INTRODUCTION

The color scheme of the original, 11-foot model of the Starship Enterprise has been the subject of debate for many years.  For decades, fans have been analyzing grainy, poor-quality photos and special-effects imagery that have been degraded by multiple passes through the optical printer in the 1960s.  An unprecedented analysis of the miniature’s paint scheme was undertaken during the Smithsonian’s 2016 restoration of the model.  During the restoration, we had access to unpublished, high-quality photographs, eyewitness descriptions, and, most importantly, the original Enterprise model, itself.

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First, the bad news: we’ll never know the exact colors of the Enterprise – not unless somebody invents a time machine.  I’ll explain why in the next section of this article. 

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The good news: we can come darned close to the original colors, if we use all our references to tweak the colors of the aged paint, where needed.  What follows is a discussion of the variables involved in determining the true colors of the paints on the 11-footer, concentrating primarily on the final version of the Production model, plus the rationale for how I derived the “factory fresh” version of the colors.

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COLOR 101

The main lesson that I learned from the 2016 restoration of the Enterprise is that color is hard.  In the beginning, I thought that all we had to do was to identify patches of original paint and look at old photos & screen caps to fill in the blanks.  I quickly learned that things aren’t so simple.  Even though we eventually located samples of all the original paint colors on the model, primarily through sanding and the careful application of specialized solvents, we still couldn’t guarantee that their appearance in 2016 was the same as it was in 1966.  Due a host of factors, the paints began to slowly change from the minute they were first applied to the model, and some paints changed more than others.  Allow me to elaborate:

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• When the lacquer paints for the Enterprise were originally mixed, the paint store added a dulling agent to reduce the shininess of the paint. In 2016, a thorough cleaning of the untouched original paint on the upper saucer by Smithsonian curators revealed that despite the dulling agent, the paint has a slight sheen – an eggshell finish, if we use the commercial house paint term.  Vintage, hi-quality photos confirmed that the rest of the model had a similar sheen years ago.

• Our hi-res color reference photos also revealed that the miniature had been subjected to layers of dulling sprays to eliminate hotspots caused by reflections of the studio lighting on the model’s slightly shiny surface. Noted visual fx historian and archivist, Gene Kozicki, says that these coatings were not like the lacquer-based dulling sprays, such as Dullcote, that modelers are familiar with.  The 1960s dulling coats were designed to be removable and did not contain the solvents that would help bind them to a painted or plastic surface, like Dullcote would.  The dulling sprays are clearly visible as a white haze in some of our better color photos, and they tend to make some of the colors, especially the red markings, appear extremely faded.

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The list of variables affecting the color of paint continues: 

• Depending upon various environmental conditions and their formulations, lacquer-based paints will sometimes darken a bit, and sometimes they won’t. This is an internal chemical reaction that is different from weathering caused by external sources, such as heat and sunlight.  This darkening phenomenon played a critical part in the restoration of the Enterprise, as I’ll explain shortly.

• Various tinted shellacs were applied to the model during its filming life. These tinted clear coatings, formulated without UV protectants, tended to yellow with age. 

• Unless precautions are taken, paint that was uncovered through sanding will appear lighter than it really is. We also had to ensure that the paint samples we were matching were the original paints, and weren’t primers or finish coats applied during later restorations. Reference photos were often helpful in this regard.

• While color photos can occasionally be helpful in sorting out paint colors, you can’t rely on color photos, even good-quality ones, to make precise determinations of the exact hue of various paints. The emulsions of different brands and types of color film have a built-in color bias and are sensitive to some color tones more than others.  For example, in the 1960s, US-produced films had a bias to reproduce Caucasian skin tones most accurately.  In addition, as prints and slides age, their colors can shift and fade to varying degrees, depending upon storage conditions.

• Some colors, such as the slightly greenish-gray Production hull color, exhibit a phenomenon called metamerism. This means that the paint appears to change color under different types of illumination.  For example, the Production hull color appears to be a fairly greenish gray under incandescent light, but looks more like a neutral primer gray in sunlight. Keep this in mind when you’re mixing paint.

• In some cases, colors changed because the model was repainted – by the craftsmen at the studio during production of the show, during previous restorations, and even by a student at a college’s Art Department – and we had to sort out who made what change and when.

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SOME GENERAL OBSERVATIONS ABOUT THE 11-FOOTER’S PAINT SCHEME

The Star Trek was broadcast in an era of low-resolution TV sets, mainly black-and-white (sales of color TVs did not exceed that of b&w sets until 1972).  Not surprisingly, the Pilot version Enterprise model was painted with a limited number of grays – essentially the cool gray hull color, plus a couple shades of gray trim.  A few additional colors – red, yellow, black, and copper – provided contrast.  The series, itself, was famously “brought to you in Living Color on NBC” at the dawn of widespread color broadcasting, so additional colors, including blinking colored lights in the nacelle domes, were added to the Production version of the model to take advantage of this new medium.

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The biggest remaining paint mystery on the model concerns the surface of the upper saucer.  During the model’s conversion into the Production version, someone at the Howard Anderson Studio gave the upper saucer, including the white simulated light panel on the left rear quadrant of the saucer, a light coating of green-tinted shellac or similar carrier.  He also sprayed dark-green “shadows” around the bases of the bridge and the teardrop-shaped B/C deck structure, and used a dry-brush technique to create streaks of green weathering, running lengthwise, to either side of the upper saucer’s central bulge.  He also carefully masked the turbolift shaft behind the bridge and painted it a dark green shade.

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The series was filmed with tungsten-balanced Eastman Kodak 5251 film stock, which was in use from 1962 through 1968.  The film had an ASA of only 50, but it had a much greater verisimilitude than earlier film stocks.  That is, it recorded color much more accurately.  Visual effects guru, Richard Edlund, says there was no technical reason to add the green to the saucer, given the film they were using.  This leaves us with two choices: either there was some unknown technical reason to do this, or the green color was intended as an artistic choice (similar to the gray & green color scheme of the Klingon battle cruiser, which appeared in the series’ 3rd season).  The simple truth is, we don’t know why only the upper saucer was painted green, and we’ll probably never know because the people involved in the decision have passed on.  I am including color info on the green upper saucer in this guide, in case the modeler wishes to replicate it.

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MY METHODOLOGY FOR CREATING THE COLORS IN THIS GUIDE

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In April 2016, the ILM team, consisting of Bill George, John Goodson, and Kim Smith, and I spent two weeks replacing lost parts and repainting the 11-foot Enterprise model at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center.  Earlier, Chief Conservator Malcolm Collum had sanded the 11-foot model in areas that I had suggested, and he had located samples of all the original paint colors.  The Smithsonian’s paint experts, led by David Wilson, had derived matches for all the original colors.  When we arrived at the museum, the model, except for the upper saucer, was in the process of being prepped and repainted with acrylic paint that matched the existing greenish-gray hull color.  When Kim Smith was preparing to apply the gray trim colors to the model, we ran into a problem. 

To backtrack a bit, I had identified three main shades of gray that were used as trim colors on the Production version model.  With a dearth of imagination, I labeled them as light, medium, and dark gray.  Our high-quality color reference photos (and even the b&w photos) showed, to my surprise, that the medium gray trim under the front ends of the nacelles was only slightly darker than the hull color. 

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When Kim mixed medium gray trim paint to Dave Wilson’s specifications, we found that the trim paint was slightly lighter than the hull color, instead of slightly darker.  The original values of the hull gray and medium gray trim colors (i.e., their relative lightness or darkness) were fairly close, and the 50-year-old lacquer-based Production hull color seemed to have darkened slightly with age, enough to make it darker than the gray trim.  Rather than guess at the “factory-fresh” appearance of the hull paint, Kim adjusted the trim colors slightly, as required, so all the colors were in balance with one another, as shown in our hi-res color photos.  The end result is that the restored model appeared as if it had been transported from the Paramount sound stage to the display case in the Smithsonian and was left to age in place.

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While this procedure was fine for an artifact at a museum, the slightly darker, “aged” colors wouldn’t be representative of the colors that were present on the 11-footer when it was filmed in the 1960s.  The Smithsonian released Dave Wilson’s matches for the original colors, but if modelers were to rely solely on these colors to paint their model Enterprise, with some being darker than the originals and others being unchanged, they’d be in a heap o’ trouble.

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When I flew home from DC, I brought along spray cards of the restoration paint, as well as Dave Wilson’s color matches of the original 1960s paint, in the form of Pantone numbers, Federal Standard numbers, and commercial paint names/numbers.  My job was to bring all the colors into balance with one another, as they had been in the 1960s.  I also wanted to recreate the Production version weathering colors, plus some colors that were unique to the Pilot versions.

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To make hobbyist-appropriate paint chips, I took the aforementioned items to a nearby paint store and had them mix quarts of matching house paint.  Many, many quarts.  Then I was ready to start making adjustments. 

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As I’ve said, the original paints seem to have aged at different rates, so I had to select a baseline from which to adjust the other colors.  Dave Wilson got good matches for the light, medium, and dark gray trim colors, and they appeared in person pretty much like they appeared in our reference photos.  Since both the Pilot and Production hull colors were originally just slightly lighter than the medium gray trim, I selected the medium gray as my base line and carefully lightened the Pilot and Production hull colors until they were just slightly less dark than the medium gray.  Kim Smith notes that it’s possible that the medium gray lacquer, too, had darkened over the years, which means that the entire original paint scheme would have been lighter than what I’ve selected; however, we’ll never precisely know the shades of the original colors, unless somebody invents the time machine I mentioned at the beginning of this article.

When I was adjusting the colors, I had to consider how each individual color would appear in combination with all the others so they would all be in “balance” with one another.  Accordingly, I used one of my spare 18” AMT kits of the Enterprise as a color test bed.  After mixing and remixing paint, plus a number of trips to the paint store, I ended up with a final set of colors.  To create paint chips, I painted multiple samples of each color onto 4” x 4” pieces of mat board, and ended up with over two card tables’ worth of paint chips.

I made a number of paint chips with house paint, but latex house paint is NOT the type of paint that you’d want to use on a plastic model!  Browsing through the paint department of a hobby shop and coming up with hobby paint matches for my chips wasn’t a practical idea, since I live in an area that’s devoid of hobby shops.  The closest ones are an hour away, and most of them have a meager selection of paints.  As a result, I sent a set of my chips to a couple of model builders who agreed to come up with hobby paint matches for my chips.  Using Testors Model Master paints, I derived the formula for the Pilot version nacelle domes and the copperish-gold paint for the area behind the deflector dish, while Mike Anderson, a model builder and consultant for Polar Lights’ 1:350 scale model, derived the rest of the matches.  I don’t yet have matches using other brands of paint, but I’ll publish what I do have, and will add to it as I accumulate further info.