It was booked for Robin's 13th birthday and rise to dark knighthood?
Pike Character Teaser
- Thread starter Harpsichord
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It was booked for Robin's 13th birthday and rise to dark knighthood?
Star Trek was always more fantasy than hard science. (Matter Transporters that can take you apart and put you back together in seconds, getting to star systems in hours given the warp scale they used; no relativistic effects on ship or crew....)
Quiet, you'll rouse the natives.
I wonder if the "death penalty" for going to Talos IV was there so that Pike and Vina would be left alone once Pike became a permanent resident.
Neither of them are spring chickens anymore. Vina would have been there over 30 years by the point Pike comes to call it home, and Pike's in his 50s or 60s.
Neither of them are spring chickens anymore. Vina would have been there over 30 years by the point Pike comes to call it home, and Pike's in his 50s or 60s.
You seem to assume the set dressers are ignorant of past Trek
They are mainly fans, like us, and you can bet that every placement has been brainstormed (and probably hotly debated) in meetings. And you can bet that they created new text for the labels. In TMP, one cargo crate was labelled as containing the "Andromeda Strain" (to give Robert Wise a smile), and I think I read that labels in DSC have had similar in-jokes.I am sure they know exactly what it meant.
And they were close enough to read the fine print with all the in-jokes.
It's just a easter egg. That signage is associated with cargo storage, but the symbol might mean anything to them. We just recognize what it meant in a different context, and that's supposed to be fun.
The design of that cargo bay made no sense in ST:TMP, after all. Enormous amounts of wasted space. It just looked cool.
You seem to assume the set dressers are ignorant of past Trek
You're correct. As for Star Trek: Discovery prop easter eggs As I recall they mentioned some of the books in Philippa Georgiou's ready room have the titles of TOS episodes. And also some of the Red Alert displays that fonts/graphics tharwere first seen/used in ST:TMP.
So yeah I'm sure they know where they labels they're putting on me props for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds were first used.
You seem to assume the set dressers are ignorant of past Trek
I am sure they know exactly what it meant.
I'm sorry, I just can't agree with that assessment. I wish I could, especially coming right off of Dave Blass's quote about having to go the extra mile in production design because of the degree of verisimilitude Star Trek fans were trained to expect.
This icon though:
(Source)
Can really only be a picture of these crates, especially if you know they only place that icon was ever used was on these specific crates in TMP:
(And, yes, I recognize it's just "containerization but worse because future hates corners." The form over function aspects of TMP's design ethos are beside the point. And it's not like the crate-chutes in SNW look any more practical.)
It's a real stretch to fanwank that this symbol was intended to denote something else while connoting cargo crates, and then twenty years later Starfleet decided to make the crates look like the logo for some reason. And one could design a similar icon that's shaped like the crates they're using on SNW and know that five minutes after the episode (or trailer) drops, one of those YouTube "Stuff you missed" accounts will figure out that "a segmented octagon icon on every face of the octagonal crate with the corresponding face of the icon filled in" was an adaptation of the TMP concept. As it is, it probably only squeaked by reviews because it's an obscure bit of production design pretty much only visible in behind-the-scenes material from a less-loved movie. Since I do know the context, though, it feels not unlike if they had a padded Pelican case holding some phasers in SNW and put a big outline of a TNG dustbuster on the side.
Or if a movie set in 1995 had this in it:
What? A payphone is supposed to have an icon of a phone on the side, and that's an icon of a phone, isn't it? (I know the AT&T logo is anachronistic, there was only so much Photoshop and Google Image Searching that I was willing to put into this lame, but hopefully illustrative, joke.)
Honestly, the idea that they did know that that icon is supposed to represent the shape of the crate and how the crate fits into a four-crate wall-slot, and then knowingly put it on a totally different kind of crate, rather than designing something equivalent that fit their production design, feels like more of an indictment. I think it's more reasonable that they found an existing graphic filed under "cargo crate label" and then used it to label cargo crates while unaware of the full context it was designed for. I mean, if you don't know that it's a literal picture of the literal crate in a literal slot and interpret as a generic symbol for "box," that's one thing, but if you do know what it is and reuse it anyway as-is for something that doesn't jibe with it (in a prequel where you can't use the excuse that the icon is a dead metaphor that's hanging on after the crates changed) what does that say about how thoughtful you're being with your designs? And it's not even a generic version of the icon, apparently every crate is supposed to be stowed to the upper right of... something. I feel it's much kinder to think the misuse is an understandable accident from incomplete information rather than an inexplicable but knowing choice to put fanservice easter eggs above doing something new that makes sense in context (and could also still be fanservice if it was still based on the same general idea). It's not like SNW/DSC hasn't made new designs for existing Trek stuff before and has some kind of "vintage only" visual philosophy.
Hell, I'm sure if the person responsible for reusing the old cargo logo read this, they'd feel like, "Man, you can't win with these fans, you make something new, they hate it for overwriting the old stuff, you reuse something old, they find some trivial point to seize on to complain that you did it wrong." And if you are reading this, I can only say, you can win, you just didn't this time, but if it's the thought that counts, I appreciate that much.
And someone who worked design on TMP complained later that the cargo containers were copied from the belt buckles because somebody in charge of something thought the shape looked cool. The amount of wasted space in that cargo hold makes no sense at all. Probert in fact designed cargo containers that made sense - interlocking hexagonal boxes - but no go.
The origin and incongruity of the signage here on SNW was something I noticed immediately, but I was tickled that they pulled it out and used it, anyway.
We don't know from the film itself that the cargo containers shown in TMP were a new design and didn't exist aboard the Enterprise even when Pike commanded it. In real world terms, of course not. In terms of the different design principles used in the show versus the movie, just as obviously not. But the design of the current productions reference touchstones from all the previous iterations pretty freely while doing their own thing, so if the designers want to make a different assumption, in-universe - that if we'd gone to the cargo hold in "The Cage" we might have seen TMP-style containers - there's no reason they shouldn't.
Just as the corridors of Pike's ship now have more in common with the corridors of the TNG Enterprise than with the flat-walled sets of the TOS ship.
BTW, inappropriate icons? Telephones? Here's the phone icon on my smartphone:
What the hell does that thing on the left have to do with my phone? For that matter, what's that little blue envelope icon have to do with my email?
What's a little cup-shaped thing with a waste recycling emblem have to do with my permanently deleting files from my PC?
If anything, the fact that all of the cargo icons are the same in the nuEnterprise cargo bay rather than having different quadrants filled in to indicate their hypothetical positions suggests that the use of the drawing is as a general icon referencing the shape of a widely-used cargo container, and nothing more specific. Like, uh, putting a drawing of a file folder or wastebasket on my desktop screen.
(I think I have a manila folder or two around here, somewhere. My paper birth certificate is in one.)
TL; DR: Many of us as individuals have some point or other - or many - on which the visual style of this show might make us uncomfortable, and the particular things that bother us aren't going to be consistent from person to person. For example, in my case I just hate the SNW CG model of the ship, and love everything else I'm seeing.
The origin and incongruity of the signage here on SNW was something I noticed immediately, but I was tickled that they pulled it out and used it, anyway.
We don't know from the film itself that the cargo containers shown in TMP were a new design and didn't exist aboard the Enterprise even when Pike commanded it. In real world terms, of course not. In terms of the different design principles used in the show versus the movie, just as obviously not. But the design of the current productions reference touchstones from all the previous iterations pretty freely while doing their own thing, so if the designers want to make a different assumption, in-universe - that if we'd gone to the cargo hold in "The Cage" we might have seen TMP-style containers - there's no reason they shouldn't.
Just as the corridors of Pike's ship now have more in common with the corridors of the TNG Enterprise than with the flat-walled sets of the TOS ship.
BTW, inappropriate icons? Telephones? Here's the phone icon on my smartphone:
What the hell does that thing on the left have to do with my phone? For that matter, what's that little blue envelope icon have to do with my email?
What's a little cup-shaped thing with a waste recycling emblem have to do with my permanently deleting files from my PC?
If anything, the fact that all of the cargo icons are the same in the nuEnterprise cargo bay rather than having different quadrants filled in to indicate their hypothetical positions suggests that the use of the drawing is as a general icon referencing the shape of a widely-used cargo container, and nothing more specific. Like, uh, putting a drawing of a file folder or wastebasket on my desktop screen.
(I think I have a manila folder or two around here, somewhere. My paper birth certificate is in one.)
TL; DR: Many of us as individuals have some point or other - or many - on which the visual style of this show might make us uncomfortable, and the particular things that bother us aren't going to be consistent from person to person. For example, in my case I just hate the SNW CG model of the ship, and love everything else I'm seeing.
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One, they can't win.
Two, we use old iconography all the time. What's the save icon on a word processor? Do you recognize that shape? As @Serveaux notes particular icons hang on even though their original purpose is not used.
Yeah, I mean I see David's point - because if we stick strictly to the material we've seen, his smartphone on a payphone booth is on the mark. It would be as if our telephones used an icon for some device that's not been invented yet, which is the opposite of the point of an icon.
I just ain't fussed about it because I see it as a throwaway Easter egg kind of thing. Like someone mentioned them putting the names of TOS episodes on Georgiou's books.
The new Cargo Containers look great. Love the call back to Probert's original hexagonal designs. Nifty that they used the same TMP labels.
Can't please everyone. They'll say not enough design easter eggs. Others will say there are too many. Eh, tomato, toMato... let's call the whole thing off.
Can't please everyone. They'll say not enough design easter eggs. Others will say there are too many. Eh, tomato, toMato... let's call the whole thing off.
Then why does Pike keep beeping NO?
I would've thought the chain-of-creation was that the containers were designed to fit into the bay windows for Admiral Nogura's office that were converted into subassemblies for the cargo bay set after his scene was cut. But I don't think I've heard much more than vague descriptions about how that set was supposed to look and which specific parts ended up in the movie and where, so I won't swear in court that those shapes were originally windows.
I don't know, as far as this specific instance goes, I just want to see that they've started using the nice wood the proverbial back-of-the-cabinet, and it whenever it starts to look like things are getting tight with the production design (or writing, or whatever), it turns out it's as superficial as ever. As I'm fond of joking, it's my own fault for not pursing a career path that let me become emperor of Star Trek.
He doesn't want Spock to ruin his career and get the death penalty.
Interesting thing about that is it's a 3.5 inch floppy disk icon. Hell I remember when there were 5.25 inch and even larger floppy disks. 3.5 inch floppies were considered a major advancement.
(Of course when I first got into computers it was with mainframes using full on reel to reel magnetic tape drives and paper punch tape and punch cards.)
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