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More hidden details about Star Trek's greatest starship.
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00:00Hello, everyone, it's me, Adam Cleary, etc. Don't know why I did that.
00:04Back, TreadCulture, we've got some videos that need to be done,
00:07because remember the thing where we do the thing about the ships,
00:11and you're all like, oh, you really like it, and then we kind of did them all well?
00:15There's still some milk in that teat, apparently.
00:18Right, yes, if you're new here, basically, we like to do these really nice breakdowns of the ships,
00:21not just with random Google-able facts, with stuff we've actually found out for ourselves
00:25by doing actual research, and by we, I, of course, mean Paul. Say hello to Paul.
00:29Now, one of my absolute favourites in these series, and indeed one of the most critically well-received,
00:33was the Enterprise D, I think one of the first ones we did.
00:36This is where we discovered Cetacean Ops, this is where my whole dolphin,
00:39they say fetish, obsession came from originally, and it turns out there is yet more space dust
00:45on that book, because we've found 10 more things. And again, by we, I, of me, Paul.
00:50Where's all this information coming from, Adam? Well, I'll tell you by reading it out.
00:54Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda's extensive Star Trek The Next Generation technical manual
00:58both the book and the CD-ROM, as well as Rick's exhaustive deck-by-deck USS Enterprise NCC-1701D
01:06blueprints. We've got it all from, I need this, but we've got it all from there.
01:10So with that in mind, my name is Adam Cleary. Yes, I am well out of presenting practice,
01:14in case you couldn't tell, and these are 10 more things about the Enterprise D you need to know.
01:19Number 10, we did see the main shuttle bay. All right, so I'm going to open this by throwing
01:24my old hands up and saying, I might have got this one wrong. Number seven, you never actually saw
01:30the main shuttle bay. Yeah, I'm going to open this by holding my hands up and saying, we've got this
01:35one slightly wrong. I did say in the previous version of this video that you never actually
01:39got to see the Enterprise D's main shuttle bay in all of its glory, because it was just designed
01:44too big and too grand and too interesting for them to ever realise on screen. Instead, we got the much
01:49smaller, much easier to visualise, much cheaper to produce shuttle bays. Never got to see the
01:54massive, enormous, two-storey, parking lot-style shuttle bay they had right at the back of the
02:00saucer section. Except we did, sort of. It was in the episode cause and effect. The USS Bose
02:05minions were repeating one, where they keep playing the same card game and doing all the same stuff
02:10over and over because of the time loop or something like that. The ship Fraser, doesn't he, comes out of
02:14the thing and he crashes into them and they all die. Apparently, the idea they had to fix it in the end,
02:19the data has, is to decompress the main shuttle bay. There you go. And that, that is the main shuttle
02:25bay. That one prop shot of the outside of the doors opening, that is the main shuttle bay. So
02:30technically, you did see it. Just, not very well. Number 9. Sickbay was actually massive. Given how much
02:38time they spent in sickbay and how much mortal peril the cast and crew were often in, you don't think it
02:43was weird that a ship with over a thousand people on board had a sickbay with five beds. Like, intergalactic
02:50plagues, diseases, people getting the flu, all sorts. Five people could ever be staying in that sickbay at once.
02:56That not seemed weird? Well, that's because it wasn't. It was absolutely massive according to the technical
03:02blueprints and the part we saw was just one part of a much bigger sickbay facility. Like a hospital, you might call it.
03:08And if we could just bring up the blueprints here, it was actually this big specifically, which is,
03:12comparative to what we saw on screen, Je Norme. In fact, just going through the dialogue of the
03:17show alone, it tells you that there were three sickbay wards, surgical suites, medical labs,
03:22private hospital rooms, a rehabilitation centre and a morgue, which, the really scary thing happens
03:27that time, as well as also a Null G ward, which is like a medical treatment facility but with zero gravity,
03:34because for some reason, that can help you. It just saves you putting your feet up if you're
03:39spraying your ankle, I guess, but other than that. Number eight, the Arboretum. All right, so one last
03:44thing I'm adding to the big long list of things that would have been very cool for them to have
03:47the budget to show us, yes, along with the giant computer core and of course, cetacean ops and I
03:51guess the sickbay, is the Arboretum. Now you did see this, but we only saw a small, tiny fraction of it.
03:58It was absolutely massive. In fact, if you just take a look at the very back of the Enterprise D model,
04:03you see those two large blue square things, that is actually the Arboretum, meaning it's at least
04:09two decks tall, it's really, really wide and so much bigger than they ever actually used in the
04:14set of the show. I would love to have seen that, even if they just knocked it up in a very weird
04:20sort of background painting kind of way. That would have been, that would have been interesting to me,
04:24a man with no garden. Wait, is that what an Arboretum is? Plant, just plants, isn't it? It is just plants.
04:28I live in a, I live in a flat in a building, I can't go outside. Number seven, idiots broke into
04:33the ship. No, we're not talking about those Ferengi mercenaries. Ahook, ahook, ahook, ahook. See, Paul,
04:39that's how good your jokes are. We're talking about some actual criminals. According to the Daily Dot,
04:44who were the ones who actually labelled them idiots, in 1988 some people actually broke into the set of
04:48the ship, had a lot of fun and games there and even videoed themselves doing it. Hence, when the tape was
04:55recovered, they had all the evidence they needed to say, it was a, hence idiots, basically. Don't video
04:59yourself doing a crime. It's pretty much, if I was doing a crime, pretty much job number one would be
05:06don't actively create evidence of yourself doing it where possible. I'm just, I'm going to read this out
05:12because it's genuinely hilarious. The videos of the break-in appeared on YouTube in 2007. They have
05:17since obviously been taken down called Stage Nine Interlopers. Two men dressed in homemade
05:23stuffy uniforms. Where was Sean that night? I would like an alibi. Two of the deck,
05:27empty sets of the Enterprise. They played with the consoles. They pretended to be my
05:31the transporter pad. They got into the bio beds for some reason. Then they talked about stealing
05:35props before the video ends. And in the description, it was like, oh, we got caught and we got chased out
05:40by Paramount Security. Again, if I'm doing a crime, I'm not gonna make videos of me doing the crime.
05:49Of course, the interesting thing about this is if you catch your mind back to the first video,
05:51we did tell you that the set was actually covered in cat because of how many cats used to break in
05:57there. So I wonder if that was a consideration. I wonder if it stood in any of it. Number six,
06:0310 forward doesn't fit. Now, as you've probably seen in these videos or just used your own common
06:08sense brain to work out, a lot of the sets in Star Trek are redresses. They're supposed to be
06:12adaptable. They change from episode to episode, from show to show, from series to series. They've
06:17got to be used for many different things because they've only got so much space, but not 10 forward.
06:22That was supposed to tell so many deeply personal stories and be such a focal part of that show that
06:29they made a permanent set that never changed and looked really, really cool. And it did look really,
06:34really cool. The only problem with it was they had a very clear idea of how they
06:38wanted 10 forward to look, and that idea came after they had designed the Enterprise D. So they
06:43knew where they wanted it to be. They knew how they wanted it to fit in with the ship. They knew what
06:47they wanted it to look like on screen. But the problem is none of those things actually line up
06:53with the outside design of the Enterprise D. What you see on screen does not fit on that model.
07:00In fact, much to the annoyance of the ship's designer, Andrew Provid, who literally sat them down and said,
07:04well, you can do what you want if you're designing a bar cafe thing, but it's got to fit within these
07:08parameters. The producers just went, nope. But then so popular was 10 forward that when they
07:14redesigned the model to be slightly better filmed on television, they tweaked the design of the
07:17saucer section so that you could fit it in. But the problem with that was they had so much footage of
07:22the old model, which only varied ever so slightly that people wouldn't even notice when watching it on
07:26television because they couldn't predict that we'd all have HD, pausable Blu-ray copies of it in
07:31future to pour over for our personal entertainment YouTube channels, that they use these interchangeably.
07:37So there's lots of shots in the episodes with 10 forward not fitting into the source section,
07:41and then shots with it does fit into the source section. It's what's known as in French,
07:46l'inconsistency. Number five, the models were very different. Okay, so this one is just
07:53astoundingly short-sighted. So when they made the next generation, they secured the services of
07:58ILM, Industrial Light and Magic. Yes, the really famous ones who do all the things for everything,
08:02and they got them to produce loads and loads of shots of the Enterprise-D. They got them to build it,
08:07they got them to film it, they got them to make it so it was very easy to repurpose. In fact,
08:11most of the shots you ever see of the Enterprise-D were done in that original window. And you know
08:17exactly the ones. It's flying by the screen, the close-ups when they're doing the captain's log at the
08:20star going into orbit, coming out of orbit. All the ones you saw over and over again,
08:24ILM made them and they just adapted them throughout the show. But the problem with doing a show that
08:28runs on for five, for six, for seven, for eight, for however many seasons, is that you need more
08:33than that. You need variety. You are writing new things to happen to your characters and thus new
08:37things happen to your ships and you must be able to visualize that and not just use the same stock
08:43images over and over again. So they needed midway through production to have new footage. But the
08:49problem was they couldn't get ILM anymore, either budgetary or whatever. They had to go to other
08:53studios and other studios found the ILM model very difficult to work with because obviously they had
08:58their own filming practices. They would prefer to make their own models. So by season three,
09:03they decided that's what they were going to do. And that new model debuted in the episode,
09:07The Defector, which is one of the first episodes where there's just all of a sudden brand new clips
09:11of the Enterprise. But the problem was it wasn't exactly like the other one. They'd made it stockier.
09:16They'd made the model only four foot so it was much easier to film. They'd exaggerated some of the
09:20paneling. They'd done little things like including 10 forward in the actual layout of it. And it was,
09:25to most people, exactly the same. But to nerds like me, like you, it's quite different.
09:34And of course things only got worse when they went to make Star Trek Generations because they got ILM
09:38back. And ILM were like, ooh, movie budget. Let's make a brand new six foot model. Check. And a really
09:43cool CGI version. Check. And all four of these different versions of the Enterprise will be ever
09:48so slightly different. With little raised bits here and little pronounced bits there and just,
09:52it's all, it's all, it's all a mess. It's all a mess. I mean, to most people, to normal people,
09:56you can't tell. But again, we ain't normal. Number four, she was almost CGI. So here's a
10:03slightly weird fun fact. Star Trek The Next Generation went into pre-production around the same time as
10:08the search for Spock was being made. And there was a lot of talk that they should just go and use the
10:12refit model of the original Enterprise for this series. I mean, it seems ridiculous now, but at
10:19the time you can understand that. Do we need, it's still Star Trek. We want things to be connected.
10:24Why do we need a new ship? And the plan was they were going to use the visual technology they had at
10:27the time to just do a CGI version of it. So it'd be much cheaper, cheaper, cheaper to produce for
10:34television. But they didn't do that. In the end, they decided it didn't look quite as good as they
10:37wanted it to. It didn't look anywhere near as good as models did. So if they were going to have to
10:41build a model for television, because they couldn't use that one that had been in the film, they might
10:44as well just design it from scratch. And then just a mere seven years later, they finally actually did
10:49make a CGI version of the Enterprise D for Star Trek Generations. So it's just, it's a funny old game.
10:54And it's funny how life works. Number three, she was blue. Right. So lighting is, I don't look like this.
11:00The version you're seeing me on, I don't really look like this. My skin tone is very different.
11:05This is just, it's, it's the lighting. Okay. I'm in a studio. I'm being lit from the front,
11:10the back is being lit as well. This is not how you would see me on the street. And the same is true
11:15of models they use to recreate starships in television shows. They are a produce, a produce,
11:21the result of lighting, which is why if I asked you to tell me what color the Enterprise D was,
11:26indeed what color are most of the ships in Starfleet, you'd probably say it's like a,
11:29like a gray silver, like a very neutral gray or silver, wouldn't you? You'd be wrong.
11:33They are actually duck egg blue, genuinely. And the reason for this, and this is going to blow your
11:38mind slightly if you're not like 50 or 60, is because the way the original Enterprise used to
11:44come across on old televisions when it was originally broadcast was duck egg blue. Even though that was
11:51designed to be silver slash gray, it actually came across as slightly blue on television. But they had the
11:56same thing when they're doing the set for Strange New Worlds, didn't they? They've got everything
11:59orange, even though we sort of think of it as red, because those sets were actually orange,
12:03it just came off as red on television. So the old Enterprise on the 60s TV show used to look blue,
12:09so they designed the Enterprise D to look blue. And yet of course, irony upon irony upon irony,
12:14even though it was designed blue to look like the color that the Enterprise was not in the 1960s,
12:20when they started putting that under studio lighting, it looked silver gray. The color
12:24the Enterprise actually was under studio lighting, which is mad. And if you still don't believe me,
12:29go watch the end of Star Trek Generations when the saucer section crashes into the planet and is lit
12:35for the first time not by space lights or anything like that, but by a natural neutral sun. It is blue.
12:42It is immistakably blue. Immistakably a word? Unmistakably blue. It is blue. Number two,
12:49they destroyed the bridge for real. All right, so people kind of noticed that they upgraded the
12:52bridge for generations. They added extra consoles on the side, they raised the seating up in the
12:56middle. The idea was you're supposed to not notice it had changed, and because you were seeing it on
13:00a big screen, just think, oh wow, is that what that really looked like all this time? But of course,
13:04people aren't stupid, and instead they sat there and went, oh, they've changed it. And while it was a
13:09slightly controversial change, because yes, you're not going to believe it, people saw something had
13:12changed on something they liked, and they got really annoyed about it and started
13:15doing so. It's just that the internet wasn't as terrible as it is now, so it kind of gets forgotten
13:20about. The plan, of course, was to destroy that bridge, because they were going to destroy the
13:23ship. And they actually did need to completely clear it out, because the space that was being
13:27used for the Enterprise D bridge needed to be cleared out to be beset for Voyager's bridge on
13:31the Paramount lot. So rather than just making effects appear to destroy the place, they decided,
13:36well, let's actually trash it. So the fires, explosions, everything burning, everything collapsing on
13:42top of itself, none of that is practical work or effects or design to be put away.
13:46They just started knocking stuff over and setting fire to it and kicking it around and
13:50that's why it looks so good. Some of it was saved though, in case I've upset you by saying that,
13:54it's in the Hollywood Entertainment Thingy Museum, it's been there since like 2007. If you want to go
13:58see it and be like, oh, thank god, you're safe, horseshoe console, then it's there.
14:03Number one, Future Enterprise had a naughty bumper sticker. So, really quick one to end on this,
14:09quite fun, you all saw All Good Things, one of my all-time favourite Star
14:11Trek Next Generation episodes, one of my all-time favourite Star Trek episodes, full stop.
14:15In fact, the Enterprise refit, the Galaxy X class I think it's called, you know, it's got,
14:21it's got the third incredibly phallic warp nacelle on the back, it's got loads of shooty
14:26phases, it's got old man Riker behind the wheel, you remember it, it peers briefly, blows up some
14:31Klingons and then goes to warp 13 and we just never addressed that. Again, you remember it, right?
14:36It had a funny bumper sticker. Now this information comes exclusive to you,
14:39thanks to our good pal Doug Drexler, who you can either see in a forthcoming video that we've
14:42just done or that's already gone out. I don't know when you're going to see this one, but we've done
14:46some fun stuff with him, is my point. He told us there was a bumper sticker on the physical model
14:51of that. They took one of the old models of the Enterprise D and they added stuff to it,
14:55because it was the last episode you can get away with stuff like that. They put a bumper sticker on
14:58it as well. Any guesses? Anyone? Anyone? What do the bumper stickers say? Anyone? Anyone?
15:02I heart Uranus. Wait, no, it's even funnier. We heart Uranus.
15:07Ho ho ho. Actually called it the master display system on that also contained loads of funny
15:11easter eggs. They had a biplane, a mouse and a rubber ducky, all just based in the ship's
15:15schematics because it was the last episode. It was the last day of school for everyone who worked on
15:18the next generation. So they started, started having some fun. Hey, fun story on my last day of school,
15:23I broke in overnight and I painted an enormous 40-foot pink penis on the school field. Have
15:31I ever told anybody about that before? If you're watching this, Mr. O'Dwyer or Ms.
15:35Kluwen, that was me. Sorry. Anyway, there you go. 10 more things you did not know about the
15:39Enterprise D, which now you do, which brings that to 20 things you now know about the Enterprise D,
15:43along with the 10 things you know about Keep Space Nine, about Voyager, about the Romulan Warbird,
15:49about the Defiant. Lots of information going on in there. Hope you don't
15:52soon forget where you live. That would be terrible. So let us know what you made of it
15:54all in the comments below. Of course, you can get to like, share and subscribe. Yes,
15:57I know. I'm sorry. I don't present much anymore because this is all over the place and terrible.
16:00Well, it's just not really my job at the minute, so standards will slip, unfortunately. But if you
16:05did like what you see, you can get me on Twitter at Adam Cleary, C-L-E-L-Y, the entire Trek Culture
16:09family at Trek Culture. But in the meantime, thank you all so much for watching. Thanks enormously to Paul
16:14for pulling all this information together and to Chris probably for the edit. But I, Adam, just me,
16:19we'll see you soon. Goodbye.
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