The Smithsonian Channel: Building Star Trek

The Smithsonian Channel: Building Star Trek

The Smithsonian Channel: Building Star Trek

The Smithsonian Channel: Building Star Trek

The Smithsonian Channel: Building Star Trek

The Smithsonian Channel: Building Star Trek

The Smithsonian Channel: Building Star Trek

The Smithsonian Channel: Building Star Trek

The Smithsonian Channel: Building Star Trek

“After the show was cancelled, most props were thrown in the dumpster,” Brooks Peck, curator at the EMP museum in Seattle, says of the set of Star Trek: The Original Series.

Cheap props, rich imagination

Peck is just one of many curators, actors, screenwriters, and fans that we meet in the Smithsonian Channel’s two-hour Star Trek tribute, Building Star Trek. Peck’s quiet enthusiasm shines through the frenetically-structured special. Part-documentary and part-reality show, the special shows how the iconic props from The Original Series are being restored and how they’ve influenced contemporary science.

As a fan, seeing the old Star Trek props is often as interesting as seeing the contemporary science that the props inspired. Building Star Trek opens with the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum bringing the original 11-foot model of the Starship Enterprise to expert restorers. The museum hopes to display the model in the Boeing “Icons of Flight” entry hall. Despite how precious some might consider the original Enterprise, the documentary gives the impression that most of the props and sets that survived have not been well cared for. On the model Enterprise, the Air and Space Museum’s chief conservator Malcolm Collum points out chipping paint and 50-year-old glue coming apart at the seams. The wiring within the ship that was used to light up its windows also needs restoring so the model won’t catch fire.

Building Star Trek also shows just how well the show creators did on a budget back in the ’60s. Phasers were made of cheap plastic, and communicator grilles that characters spoke into were made of nothing more than painted, ribbed paper. Some of the early TOS episodes used a prop shuttle called the Galileo to take the crew from the ship to a planet’s surface and back again, but eventually the budget got in the way of that.

“There just was no budget available on a TV show in the ’60s to show a shuttle flying down to a planet and landing,” says John van Citters, CBS’ VP of product development. Instead, TOS writers “invented” the transporter to get characters to the next location.

Stars and scientists

Writers David Gerrold and DC Fontana and actress Nichelle Nichols appear in the Smithsonian Channel’s special to talk about Star Trek’s cultural impact. Although parts of The Original Series were decidedly not progressive, overall, The Original Series was a ground-breaking show for the inclusion of women and minorities in leadership positions.

About Lt. Uhura’s character, Fontana recounted, “There were southern stations that told NBC ‘well, we’re not going to run the show, because you have a black woman on TV,’ and Gene Roddenberry told NBC ‘well, tell them to go to hell.’”

Nichols also talked about how she used the fame she earned playing Uhura to recruit black women as astronauts and scientists. “There were many little girls—black, white, yellow, brown, red, green—who wanted to be Uhura, loved Uhura.”

Fans also loved Spock. The special visits the UCLA library Special Collections Department, where archivists keep some of the many letters sent to Leonard Nimoy. The Vulcan apparently got much more fan mail than anyone else on the show.

Amid all of these fan-focused factoids, the Smithsonian Channel also interviews specialists who are working on science and technology that mirrors Star Trek’s own. Professor David Grier has been working on ways to pull atoms using a sort of microscopic tractor beam, Dr. Rob Afzal talks about his work developing high-power lasers, and Google developers talk about their work to make Google Translate as good as Star Trek’s universal translator.

These interludes in the real world are too fast-paced and numerous to offer more than just a surface-level glimpse of what these contemporary scientists do. The meat of Building Star Trek is the 1966 show, so each side quest into science is fleeting and sometimes unsatisfying (I was always left with questions: how does your tiny tractor beam actually pull atoms? In what situations are high-power lasers better to use than other missile-defense systems? How do you gauge accuracy in Google Translate?).

But on a macro scale, the thesis of the special is clear: Star Trek has been influencing science for 50 years, and its positive vision of humanity’s future has changed our world for the better.

That’s echoed in Grier’s hopeful comments about science’s progression in the half-century since The Original Series. “We’re way ahead of schedule,” he muses. Who knows, maybe by the end of the 23rd century we’ll have made science fiction just regular science.

The Smithsonian Channel's Building Star Trek premieres Sunday, September 4, 8pm ET/PT.

Listing image by The Smithsonian Channel: Building Star Trek