upvote
This is a pretty common scifi thing. The Borg antennas being built on the Enterprise's deflector in First Contact were bird feeders. Odo was once contained on DS9 in a bread maker.
reply
Luke’s lightsaber was famously a Graflex camera flash
reply
Inevitably there's a reddit sub for it (I adore the name of it):

https://www.reddit.com/r/Thatsabooklight/

reply
A bread maker? My eyes always focused on these plastic pallets used as wall, ceiling panels in DS9...
reply
Cypher -from the Matrix franchise- said it best, "Ignorance is bliss". Fun fact about that scene: Studio executives wanted it cut but Keanu Reeves insisted on using it.
reply
The reboot show started losing its way toward the end of the 11th Doctor, probably as American money came flooding in.

I suspect there’s a strong negative correlation between audience appreciation and production budget.

reply
There's a lot of people who have remarked on necessity being the mother of invention - I claim that it's possible to maintain that even when you're no longer constrained, but it takes a discipline often lacking in people.

If you know you have 2 weeks and 100k to shoot an episode, and that everyone from the top down knows more money and time isn't coming, then you have no choice but to deliver it, no matter the corners cut. It's very hard to keep that attitude and pressure if people are aware that the budget limits are a polite fiction if you're convincing enough. (One might draw parallels to Steve Jobs' remarks about how the most important thing is not knowing when to say yes, but knowing when to say no.)

One might look at Team Cherry (Hollow Knight, Silksong) for an example of maintaining this - they made an enormous amount of money off Hollow Knight's success, and instead of scaling out the team markedly for Silksong, they mostly used the money as padding against any pressure to deliver it sooner, and worked at their own pace, to their own satisfaction.

reply