15 More Things You Didn’t Know About Star Trek III: The Search For Spock (1984)

Although budgeted at $5 million higher than The Wrath of Khan, The Search For Spock was still very much a “budget” production, and to cut corners existing sets were repurposed as much as possible: the divey space bar where McCoy gets arrested by Federation Security was a redress of the ward set of the Enterprise Sickbay; the Bird of Prey’s sickbay was a redress of McCoy’s office; the old city station transporter was a reworking of the Regula I transporter room, which itself had been cobbled together in part with pieces left over from Star Trek—The Motion Picture, notably the helm console of the Klingon bridge, which ended up as the Regula transporter console.

But the bridge set of the Bird of Prey is literally the back part of the Klingon battlecruiser Amar bridge from The Motion Picture. That set was built in sections, each piece on casters, so it could be pulled apart piece by piece as the V’ger weapon annihilates it from back to front. As such it was relatively easy to move sections around to serve as parts of other sets.

The platform Kruge and his pet sit upon is the circular platform behind the helm in TMP, and the lower level where most of the crew work is where the gunner chairs were in that first film. The main reason it looks so different is the surrounding walls had been previously pulled out and used to build the “radiation room” where Spock got nuked in Star Trek II. When the doors to Kruge’s bridge open you can just glimpse the walls and the foot of one of the angled “shock absorber” struts of the forward part of the Klingon bridge from the first film: in this film serving as the Enterprise torpedo deck.