Lowbudget Trek

[Peregrin Toker]

Something I have noticed is that when it comes to Star Trek, there is often an inverse proportion between budget and series quality.

I think it's common knowledge most ST fans seem to like the original series over the newer series - mainly because TOS relied upon plot instead of expensive special effects and eye-candy.

However, I think there is more to it than this - many TNG and Voyager episodes have extremely silly plots which aren't very entertaining but cost a lot of money in FX (Example: Voyager episode "Thresholds"), which might have been a result of the writers only having really stupid ideas.

Some film enthusiasts might have observed that moviemaking sometimes actually is easier with limitations in the form of lower budgets and in some cases (such as "Six-String Samurai") lower budgets mean genuinely better films.

I have noticed that some old TOS episodes (TOS didn't have a very high budget) seem to have been written the Kevin Lindenmuth way - in other words, the writer looks around what props, sets and costumes he can use without using to much money and then writes the plot around the props.

Don't believe me?? Examples:
"Bread And Circuses": Paramount had some Roman sets around, then they decided to make a Roman Empire-themed parallel world.
"Patterns Of Force": Paramount had recently made something featuring Nazi Germany, or they just had some WW2 costumes around and then somehow incorporated that into their next episode.
"Shore Leave": Probably the best/worst episode. All they really needed other than the spaceship sets, Starfleet costumes and ship models were a fakey-looking bunny costume, some stock footage of an airplane, some stock footage of a tiger and some Medieval-period costumes.

And I actually prefer TOS in part due to it's B-Movie-ish charm and "Kitsch Factor". Opinions??

[kojikun]

This is very true for many science fiction stories. too often a writer rightsm more about the technology and less about the people and situations. Earth: Final Conflict season 1 was a really good scifi and didnt rely on the fancy tech or anything to keep it going. they didnt need many special effects. stargate is like that too.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Keep in mind that during the 1960s, the special and visual effects used in TOS were expensive for TV at the time.

[kojikun]

spanky, this is true this is true.

[Peregrin Toker]

Keep in mind that during the 1960s, the special and visual effects used in TOS were expensive for TV at the time.

But didn't this result in shrinking budgets during the 3rd TOS season?

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Low ratings resulted in the budget for season three being cut.

[kmart]

But despite the budget cut, the fx got better 3rd season. they rigged the bridge for rear projection on the viewscreeen a couple times, plus there were some really nice close shots of the ship, and that great encircling E shot with the rom using kling cruisers in ENTERPRISE INCIDENT. And the shot of the Enterprise turning a Klingon ship into MILK in DAY OF THE DOVE.

They supposedly spent half the budget for one show just on opticals, with THOLIAN (the claim from old Mike Minor interviews is that they blew 90 grand on it, though I'm inclined to think it was maybe that they went 9 grand over ... )

The Allen shows always had more money than Trek on the fx end, and it showed, but I still like a lot of the TOS stuff. Except for matte lines and the looney time travel in TOMORROW IS YESTERDAY, there aren't too many instances of ship shots that I find really obnoxious, yet on more recent [i.e., ModernTrek] projects, the cg trek stuff often looks laughably cartoony.

Modelwork on trek (outside of TMP) probably peaked with mid-run on DS9, around WAY OF THE WARRIOR or the show where they force Eddington to give up.

Percentagewise, they probably had less to spend on NextGen than on TOS ... on average they had 75,000 per show on visual effects in the first years of NextGen, and that is based on a 1.5 mil per show average budget. So that is one half of one percent of each show's cost going to visual effects, a genuine pittance (and it showed, too ... I think NextGen's vfs only got good a few years in, when they stopped trying to use the 2 ft model, limited use on the 6 fter, and cut back on shooting film elements at 30fps instead of 24, which creates that no-blur/no-scale thing with underdetailed miniatures. )

EDIT ADD-ON: back on topic, the budget thing as applied to the features does to some degree suggest that in the right hands, art thrives on economy. With Bob Sallin (Bennett's line producer at the time) and Meyer, they made the most of ST 2 on little bread, and Meyer with Jaffe and Winter made ST 6 pretty decent despite dollar crunches. I think Berman has a tendency to spend the money in the wrong places (like the foam village in INSURRECTION, stellar cartog in GENERATIONS, paying the writer for FIRST CONTACT, and in the case of NEMESIS, paying himself anything for all the wrong decisions made.

Also note that ILM did not work on ST 9 & 10. They didn't work on ST 5 either (except recomping 2 shots), so the proven history is if ILM doesn't do the show, it is considered something of a failure (even though I like ST 5 a lot, it sure as hell suffers in the vfx area.)

[Peregrin Toker]

They supposedly spent half the budget for one show just on opticals, with THOLIAN (the claim from old Mike Minor interviews is that they blew 90 grand on it, though I'm inclined to think it was maybe that they went 9 grand over ... )

Then again, didn't this put certain limitations on the rest??

[Uraniun235]

David Gerrold in his book The Trouble With Tribbles says that the stories he pitched were heavily influenced by the budget constraints of the show.

And wasn't the TOS budget actually bigger than the TNG budget when inflation was taken into account? I seem to remember hearing this somewhere.

[Peregrin Toker]

David Gerrold in his book The Trouble With Tribbles says that the stories he pitched were heavily influenced by the budget constraints of the show.

So I weren't that wrong.... (The episode "Shore Leave" definately uses some stock footage)

And wasn't the TOS budget actually bigger than the TNG budget when inflation was taken into account? I seem to remember hearing this somewhere.

Well, all I know was that TOS had an unusually high budget for a 1960s series. But it was a sci-fi series, and they always have high budgets. (save for the Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s)

[HemlockGrey]

Hmm. The TNG shows I've seen never struck me as needing a very high budget, mostly because almost all of them are characters walking around in the ship talking. Even 'Yesterday's Enterprise' looks fairly simple; Enterprise flies around, fires a few shots, and the Klingons blow up in clouds of green/yellow smoke.

[kmart]

STAR TREK had a somewhat higher budget than OUTER LIMITS, but it was about the same or slightly less than MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, which did NOT have opticals. I'm pretty sure the Allen shows were made at similar budgets, but they could trade stuff back and forth between VOYAGE and TUNNEL or LOST IN SPACE, sort of like DS9 and VOYAGER and the trek features, so the investments went a lot further. However, a huge hunk of Trek's budget on TOS went to Desilu overhead, moreso than with show's done at other studios. So it didn't all get up there on the screen.

[Baron Mordo]

I have noticed that some old TOS episodes (TOS didn't have a very high budget) seem to have been written the Kevin Lindenmuth way - in other words, the writer looks around what props, sets and costumes he can use without using to much money and then writes the plot around the props.

You know, Lexx was done in that exact way, I think. Very MacGuyver-y looking sets and props combined with CG effects. But it works, oddly enough.

[Lord Poe]

STAR TREK had a somewhat higher budget than OUTER LIMITS, but it was about the same or slightly less than MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, which did NOT have opticals.

According to "Inside Star Trek", the studio spent more money on the MI budget, then gave Trek the scraps in the third season. The third season was to consist of more "bottle shows" (show that take place on the ship) because location shooting was so expensive.

Koloth was supposed to be a recurring character Klingon to duel with Kirk.

BTW, Nimoy jumped right into MI after Trek tanked!

[Peregrin Toker]

I have noticed that some old TOS episodes (TOS didn't have a very high budget) seem to have been written the Kevin Lindenmuth way - in other words, the writer looks around what props, sets and costumes he can use without using to much money and then writes the plot around the props.

You know, Lexx was done in that exact way, I think. Very MacGuyver-y looking sets and props combined with CG effects. But it works, oddly enough.

Yet another source of Lexx' cult status....

[kmart]

STAR TREK had a somewhat higher budget than OUTER LIMITS, but it was about the same or slightly less than MISSION IMPOSSIBLE, which did NOT have opticals.

According to "Inside Star Trek", the studio spent more money on the MI budget, then gave Trek the scraps in the third season. The third season was to consist of more "bottle shows" (show that take place on the ship) because location shooting was so expensive.

Koloth was supposed to be a recurring character Klingon to duel with Kirk.

BTW, Nimoy jumped right into MI after Trek tanked!

There's a lot of good stuff in INSIDE STAR TREK, but just due to the invention and inaccuracies in the portion about Harlan Ellison, it makes me take the whole thing with many grains of salt. I think most of the stuff about Roddenberry is pretty accurate, and any info about Gene Coon is always welcome, but I'm just not too sure about other aspects. The budget hit they took 3rd season wasn't as huge as what happened to OUTER LIMITS in their 2nd year (especially the last couple shows, one of which was brought in for about sixty grand!), but the other aspect there is that the overhead paid for the studio may not have been what it was before, since Paramount acquired Desilu toward the end of season 2. Paramount didn't give a shit about the show until 73 or so, but it could be that the crazy markup Desilu got in the initial setup didn't carry over to Paramount (remember, for all this 3rd season costcutting, they still had money to do the stuff I mentioned a few posts earlier, plus make that huge monolith for the Native American episode and deliver some really nice new Enterprise shots.)