View attachment 1575937
Came across this elsewhere. It speaks to how easily people are roped in by things that are new and shiny.
As the years have gone on, I’ve come to really understand just how influential and definitive Matt Jefferies’ TOS designs are. There’s been a gradual shift away from his clean, elegant, and futuristic style as TREK has more and more been designed by people who just…design things for TV and movies, rather that having actual life experience and experience in aviation and engineering and whatnot. Beginning with the TOS movies, we started to see that influx of excessive detailing (resulting from the influential one-two punch of 2001 and STAR WARS) which actually made the designs look
less futuristic.
Just look at the real world for an example of how far ahead of the curve Jefferies was: Personal computers have gone from big and clunky to handheld tablets with touchscreens and two buttons. While the TMP
Enterprise entranced me in my youth (and still does, mind you), I’ve really come to understand and appreciate the fact that Jefferies’ original
Enterprise is the single greatest spaceship design of all time, inside and out, and that everything else which came after is a derivative and lesser version of it.
Fast-forward to the NuTREK movies, and the Abramsprise is a mish-mash of the TOS and TMP ships that looks like it was thrown into a microwave, with no understanding of the function of the design elements being mixed together. For example, they ripped off the general look of the TMP
Enterprise’s Bridge dome, with the three slots housing spotlights that illuminate the name/registry on the upper saucer. However, on the Abramsprise, the front “spotlight” is now the front “window”/viewscreen on the Bridge (which in itself is a dumb literalization of the viewscreen from the interior set).
Jefferies’ designs had form follow function, with the very smooth and plain exterior, since EVAs to repair greeblies on the outside of the ship would be hazardous. Same with the subtle details, like the Sickbay walls being painted green, just as they are in real hospitals (so surgeons can have a contrasting color to aid their eyes when confronted by all that organic-red during operations). There was a logic to the how and why of everything, and the result was sleek and functional, rather than everything just being there to look cool and flashy and expensive.
Again, flashforward to the Abrams and Kurtzman stuff, and the sets are over-designed and over-detailed, with lots of bright lights and greeblies and whatnot everywhere. And that’s not even getting into things like the ridiculous lens flares and camera moves. The NuTREK ships may look “cool” and “flashy” for the purpose of watching an hour of TV, but they in no way look like comfortable, efficiently-designed places where hundreds of people live and work for years at a time. And the exterior of NuPike’s ship is just an over-designed, clunkier version of Jefferies’ classic original, with elements from TMP and NX-01 mixed in. To say nothing of pointless, flashy-for-flashy’s sake elements like the slots in the nacelle pylons.
But, because it’s new and shiny, people are happy to use the opportunity to knock the “cardboard sets and rubber monsters” of TOS, as usual. Sad.