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General Discussion & Feedback => Just Chat! => Topic started by: ROBERT on 05/10/2006 15:41:56
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Christie's new frontier: 'Star Trek' memorabilia
By James Barron The New York Times
NEW YORK The stuff of "Star Trek" - uniforms, communicators and other props, including pointy rubber ears - has boldly gone to a place where the intrepid crew never took the Enterprise: a windowless warehouse in a New York borough.
Boxes of memorabilia from the television show that were shipped from the part of the galaxy known as Hollywood are being catalogued and photographed in the building in the Bronx. The cataloguers and photographers work for Christie's, the auction house that more often handles Impressionists and Old Masters.
Hanging on one coat rack in the warehouse are Klingon costumes. On another are the Enterprise crew's uniforms, even William Shatner's.
"It's a great" - long pause - "leisure suit," said Cathy Elkies, the Christie's official overseeing the sale.
"Star Trek" fans are passionate. They attend conventions devoted to the original television series from the 1960s and the various TV and movie sequels, prequels and other spinoffs. They know "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" and "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country." They correct dumb mistakes, no matter how obscure, in any articles having to do with "Star Trek." And they are not the usual Christie's crowd.
So when Christie's marketers asked Elkies who was the intended audience for the sale, which is scheduled for Oct. 5-7, she did not have a ready answer. "I had to say, I really don't know," she said.
That is partly because so few actual props from the various television series and films have been sold before. The items in the sale had been stored in warehouses, some for several decades. But after the UPN prequel "Star Trek: Enterprise" was canceled last year, Paramount decided to lighten its holdings.
Now Christie's is preparing descriptions for each item - descriptions that are decidedly different from the ones usually found in Christie's catalogues.
Consider this one, for a pair of items Christie's expects to sell for $1,000 to $1,500: "Two tribbles of imitation fur stuffed with foam rubber, one gray and black, the other white, gray and brown."
The fictional tribbles were small life forms that reproduced at alarming rates, according to Memory-Alpha.org, one of many Web sites devoted to "Star Trek." Christie's says this pair was used in the "Deep Space Nine" episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" and also in a "Star Trek: Enterprise" episode.
Elkies said she was approaching the sale in "a democratic way." She explained, "We are pricing it so there will be something for everyone." She said there would be items with estimated prices of $200 or so.
But the estimates on some items are far higher. Christie's expects to sell a model of the Starship Enterprise-A, made from a plastic hobby kit and used on "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" in 1991, for $15,000 to $25,000. According to the Memory-Alpha site, the Enterprise-A had made its debut in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" and had gone on a surprisingly speedy journey to the center of the galaxy in "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier."
Christie's also has a model of a Work Bee, which, according to Memory-Alpha, was "a small utility craft in use by the Federation since the mid-23rd century."
Elkies said this one was used in the drydock sequences in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" and also in the main title sequence of "Deep Space Nine." Christie's estimates that it will sell for $6,000 to $8,000 at the auction.
Elkies said she was impressed by the craftsmanship of the costumes and props. "If you see something on TV, you don't think there's a backside to it," she said. "But you see these things and you realize how much time and labor went into each object."
The Starfleet officer Worf's silver rifle "almost looks like an Uzi," Elkies said, lifting it off the shelf, "and it's heavy."
And then there was the Xindi alien in the stasis chamber from the series "Enterprise." The stasis chamber was a clear plastic cylinder. The Xindi alien was a yellow figure about the size of a 5- year-old child, with wires attached to places that, on a human, would be painful if attached without anesthetic.
Elkies said she was not a major "Star Trek" fan before she started to organize the sale.
She got her baptism in "Star Trek" mania when she went to a convention in Germany in May.
"The funny part was, I couldn't always tell if it was German or Klingon that they were speaking," she said.
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I do!
NEVER! underestimate youth
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LOL !! where Neil, He would like to read this...!! Have to tell him!!
Karen
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$1000 for a Tribble, that's steep, although you could buy a breeding pair and sell their offspring to make a profit [:)]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribble
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(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.activity4life.com%2Fphoto%2Fears.GIF&hash=3e55c18859d65a5b18f38b6717664eb1)
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quote:
Originally posted by Hadrian
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.activity4life.com%2Fphoto%2Fears.GIF&hash=3e55c18859d65a5b18f38b6717664eb1)
Yes Hadrain, Tribbles do look a bit like sheep, but without the head and legs:-
(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi24.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fc23%2FSUEDONIM%2FTribbles.jpg&hash=56459a6dc144ef39408cd097d6c6b077)
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Indeed they do [^]
What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say. (https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.activity4life.com%2Fphoto%2Fsheepbouncing.gif+&hash=159acaa741febc5b65a3b1d93c7395d2)
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Yes they do!!
Karen
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Think this lot could do with the props [:D]
http://www.wellbored.com/funny_animations/pages/picard_song.htm
Gaia xxx
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Cool Clip Gaia, Neil will love it! So Do I!! YAYYYYY!
Karen
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I aim to please...
Gaia xxx
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I love star trek... Hey I went out last night Bob and I and we went to the casino.. just to play a little, and as I was giving the machine my 20.00 I was being entertained by ancient star trek episodes, the one I was watching was the one with Joan collins.. She was very beautiful in her youth .. and just a s beautiful now! It was cool and funny that it was playing in six different screens around the one big room..LOL
Karen
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I'm a science fiction nut, my hallway is lined with sci fi books and George can testify to this!
Gaia xxx
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Me too! I think several of us on the forum are!! I love good sciencfiction!
Karen
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" Star Trek sale stuns auctioneers
A model of the Starship Enterprise has sold for $576,000 (£308,000) at an auction of memorabilia from 40 years of the science fiction television series.
Before the sale, Christie's auction house in New York estimated the model would sell for about $30,000 (£16,000).
The 78-inch-long (198cm) miniature of the Enterprise-D, used in the title sequences of Star Trek: The Next Generation, made its TV debut in 1987.
More than 1,000 Star Trek items were sold over three days at the auction.
Built by Industrial Light and Magic, the model was first used in the 1987 Star Trek episode Encounter at Farpoint, and also appeared in the film Star Trek Generations.
Estimates were regularly surpassed during the three-day auction in Manhattan, with fans spending more than $7.1m (£3.8m) for set furniture, pointy Vulcan ears and other props.
Other top sellers on Saturday's auction included a replica of Captain James T Kirk's command chair from the bridge of the spaceship on the original Star Trek series.
Despite being a reproduction, the painted wood chair used in a 1996 episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fetched $62,400 (£33,350).
A costume belonging to the original series' Dr McCoy was sold for $144,000 (£77,000). "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4801631.stm
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I wish I could have bought the transporter room from the starship enterprise; it would save a fortune in travel costs [:)].
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quote:
Originally posted by ROBERT
I wish I could have bought the transporter room from the starship enterprise; it would save a fortune in travel costs [:)].
But you would need a supply of dilithium crystals, and the matter/antimatter engines to power it all.
George
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NO doubt! I think I would much prefer travel in this matter over a Plane!! YAAAAYY!
Karen