of characterization, storytelling, and tone are far more important than continuity of the window dressing.
See previous about the timeline issues. Going by stardate order, "Catspaw" takes place before "Space Seed", and several season one episodes take place after. Chekov could easily have been on the ship at least since the stopover at Starbase 11 in "Court Martial", and just not on Alpha or Beta Watch or whatever one(s) Kirk tended to have the conn for until later.
His track record is the exact opposite up until that film.
Yup. The latter is far, far easier for us fans to rationalize and retcon.
Eaglemoss did do good ones, but they just went out of business a little while ago. You can find them all over the secondary market for widely varying amounts. What attributes and sizes are you looking for? I have good 3D models of many ships and a good fine-detail 3D printer. If you're wanting metal replicas, I have had good successes with Shapeways.
robn1
Master Member
There were magazine articles at the time where it was stated that the Trek III villains were originally Romulans, but they changed it when they got the sense that fans were more interested in seeing Klingons. ILM's construction of the BoP was already under way and the design was so well received that it was kept.
Lightning
Master Member
The 2018 Hallmark Enterprise was made in metal. I've got mine on a pocket watch chain, doing a sort of a Catspaw display.
Interesting. I always see mention of the ship, but not the baddies themselves. I wonder how different the tone would have been with Romulans...
Yeah this looks perfect… 8.5 inch length - don’t know the scale…
But pricy… we’ll have a look around for deals
Although the paint job is rather plain, Galoob did a surprisingly good job with their diecast D back in 1988 or so. It can be found carded for under $30.
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It can be found readily on eBay quite cheaply:
"galoob 1987 enterprise d" in All Categories
"galoob 1987 enterprise d" in All Categories. Shop the Largest Selection, Click to See! Search eBay faster with PicClick. Money Back Guarantee ensures YOU receive the item you ordered or get your money back.
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(note: use picclick.com instead of ebay's search bar to find stuff and to see how many watchers, since ebay seems to ahve removed that feature!)
Riceball
Master Member
One thing to be aware of is that Eaglemoss produced their models in 2 different scales. The one in your pic is their larger scale, they also made a lot of models in a smaller scale at around half the size. So if you don't want to pay as much and want to save some shelf space too, keep an eye out for their smaller scale models.
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