10 Star Trek Deleted Scenes You Must See

Strap in! It’s time for some ship p*rn.

This entry is a bit unorthodox as it will focus not on any deleted scenes per se, but on unused visual effects. Nonetheless, these shots are an absolute must-see for any Star Trek fan worth their salt.

In one documentary featurette of The Roddenberry Vault Blu-Ray, Strange New Worlds: Visualising The Fantastic, we are utterly spoilt with left over shots of the miniature filming model of the original Enterprise, including camera fly-bys – the technique which created the illusion that the ship was in forward motion through space. In another sublime example, the camera glides in towards the bridge as the Enterprise is rotated from underneath by a studio operator.

We see excerpts of temporary visual effects from the episode Spectre of the Gun, isolated VFX elements of the galactic barrier, other blue-screen views of the Space Station K-7, behind-the-scenes transporter sequences, views of the Enterprise shuttlebay, and blue screen shots of the Galileo.

The featurette also allows us an insight into the visual effects process on The Original Series. For example, to produce a "typical shot," such as the Enterprise flying through space or orbiting a planet, the blue screen footage of the ship was combined with shots of a starfield or artwork of a planet in an 'optical printer'. This gigantic device, which was essentially part projector, part camera, allowed the different elements to be re-filmed to form a new composite shot. The revolutionary machine was the brainchild of Linwood Dunn, "the father of optical printing," who worked directly on the visual effects for Star Trek.

Creativity was not in short supply on The Original Series. Feats of "analogue ingenuity," as TOS visual effects artist Richard Edlund puts it, even included the use of cornflakes on strings as asteroids (as seen in Mudd’s Women). For another effect, pans of mercury were hit with a hammer to create different patterns of reflected light, used notably for the introduction of the Metrons over the viewscreen in the episode Arena. These are just two examples; their innovativeness was boundless.

The filming model of the Enterprise, largely the work of Matt Jeffries, has been in the care of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC since 1974.