Starfleet Standard-Issue Spray Bottle: Silly Star Trek Prop?
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- čas přidán 25. 06. 2020
- One of the more interesting props in Star Trek is actually one of the most commonplace in our modern world. But maybe the original audience saw it differently...
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In Star Trek:The Next Generation, Captain Picard used a shovel to dig a hole. Shovels have been around for thousands of years...'if it ain't broke why fix it?'
Exactly. In DS9, Sisco uses a collapsible shovel made from futuristic looking metal, but it is still just a shovel.
I appreciated that.
@Ben Lutz Fair enough. 🤣
But I am sure that still looked pretty sci-fi back in the 90's.
I saw that episode exactly today !
It has nano-motor vibration technology for 54% better digging.
@@zodammit LASER SHOVELS.
I was expecting something about how they're secretly super-advanced computerized doodads, but this makes way more sense.
If something works you don't have to change it. It works it works.
@@okankyoto voyager did that with golf balls
@@andrewshouse9840 and tennis balls
The Fact that nobody knows where TOS got those Bottles makes me think about someone travelling back in Time and giving them those Spray Bottles to preserve the Timeline
There were a bunch of them on board Captain Braxton's timeship.
Spray bottles were invented in 1947. Plastic spray bottles were commonplace in the late 60s. This video is complete and utter nonsense. This guys basically says they're on the show because they were new rare expensive tech whilst stating they have so many because they weren't new rare expensive tech. He also provides no evidence for his claim, either from the show or historical, he just decided it's so. He's a moron.
They're from Daniels
I used those kind of.bottles many times as a janitor over the years.Some times I'd remember I first saw them on Star Trek.
With replicator technology, easy to recycle!
There is also the precedence of the Salt Shaker: For a first-season episode, a Producer told the Prop Guy they needed some "super futuristic salt shaker." He found them, but they were SO futuristic, the producer was afraid the audience wouldn't recognize them: They became some of Dr. McCoy's operating instruments. Lesson Learned: IF the Audience won't know what the prop is supposed to be, it loses its value as a prop.
I've used a mortar & pestle for cooking and in the lab when I was in college. Tools that have been used since 35,000 BC.
If you go to Yosemite national park you can find mortar holes in rocks
People used them and you can see it mattered
We just learned how to cut enough rock away for us but it looked like a social area- there were a few big stones
All bigger than SUVs on the ground
McCoy used one of those, and Sisko used one to grind up his spices. Neelix had one as well. Although he never used it.
Hell, capuchin monkeys in South America use a similar method, a big rock and a little rock, to bust open nuts and shellfish, and there’s archaeological evidence of them doing so for at least 3,000 years.
As a child, back then, when flatscreens weren’t a thing yet IRL, I clearly remember being amazed by TNGs flat, handheld mini computers that could show all sorts of stuff, thinking how this could ever be possible to have everything displayed on such a flat item. And guess what I‘m typing this comment on right now :)
A typewriter?
And now they have screens you can roll up.
@@Dwayne_Bearup Same with keyboards.
@@R.F.9847 I hadn't seen the roll-up keyboards, though I have seen one that is projected from a tablet onto a tabletop. Not sure how well it works though....
@Jared Harris Actually, the EU specifically referenced the NewsPad from Stanley Kubrick's _2001: A Space Odyssey_ when they started an (ultimately unsuccessful) program to create a tablet computer in 1994. In fact they even called it the NewsPad program.
Don’t even get me started on all those every-day drinking glasses, tables, spoons and chairs. And here I was thinking this was supposed to be the future. Disgusting.
Literally unwatchable
Some random 24th century dish company: These plates and forks are so outdated! Our new dishes will have transporter technology built in to them to beam the food directly into your mouth! What could go wrong? :D
@@pills- They'd probably have to complement the idea with transporter-based dentistry.
Not to mention root beer. It couldn't have survived on one Klingon's fetish.
@@pills-
I cant believe they still use legs when they could just use transporters, it shows how lazily made the show was.
You could literally take one of those spray bottles and stick it in a house today, and no one would think it was odd. So it's been fifty years and we really haven't changed the thing.
There’s also the idea of KISS - ie., the spray bottle heads are still a thing because they still work for what they were designed to do. The reason they might turn up on alien ships/planets is simple convergent engineering - they solve the same problem in vaguely the same way.
Probably, its funny that we insist that any decently futuristic setting MUST have a bunch of new tech to do old jobs.
But see in our past that technologies are resilient and tend to be revised rather than replaced.
More than likely a lot of things would be familiar to us 200-300 years in the future, but we can expect technology to have changed them in interesting ways.
In the case of these bottles, while they look like plastic i would bet they are actually some synthesized organic material. We know they don't have true replicator tech but they have synthesizers that are mostly shown making food products. I think they also make the dishes those products are dispensed into. And both beta canon and now main Canon shows us the uniforms are synthesized organic material. Presumably the disguises they come up with from the ships stores are also synthesized, and i believe that the reason so many of the basic every day objects we see on set look like simple pieces of plastic is because they are synthesized rather than stored intact onboard.
@@DrewLSsix yes, and replacing things takes a LOT more money, especially in the west. So perfecting a thing is what happens instead
@@DrewLSsix Exactly. A squirt bottle does its job pretty much perfectly. Why does it have to be futuristic?
Convergent invention of cleaning supplies would explain why Star Wars has those little roomba robots.
But it doesn't really answer an important question in Star Trek: why does Sulu keep a bunch of artfully arranged chemical spray bottles on his lunch table?
@@pwnmeisterage The red bottle is hot sauce, the orange bottle is sweet and sour.
Sounds like they trawled through trade shows for futuristic looking household items
Honestly, I'd be more surprised if they didn't.
"every day cleaning supplies"
Me: *more like, monthly cleaning supplies...* 😶
Me: Whenever I need it.
You mean more like annual spring-cleaning supplies... lol
Them: How often do you change the bag on your vacuum cleaner?
Me: Ummm, you mean I'm suppose to change it?
I am currently cleaning an apartment that a tenant just left. I don’t think he knew what cleaning supplies are. 2 years of filth.
You guys are getting _clean_ ?
A detailed explanation of a problem I never even considered. That's why I enjoy this channel.
Huh Star Trek predicted the future. That’s odd.
Not really.
More like _inspired_
Let us hope it predicts it again. Someone build the Phoenix already please!
Star Trek has been right about quite a bit it seems
@@SephirothRyu I'd really rather the future be less sexist and violent, myself. Let's get a reboot of DS9 and revisit that.
I don’t see why it’s so surprising. We still use wheels and hammers, two of the oldest technologies in humanity’s history.
The wheel is a bad example. We use the concept of the wheel yes but the specific products have changed dramatically.
Alex Kurtzman would have put a Starfleet Delta on it.
Alex Kurtzman would have made the bottle to be shaped like a delta, and had the surface honeycombed with tiny moulded delta's.
And the droplets would have to be red deltas to match the red matter from the movie that he totally forgot that he wrote eleven years ago.
As much as I am not the biggest fan of Kurtzman's trek that doesn't really make sense. From tng through voyager there where delta's everywhere, that's not new.
@@iandowall153 Take a close look at the uniforms in JJ trek and Kurtzman trek. That pattern that (at least I always thought) just looks like generic sci fi hexagon patterns? Delta's. Hundreds, upon hundreds of delta's. There's a fine line between showing off a logo and obsessing over it. Kurtzman passed that line about 20 miles ago.
And he would have had the villain fill it with acid and use it to dissolve someone's eye during a torture session. Because Kurtzman apparently thinks a noblebright setting like Star Trek needs disturbing grimdark violence.
Interesting, old shows are acting like time capsules. Maybe we should study them more often, there is probably a lot to learn, even if it from such a basic and unimpressive prop.
You need to know, this show was before hyphenated Americans.
Just look at a show like Adam-12 and you learn a lot by looking in the background.
The location shots on older TV shows and movies can be very interesting to historian research, especially if no other records exist.
Someone: that looks stupid.
Henry: Well yes but also no, let me explain.
I was wondering about this when watching TOS, but I didn't actually know that back then spray bottles weren't really a thing yet. Makes total sense though.
@Sean Wilkinson are food standards just going to go away in the future? Well they might in a hyper-capitalist one, but Star Trek? There is no way your alien spice would be allowed to be served in way that it's so easy to over dose.
@Sean Wilkinson Given Sulu was eating in one of the botanical labs (remember the puppeteered "Weeper" plant?), those bottles more likely contained liquid compounds for the plants: fertilizers, pesticides, etc. Nothing stated on screen, just supposition on my part. Sincerely, Bill
They were a thing back then. Spray bottles were invented in 1947 with plastic ones being commonplace in late 60s. This guy is basically saying they are on the show because they were new rare expensive tech AND there's so many of them because they weren't new rare expensive tech. He's a moron. He came up with an explanation and made a video to spread his claim without providing any sort of evidence, either from the show itself or historical. That's like saying TNG used overalls for uniforms because zips were a new tech without backing it up with any evidence.
@@20catsRPG No reason to be so unfriendly about it. You could just say you disagree because they were invented earlier and were already around at that time instead of calling people names.
I like the jolly fascination you get from Trekkies discussing the minutiae of the old shows. And I'm sure you're right, they most likely chose them as a futuristic and useful prop of tomorrow.
Always gonna watch my favorite sci-fi youtuber
Not just favorite, THE BEST! This guy always comes up with weird and great video's about Star Trek, Star Wars!
I like the idea that it's just such a well known, useful design, that they never updated them
I'm laughing because when I was a kid in the 70s I got the AMT model phaser, tricorder and communicator kit. And only now do I realize what an oversight it was that they didn't include the "fourth" prop in the star trek "trinity"... the amazing, futuristic spray bottle!
I mean... if it works, why make something more "high tech" to complicated it? It's simple, doesn't take very many resources and it's difficult to imagine "making it better" without making it more complicated and prone to malfunction. Makes perfect sense to me.
There's two contrasting good examples of this: in Star Trek 2009, when Kirk and Old Spock reach the Starfleet outpost to meet Scott, the door they enter has a crashbar mechanism on the inside. Yes, it's because they filmed on location, but in-universe, if you just needed something to open a door or keep it closed, the crashbar mechanism works perfectly well. Why would you need something fancy? Meanwhile on _Space:1999_, in order to open the doors at Moonbase Alpha (at least in the first few episodes, even the doors for unsecured areas, they had to take out their communicators, key in a code, and then the door would open.
Which is _stupid_. Why would you even do that? It might look futuristic but it's overly complicated, subject to failure ("I need to use the toilet...on no, I forgot the communicator back in my room! Which I can't get back into because I don't have my communicator!") and simply takes longer than, I don't know, pushing a button on the wall if you insist on wanting a powered door.
@@keith6706 a very simple solution to your issue is that you wouldn’t leave a moon base without your communicator. And a security code is used on all sorts of bases all over the world.
The thought you put into these videos is extraordinary. Thank you for treating Star Trek with the respect it deserves. What a truly singularly momentous vision of the future.
Funny. I got an ad for Mr. Clean spray cleaner on this video.
As Scotty said, the more you overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.
If the design works, no need to change it.
2:30 I remember that those bottles with the Dark colored fluid and orange fluid were same ones sold by AmWay in the 70's. My grandma had a cabinet full of them for all her AmWay Products she used to buy.
I've also heard young people (i.e. younger than me) say that TOS is "campy", when I know it was specifically designed to NOT be campy. When pressed, they don't even really know what camp is. But it would be a mistake to lump Star Trek together with Adam West's Batman, or the original Lost in Space series. Tonally VERY different.
Either they misused the word for "Retro" or they've been desensitized by modern visuals tones, that it classifies as campy purely based on the colorization of the bright aesthetics rather then characterization and theme in the storytelling.
They are confusing unintentional comedy for intentional comedy, but Star Trek TOS is still very much part of the old fashioned tradition of extreme overacting
The fight scenes in TOS are definitely campy.
Pretty much everything else is well thought out and well executed though.
Next up: paper mache rocks found in an inhabitable planet
Also can I say holy crap the taller spray bottle at 2:29 next to Sulu, that design has not changed at all, I HAVE that spray bottle sitting in my house right now with my own cleaner mix in it. It's a generic spray bottle you can fill with whatever you want, even just water for misting plants.
Another intriguing look behind the scenes and into our history. And all I under 4 minutes!Thank you!
My favorite “high tech” prop was the grey painted styrofoam coffee cup.
That's actually pretty impressive. Most times when you paint styrofoam it dissolves into goo.
Can’t wait for the sequel to this video in the far future where it’s explained to a bunch of kids that replicators or transporters were not commonplace
Star Trek director said something like this:
"My iPhone can do more that the original Enterprise's console"
"Because it's hard to know what technologies are going to be discovered, and how will they look"
Also: what useful for a phone is _not_ what is useful for a starship's computer! They need to be tough, string, able to take a hit. And they don't have touchscreens because, well, ask the US Navy.
@@sciranger6703 The Enterprise D would like to object on your notion that touchscreens aren't a thing on starships.
It bugs me when people say "cell phones are just like communicators from the original star trek". Except your cell phone is just talking to a tower that's only a few miles away. Communicators could talk to ships in orbit, even when they were underground, usually with little or no interference.
@@sciranger6703 Well, the new ships from Star Trek Pickard don't even have a physical console, they're all holograms
@@nehukybis I don't think he meant that, it was about the lot of things you can do with your phone, and not just comunicate. Also, he was talking about the computer from the original serie, and comparing it's iA with Siri, for example
Beautifully done, my friend. Thanks for the genuine, thoughtful essence of what it means to be a Trekkie in this age of complete disregard of our beloved franchise!
You are correct. I am 61 years old and I've been watching Star Trek since it was new in '66. These bottles did not exist for the consumer then.
I remember as a kid watching these bottles and thinking how cool they were, Like the hypospray . We didn't see bottles like this until the late sixties at the very least.
Good job. I always wondered where they got them !
This is so fascinating. Thanks for this video.
I'm old enough to remember the 80s when these things were less common, you would see them more used for gardening chemicals and paint thinners. The latter something that Desilu's set building and prop department would have ample use for.
“Highly thought out”
meanwhile Star Trek putting a dog in a costume and calling it a alien
It’s pretty interesting how they took everyday items and make them look futuristic like those children’s tablets that Captain Kirk signs in quite a few episodes.
Imagine having glass spray bottles at your home that you could just refill over and over again?
A history lesson and a niche lore vid rolled into a bite sized sandwich. Neat
I was born in 1971, and watched the repetitions of the show in 1978. You are right, that was space age for us, in 1978 in Chile we still have yogurt in glass bottles for god sake! XD And this spray bottles didn't get common use until mid 80s! We can add another item to ST predictions! Excellent video, thanks for sharing!
I dont know why this popped up but I am glad it did. I am a total trekkie. I never gave these bottles a thought. But I love where you took this. Great Vid.
'I'm a Dr Jim, not some damn custodian.'
Great investigation! Another awesome video!
Fascinating!
I came here from the channel EckhartsLatter and your work is smazing
OK! I paused the video to laugh but then I watched the rest of it and you blew my mind!
Last time I was this early, they were still using salt shakers for medical tricorders.
This was very well researched. I never knew that these were cutting edge stuff at the time.
Even today those spray bottles never work and break really easy. Love this episode I learned something!!
This makes for a wildly interesting conversation piece.
I wonder when those spray bottles were introduced? Maybe in the early/mid 60s they were still pretty new and therefore would look futuristic to most audiences of the original show?
C Henry, thanks for posting...cool video
You hit the nail on the head.
So, as a young kid when TOS first aired, I can tell you that these bottles WERE indeed futuristic, pretty much unavailable to the average consumer, and greatly sought after; I recall seeing an Amway advert around the time of TOS, with these bottles listed for $8.99 - that translates to something like $60 in 2021. In the mid-sixties, these bottles and the trigger sprayers were seen as futuristic as the other props....no different than TV shows a decade later using the old big, brick mobile phones....or walkie-talkies; I recall watching the original Hawaii Five-O and really, really wanting McGarret's huge (again, brick size) walkie talkie with the extendable chrome antenna....
At some point in the future folks will look back at TV of this era and wonder why all the actors had those big, ugly, simplistic....'smart' ??? phones.... :-)
thank you for this bit of info
When I was a kid in the '60's, we had two commonly available items in our household that later turned up as props in the show. One was a squirt gun, which they spray-painted to use as an alien's weapon. It had a sort of bulbous, clear compartment that housed a little plastic shark that floated in the water supply. I don't know what color they used--it looked grey on our black and white TV. I can't remember the episode.
The other was some sort of costume jewellery medallion. It was metallic, with straight metal pieces fastened in a sort of crosshatch pattern. Some alien species used it as a communicator on the show. I wish I could remember the episodes. I've hardly watched tos since the days it was syndicated on broadcast tevevision, I couldn't name 5 episodes. I still remember parts of the Mad Magazine parody, though. "These are the voyagers of the starship Boobie-Prize..."
I don’t think humanity would’ve just abandoned such a successful design. It makes sense for them to be in Star Trek because they are just so practical
You should also consider the application of those bottles.
In the three episodes they appear in, they are found in a botany lab (great way to water and medicate plants), medical (great way to dispense antiseptics), and the one being sprayed into milk is a toxic lubricant. Spray bottles are great for dispensing low-viscocity lubricants.
These are all normal everyday uses for these kinds of bottles, where one doesn't NEED fancy high technology.
I've bought the exact same bottles. . . down to the color and even the rippling at the top as one of the bottles on the table has. . . in 2012.
I was wondering how they differentiated between medical, cleaning, and food supplies without labels on the bottles.
man, they really had there finger on the pulse when they were making that show.
The way I see it is that the technology simply works fine just the way it is, so they never bothered to change it. It's likely it's made from more futuristic materials, but otherwise, would be the same technology.
Might be nice to have an adjustable dial for the instant drunk setting. Get home from work, crank it up to 3 pints and relax.
That is an interesting factoid. Nice!
This is kind of like spotting the steady-cam harness in the movie Aliens :D
Mind BLOWN!
I can't find it at the moment, but I remember seeing a picture from some sci fi show where they used an air freshener as a comm badge.
I believe they did that in episode 1 of starwars when they are taking anakin's whatcha ma call its metaclorians i think
"raumpatrouille orion" - german scifi show that predated Star Trek.
love how on the left is an easter egg on the lcars, sr388, the planet samus aran explored in metroid
In Star Trek, they invented flip mobile phones, tablets and so on 👍
I opened this video expecting to hear about some tv crew's in-joke. Instead, I learned something about the history of product design.
Oh sure. Next you'll tell us that not everyone had Cell phones. :P
Yet another thing that Star Trek showed as futuristic and nowadays in common everyday usage! IT's great.
You know what, they *also* use wheels in the future. If something works, you don't need to reinvent it.
DUDE
NO JOKE
I WAS GONNA ASK YOU TO DO A VIDEO ON THIS
xD
We saw it the other day and were laughing so hard...but the humor is on us, it seems!
I can remember as a kid in the 80s spray bottle's where rare even then. Most cleaning supplies came in pour or squeeze dispenser bottles.
I mean this holds up with later things too-Enterprise used those flip open communicators, that looked like they could have been made by Motorola, but the show came out in 2001. Cell phones had been around for a little bit, but the flip phone was pretty new at the time, and Enterprise was going for a more basic, NASA esque feel. The iPhone didn’t come out for another 6 years. Touch screen had been around since 92, but it wasn’t anywhere near what we had today. The first blackberry wouldn’t come out til a year later. So those communicators looked pretty cutting edge at the time, if less elegant than the earlier Star Trek designs. Similarly, looking back at Stargate Atlantis, their touchscreen tablets and the Ancient tracking devices and things all look pretty clunky now, but the iPad wasn’t even invented yet at the time. Those tablets were props, nonfunctional. Touchscreen was the VERY cutting edge, and the idea of having everyone use a touchscreen tablet probably seemed a decade or two away at the time.
I got this in my recommended when it was 1 minute old wtf
The Algorithm works in mysterious ways.
CZcams's algorithm is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be... unnatural.
Progress happens in some areas, in other areas things already got to perfection long ago and using things designed hundreds of years ago has its charm.
Violins were perfected circa 1700, cast iron skillets too, shoe laces have been used forever and even though "better" things have been invented, for some reason we still like to use them over anything else.
In the Star Trek worlds, those simple spray bottles are a nice traditional item, something that reminds you of your grandparents, possibly passed down from generations since only diamonds and plastic lasts forever.
The Star Trek TOS Set Tour in Ticonderoga, New York makes a point to bring up the spray bottles during their guide's spiel. Apparently they've gotten questions from visitors as to whether the cleaning people forgot to remove their supplies before opening for the day.
Not gonna lie. This video made my day.
I'm 61. Have been a StarTrack fan for as many years. I had never thought about the spray bottle before. But, Ya. It was futuristic at the time... The Communicator, though... Way out there. Wait a minute... I got one in my pocket right now. We Earthlings, call them Cell Phones. What's next?
Context is always everything, for the time period of this show, it was futuristic, is it now? No, but it was then, that's the important part.
When they were putting Spocks brain back in they had to use the Sonic Seperator to line up each nerve ending properly so that it could be fused with it's original nerve. I now use my own Sonic Seperator to fuse my beer molecules to my brain cells so l can get instantly drunk.
It would be relly interesting and fun to see you interpretation of a heavy a-wing.
EC,
Wow. I never noticed the spray bottle on Trek.
I love how you bring context into your analysis. A spray bottle really would look futuristic to 1960s audiences. This underscores now prop makers put a lot of thought in how the 23rd century would look.
Junky disposable consumer plastics = "New Space Age Materials" in the decades surrounding TOS
Makes me wonder what citizens of 2090 will think of our junky disposable consumer cars, computers, smartphones, etc
In some cases they selected props that looked a bit ordinary for a good reason. It was a 50 minute TV show after all. If the audience had to 'figure out' what a 'futuristic' prop was supposed to do, it would distract from the story. In the first regular episode, "The Man Trap', the shape shifting, salt eating alien needed to be lured with...Salt! If the salt shakers from the mess hall were too fancy, it would be hard to figure out what they were. So the prop department used regular, 20th century glass salt shakers!
It's the same as judging communicators as off the shelf cell phones. Technology has simply caught up.
In some ways, and not others. Star Trek communicators don't need cell towers.
I noticed what I think is a Sharpie brand magic marker on the transporter console in the Star Trek pilot The Cage. I looked up the history of the Sharpie and they were on the market at that time.
Those bottles -- exactly those bottles -- were in reality quite common by that period. I saw them in schools, businesses, all over the place. Perhaps they weren't super common in homes yet, but we had at least a couple contemporaneously with the show. So this really does look like a case of "cheap props will serve" and nothing more.
In the mid-sixties, those spray bottles WERE in use, but not commercially. They were used industrially ONLY, and that's why Trek used them. To the general public, no one ever saw spray bottles like that, plus they looked so futuristic, they worked perfectly as props and looked so "cool" for that mid-sixties time.
They did the same thing by using an actual radiation detector as a prop for Scotty as his engineering scanner. It was an actual professional tool that no one saw before, but it looked cool and futuristic as a prop.
I took it as a traditional tool used in early space travel. Having a regular bottle in zero-g would probably be a hassle when you tried to pour anything, so spraying onto the food would probably be more ideal. So even after artificial gravity was acquired, the spray bottle perhaps stayed as a traditional homage to early space travelers.
I wish EC Henry uploaded more
Like we use Wheels “ why fixed it when its not broken ”
The shark repellant bat-spray!
The amount of things Batman must have carried around on his utility belt to be prepared for any outrageous circumstance, he would need to have discovered portable pocket dimensions to store it all.
been cleansing my groceries with spray bottles filled with Lysol for the past several months. Thanks, Star Trek!
Gene was a trip traveler. He had them in his time machine when he came back to the past to make the furture better.
We saw this the other day - were laughing so hard
I also think it's noteworthy that these bottles are in the cafeteria. It shows that they imagined a wider use of products like flavoring being commonplace. I do like the idea of antiseptic in a eindex bottle, to treat wounds.
That’s it. It’s important to have the perspective of someone from that time period to understand the show’s portrayal of the future. Things start to look a lot better.