Star Trek: 10 Secrets About The USS Excelsior You Need To Know

hello there everybody track cultures adam cleary here and you may have noticed on other less meaningful watch culture channels that we recently announced we had a brand new huge ginormous studio space within it several nice looking studios well trek culture doesn't have its own little dedicated space in there just yet we did get lots of messages being like oh hey cool you've got some studios again any danger of some more dolphin episodes and i was like well obviously we can't do that because we've only really got the wrestling studio up and running and it wouldn't be right to do a dolphin episode in in a wrestling room because there'd be all this wrestling memorabilia around it would look weird and distracting but then of course i remembered i can do this and it can feel like a star trek studio but given that we've done pretty much all of the hero ships we thought we would start now with the ship that was nearly a hero ship a quasi hero ship a hero ship if you want to think of it as a hero ship but not strictly speaking a hero ship the excelsior class starship specifically the uss excelsior why are we doing that one well because you guys asked for it all the time and also it's pretty much been in star trek since the movies it's like the longest running longest serving ship in canon and again as ever shout out to paul who writes these articles for calling it a whopping 37 years old that is older than me but not by as much as i want it to be and more importantly that the ship not only has heritage but it has legacy the amount of things in star trek that have been spawned because of it the appearances it's made and its own personal backstory mean it's genuinely more interesting than some of the actual hero ships we have done in our humble slash honest opinion so let's get to the getting my name is adam cleary and these are 10 amazing things what are the titles of these that you need to know about the uss excelsior secrets or something number 10 whatever this says yes i'm sure whatever headline that was there paul's very very witty very clever however i don't i can't read i can't read japanese so i'll never know all right so with a backstory for you the uss excelsior was originally christened at the uss valiant it was described in the script work for star trek iii as a superstarship a new queen of space now the vast majority of the work on the ship was done by ilm which is not really how they've done things in the past they've done drawings and stuff in-house but ilm took on the bulk of this and instead of doing concept art they made loads and loads of physical models so they could study them from every different angle now they're all very different very wild very radical but the description they had to work with was something that had to look like it was new it was sleek and it was well the queen of space notes either very very good or very very disappointing depending on your point of view was that the ship they selected from all of these different models was the one leonard nimoy described as the most starfleet looking of the lot of them which yes feels like a little bit of a cop-out that could have done something brave and bold and ambitious but it did have a slight twist on it according to ilm model maker bill george he was absolutely obsessed with japanese design and japanese architecture at the time so his model which he produced which ended up being the excelsior that we all know and love was just simply what he imagined the enterprise would look like if it was built by the japanese aha number nine models inc actually one thing ilm did learn from their time working on star trek was that when the enterprise a refit model was required it was an absolute nightmare it weighed a ton it was impossible to photograph because of the materials used on it so when they built the excelsior they deliberately made it incredibly light and incredibly incredibly good in front of a camera but what about all those study models adam you were just talking about those who haven't all those mad crazy little art projects that ilm made before finally settling on the design of the excelsior what one of them i thought star trek couldn't abide waste did they throw them in the bin well no they didn't they had all these random starfleet designs just lying around so when it came time to get loads of random props for star trek the next generation guess what they used the episode unification part 2 at the surplus depot at quaylor 2. if you really squint and really up the brightness on your monitor you can see several of the discarded excelsior style design models which never ever made it into reality you weren't supposed to be able to see them so they thought they would just get away with doing that of course not predicting that in like what 20 years time big nerds with nice high-end cameras and photography degrees would be able to pick them out oh and also in there is one of the concept models for star trek planet of the titans which was you know we did this whole thing about it it was this concept from the 70s that was going to be a new show for the phase two and then parts of it ended up being the most i'm not getting into it now but the ship was that oh because the star trek producers are incredibly cheeky this one here this specific model that was christened the uss alka seltzer ask your parents number eight the great n experiment good that one all right that one four that's good now between its debut in the search for spock and its proper arrival into star trek in the undiscovered country the excelsior class ship and specifically again the uss excelsior went through some very small little design changes nothing you would have really noticed and it was in the background of star trek's four and five completely unchanged by the time the undiscovered country came around to change the bridge because ilm felt it was too big and there was tiny little additions and subtractions across the primary hull and the back of the the one big change was its transition from the nx 2000 to to note that it was an experimental vessel to ncc 2000 to denote that it was just another ship in the fleet now while of course the nx thing is an established part of star trek canon now predominantly with the defiant and the enterprise from the show enterprise the excelsior was the first ship to ever actually get that in fact if you've ever actually wondered what the whole ncc thing is about star trek the original series production designer matt jeffery said that it's to do with american naval tradition like the n means the navy the c means commercial and then he just added a random extra c on to make it feel more fun and spacey and then they've got nx because the n stands for navy and the x genuinely just means experimental number seven fire apart then oh this is so this is some wonderfully nitpicky stuff you remember when they introduced the excelsior and it was called the big experiment do you do you remember why that was no not because the captain had a mustache because it had trans warp drive now what do they mean by that because trans warp drive has been a thing in so many iterations of star trek and it's always meant different things well they never actually tell you in the search for spock they just laugh at the idea that somebody could try and escape them with warp drive it's the line i love it's my favorite scene in star trek actually the the stealing enterprise from space dock what is it now if he tries to get away with warp drive he's really in for a shock now what we do sort of know from star trek is that transwarp is just the ultimate pretty much form of propulsion it can get you from pretty much point a in the alpha quadrant to point d wherever the hell voyager was in the end of one episode so if started had that that would have completely changed pretty much everything that ever happened in these subsequent shows but apparently it's all a big failure now i've got here the star trek the next generation technical manual which is one of the ultimate bibles for producing these videos and it says while the attempt to surpass the primary warp field efficiency barrier with the transworld development project in the early 2280s proved unsuccessful the pioneering achievements in warp power generation and field coil design eventually led to the upgraded excelsior and ambassador class starships that's deliberately vague now i'm not going to get into the whole thing about how transwarp is a thing in the kelvin universe and there was a reference to that but it was cut they just call it war but even though loads of the things that actually happen in these films are clearly transwarp and not regular warp we're not getting into that that's for another video number six up your shaft okay right i love this in the episode evolution of the next generation data says there has not been a system-wide technological failure on a starship in 79 years just a good random throwaway bit of dialogue isn't it no it's a direct reference to the stealing enterprise scene from the search for spock now the reason the ceiling at the price team works is though everybody's on the same team we're all staff we're all you know we're all one of the guys etc every single person on that ship is incredibly dislikable you've got james b sicking here who is honestly one of my favorite one time ever performances in star trek as well as miguel ferreira who despite the fact that paul's listed him as being in robocop and mulan is of course best known for twin peaks but the single best one time ever performance on board the excelsior in that films by none other than frank force who you know as leonard nimoy because good thing is he's not supposed to be in the search for spock is he because he's not actually spock he's just like a big like proto vulcan really weirdly horny and aggressive vulcan on the genesis planet but he does feature in the film as frank force because he is the voice of the ship's computer who scotty says up your shaft too just a good good insulin it up yosh up your shaft one of those ones that only works in scottish up your shaft number five our obligatory reused set entry now if you've watched these videos before and let's face it you've watched these videos before you know that we like to point out all the reused sets and props and whatever that you can see in one part of one ship and off you just sort of squint and turn your head the exact same part of another ship and of course there is an entry for the excelsior in that now the excelsior as it appears in the undiscovered country which is of course the definitive film appearance of that ship is a redress set from the next generation which was itself a redress set of the enterprise a's bridge from the final frontier got it that's all that's all well and good but a problem arose when they needed to reuse the excelsior's bridge for the voyager episode flashback because they had reused the excelsior bridge about a million times by that point it had been the enterprise b in star trek generations it had been the uss prometheus it had been the zoza and it had been a romulan warbird in deep space nine according to star trek voyager production designer richard james they went and tried to find any bit of left over just wall or console that we're kicking about in paramount slot they found like two or three bits of console that were like redressed to look like klingon things but pretty much ended up having to build the whole thing from scratch all over again no i just don't want to give credit where it's due they did a really good job of recreating that bridge in flashback even though we're now working with a television budget rather than a movie one but if you look closely you can see that there's carpet instead of that nice metallic floor and also the captain's chair is weirdly crap number four that's an old ship all right anybody who watches a lot of star trek will know that the excelsior clash ship pops up a lot across the next generation and then in the dominion wars and of course even finds itself a little feature in voyager now i'm not even going to try and do off the top of my head all of its appearances because i've got them written down you've got the uss fearless in where no one has gone before the uss repulse in the child the uss potemkin in ethics the uss cairo in chain of command the uss crazy horse in descent the uss gorkon in pre-emptive strike pretty much all of that is stock footage of the uss hood from encounter at farpoint but all of them were excelsior class ships 50 episodes in total you can catch a glimpse of an excelsior-class starship which is four more the nog number three to be or not to be the more we don't actually see the enterprise bee until star trek generations which is of course at the very end of the next generations run it was assumed from the very conceptual stages of that show that the second enterprise was going to be an excelsior class starship that's why it's on the wall this is obviously common sense as it became a major workhorse of starfleet but also quite cost effective because they already had a nice lovely big movie studio quality model of an excelsior class starship the excelsior now i hold my hands up i missed this the first couple of times i watched that film but they actually made some fairly major modifications to the actual shape of the ship most notably that i know what would you call it it's got booty now when it's got cake that wagon they've also got new caps on the warp nacelles added impulse engines and they painted the thing like a weedy like purpley color rather than its traditional blue now of course they were very sensible about all this all the changes they made all the additions were only supposed to be temporary and they were added in a way that meant they could just be removed as soon as they needed to be without damaging the model but no kidding they planned to do that but they worked out that if they tried to pull any of that off at any point they were gonna break it so it stayed like that forever just reading here that apparently it was sold for auction in 2006 for 132 000 us dollars wow number two two vox rusty memory now owing to those modifications which they absolutely could not change they have to build a brand new model of the excelsior for the voyager episode flashback now just if you've not seen that episode it's a flashback to when tuvok was apparently on board the uss excelsior during the events of the undiscovered country it starts you know it's still got that whole bit with the the big shock wave through space and shields turn him into the wave all that but it's still got that in it but then there's additional things to tell you what happened between that and then getting to everybody's rescue at the end of the film oh they also fix to fix this thing don't they how how he's there and then he disappears in the film but they're actually out of it where he runs back his console just to just to fix that little plot holes quite clever now because they had a much smaller budget and a very small time frame which to remake this ship both the physical model of the ship and the bridge ended up being quite different to what's in the film the ship is skinnier and has a bit more light up stuff and the bridge model is a little bit smaller and like i said before it's got carpet for some reason also toovox there one thing that they did i don't know why they did this this this is lieutenant valtine who in the voyager episode he's a major part of what happens he gives tuvok this brain disease but he dies in the episode that's the sad thing that happened the thing is though at the end of the undiscovered country he's he's there he's he's alive the like i get i get your wreck on things why would you kill a man who's in another scene now i'm saying all that the whole point of flashback is the tuvak has this brain disease so it might just be he's remembering it wrong and really valtine's still alive because i mean of course he is the little kitten thing at the end of the film so i don't know imagine when he gets back to the alpha quadrant though and he bumps into him like no way number one fictional fictional history now weirdly sulu being captain of the excelsior was the thing that was written into the wrath of calm but eventually taken out of that script not fully realized until like the later films when he is literally captain of the excelsior and despite all this and the fact he got a really prominent role in the undiscovered country all the adventures of the excelsior pretty much take place off-screen like we hear about them cataloging gaseous anomalies in beta quadrant and then they expand on it in voyager as they rush through that nebula and blow up them klingons but that's it for such an iconic ship for something had such a major role in star trek what did it do we don't know but would you like to occasionally pull from non-canon beta canon sources for all of this zulu's adventures aboard the excelsior were part of a really cool book series called the lost era it depicts the death of its original captain soonly taking command all the fun stuff they get up to before the excelsior's eventual destruction in a temporal rift at the hands of this guy from deep space nine oh my god it gets destroyed at them do they all die no no no no it's fine they all like sulu and rand and obviously vaulting because he's still alive they all get rescued by sulu just not that one this that that sulu from the enterprise b so they have it those are 10 secrets of the uss excelsior mx slash ncc 2000 see i finally remember the title that i decided you needed to know after paul very hardly wrote it all down for me haha let us know what you made of it in the comments below of course forget to like share and subscribe and tell us we beg what other ships you would like to see in the dolphin series slash the fireman's pulse series because we've done all the obvious ones so we need to know what you actually want to see now it's all on you but in the meantime thank you so much for watching i have been adam cleary and i will see you soon i wanted to sign this off with the noise of dolphin makes but i don't know it ha ha that's bad that's a parrot isn't it never mind goodbye

Channel: TrekCulture

Views: 183,591

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Id: K-_lOm5uRig

Length: 16min 10sec (970 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021