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The Great Phaser Caper, revisited

Dukhat

Dukhat

Admiral
Admiral
Continuing on from this old thread:

https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/spec-phasers.144993/page-4

So it's been pretty well verified that Justman was a bit confused when he talked about his memories of a toy company wanting to produce phaser weapons for free in exchange for being allowed to sell toy versions (and having those prototypes being used in early publicity photos when in fact they were nothing more than flashlights with colored cells, and the actual subject was the phaser rifle from WNMHGB.)

However, I'm bringing this up again because of an excerpt from 'The Making of Star Trek' book that @Maurice quoted:

The hand weapon is, in fact, a good case in point. Eight of them were required and with normal breakage should have carried STAR TREK through its first year of production. The weapons were built by the studio, cost nearly $7,000, and, when delivered, were unusable. They had no imaginative surface detail—just plain flat surfaces. They were good looking toys, but they weren't believable as 23rd century weapons. An outside company had to be hired, at high additional cost...
Click to expand...

My question is, does anyone know about those rejected phaser weapons made by Desilu? What did they look like? Were they used in later episodes as something else? Were they just junked?
 
The TMOST quote refers to production-era Phaser II props, right?

And if so, do we know anything about the Cage-WNM era pistols? They show up in "What are Little Girls Made Of" as well. They don't look as good, but if money was an issue, they could have been used for the series. Does anybody know why they weren't?

Dukhat said:
My question is, does anyone know about those rejected phaser weapons made by Desilu? What did they look like? Were they used in later episodes as something else? Were they just junked?
Click to expand...

Maybe they were repurposed as the morte implements in "The Cloud Minders." No surface detail might have made them better digging tools than ray guns.
 
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ZapBrannigan said:
The TMOST quote refers to production-era Phaser II props, right?

And if so, do we know anything about the Cage-WNM era pistols? They show up again in "What are Little Girls Made Of" as well. They don't look as good, but if money was an issue, they could have been used for the series. Does anybody know why they weren't?
Click to expand...

From what I understand, after the second pilot, they wanted new phasers to replace the 'laser guns' from 'The Cage' (and which, as you said, showed up intermittently in the first few episodes of season 1 as other people's personal guns), and had Desilu's prop department make some. But they didn't like the eight prototypes, so Matt Jeffries designed new phasers and Wah Chang built them, which are the phaser I and II props we see in the show. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong.

As for why the laser guns were discontinued? They probably were not meant to be used on a consistently regular basis. They were good for the pilot and occasional guest uses, but that was it. The same thing happened with Babylon 5. In the pilot movie, the guns used were completely different from the PPGs they used later. The pilot guns were quite shoddy and would not have held up to repeated use for years on end.
 
The toy company is the one that built the phaser rifle for the second pilot. There are memos about this is the Roddenberry papers.

I have seen no further elucidation about the Desilu made weapons.
 
ZapBrannigan said:
Maybe they were repurposed as the morte implements in "The Cloud Minders." No surface detail might have made them better digging tools than ray guns.
Click to expand...

Maybe, but the mortae don’t really scream out at me as ‘former phaser pistol now being used as a spade.’
 
Dukhat said:
Maybe, but the mortae don’t really scream out at me as ‘former phaser pistol now being used as a spade.’
Click to expand...

And that's what made them such bad phaser pistols. :bolian: Kidding. It's a wild guess on my part. But remember how McCoy's remote control device in "Spock's Brain" was a repaint of the Cage communicator? They took the lid off, painted over the clear Lucite™, and stuck some buttons on. So it wouldn't surprise anyone if the unacceptable phasers were used for something later.
 
ZapBrannigan said:
And that's what made them such bad phaser pistols. :bolian: Kidding. It's a wild guess on my part. But remember how McCoy's remote control device in "Spock's Brain" was a repaint of the Cage communicator? They took the lid off, painted over the clear Lucite™, and stuck some buttons on. So it wouldn't surprise anyone if the unacceptable phasers were used for something later.
Click to expand...

LOL.

Another candidate could be this thing:

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Laser_beacon

Franz Joseph apparently thought it was some sort of ray gun weapon:

https://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/blueprints/sftm/01-08-58.jpg
 
Dukhat said:
Franz Joseph apparently thought it was some sort of ray gun weapon:
https://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/blueprints/sftm/01-08-58.jpg
Click to expand...

Maurice said:
TMOST, 21st photo page (unnumbered)

View attachment 25002
Click to expand...

FJ was working directly from TMOST, and any other photos he could get his hands on to reverse engineer. With a photo like that in the book, he must have absolutely nailed the true size and shape of the laser beacon / soldering gun egg.

By contrast, he was way off on the better-loved communicator, which had no ruler and no side view to spell it out. We eventually did get highly accurate plans for it:
http://www.herocomm.com/PartsAndPlans/Plans.htm
http://www.herocomm.com/PartsAndPlans/Images/AlphaCommBlueprints-Jul07.pdf
 
BK613 said:
Maybe these? Also shown on image page 17 of TMOST. Pistol grips would definitely make them weapon-like. They also look like a jumping off point for the Phaser II
https://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/blueprints/sftm/02-11-12.jpg
https://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/blueprints/sftm/02-11-13.jpg
Click to expand...

That's also a possibility, unless there's documentation that these props were made specifically as medical instruments. However, it shows up several times as random tools before being used as a medical device, so there you go.
 
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Dukhat said:
So it's been pretty well verified that Justman was a bit confused when he talked about his memories of a toy company wanting to produce phaser weapons for free in exchange for being allowed to sell toy versions (and having those prototypes being used in early publicity photos when in fact they were nothing more than flashlights with colored cells, and the actual subject was the phaser rifle from WNMHGB.)
Click to expand...

The toy company in question designed the phaser rifle used in the second pilot. An early publicity stills of Shatner holding the phaser rifle was shown in a sales brochure promoting the show’s second season.

http://startrekfactcheck.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-great-phaser-caper.html
 
Harvey said:
The toy company in question designed the phaser rifle used in the second pilot. An early publicity stills of Shatner holding the phaser rifle was shown in a sales brochure promoting the show’s second season.

http://startrekfactcheck.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-great-phaser-caper.html
Click to expand...

Yes, that was the conclusion reached from the original thread topic about the spec phasers. However, what I'm asking about now is the Desilu-produced phasers that were rejected for being unusable because they had no surface detail and plain flat surfaces, as quoted in TMOST book. Was Irving Feinberg the one who made those rejected phasers or was it someone else in the Desilu prop department? I'm curious to know what they looked like or if they were ever reused as other props.
 
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