Here’s an entire series of toys fraught with bloopers.
In pre-production for Star Trek: Generations, which premiered over the Thanksgiving 1994 holidays, a new costume design – rather a spiffy one, I always thought – was conceived for the crew of the Enterprise-D in their first film. But at the last moment, despite the fact that a lot of money had been spent actually creating these new costumes, the powers that be decided to reduce the number of “new” and unfamiliar elements, opting instead to outfit the Enterprise’s crew in a random mix of their original Next Generation uniforms and DS9-style jumpsuits.
There’s just one problem. Playmates had gotten to work on their new line of Generations toys before the movie ever got in front of the cameras …and as far as they knew, the new uniforms would be in use. Too late to recall the incorrectly-costumed characters, this was the result.
Oops. At least they got Worf’s pirate outfit right.
In and of themselves, the correctly-attired Duras sisters, debuting here for the first time in plastic, caused a stir in some areas because of their famous Klingon Kleavage. Retailers in more conservative communities made the Klingon sisters’ replicas very hard to come by.
The 23rd century Enterprise crew members were also represented in the Generations series of toys, with figures of Scotty, Kirk and Chekov in their later movie-era red uniforms. Aside from the Saavik figure released in the Classic Trek movie era series, these were the only characters to appear in the Star Trek II style uniforms, aside from a later “Picard from Tapestry” toy, which was actually a Picard head on the same body mold as Chekov.
Perhaps the rarest and most curious of all of the Generations toys is Captain Kirk in Space Suit. Another case of Playmates rushing the toys into early production to have them on shelves for Christmas ’94, Kirk in Space Suit’s cardback contains a completely wrong explanation for the suit – unseen in the film – as being the “regulation Starfleet space suit” worn by Kirk to repair the Enterprise-B’s deflector dish. In actuality, the space suit was worn by Kirk in the infamous orbital skydiving scene which was left on the cutting room floor. Kirk was in his uniform for the deflector dish scene. (Ironically, B’elanna Torres winds up wearing that suit in the Voyager episode Extreme Risk.)
The figures differed from virtually all of the previous Trek figures in one important respect: the knee and elbow joints were gone, sacrificed to cut down the amount of time that would be needed to manufacture more bendable figures. Lursa, B’etor and Guinan had no leg joints at all, jointed only at their shoulders and heads.
Three ships were released in the Generations range, including a “battle-damaged” Enterprise-D with pop-off damage panels (!?), the long-awaited Klingon Bird of Prey, and the Excelsior-class Enterprise-B, which was slightly out of proportion. Incidentally, that same mold was used for a toy of the Excelsior, resulting in something of an inaccuracy since the Excelsior lacked the Enterprise-B’s additional flanges on its engines and engineering area.
And the final score? Only the Lursa, B’etor, Kirk, Scotty, Chekov, Guinan, Soran, and Worf-as-pirate figures reflected the movie’s final costuming decisions. Kirk in Space Suit is a very accurate representation of the very uncomfortable-looking costume documented in numerous books and magazines on the production of the movie, but ended up being a plastic non-sequitur. The Generations figures were prevented from becoming prized collectibles only by the fact that the sales just weren’t that great.
Playmates later issued correct DS9 uniform versions of Data, Geordi and Dr. Crusher under the generic “Star Trek” banner.
