A hangar bay is the landing or launching station
for an aircraft or spaceship. In terms
of cult television history, hangar bays have been featured many times, in a
variety of different science fiction series.
In Star Trek, the starship Enterprise
hangar bay was first seen in the episode “The Galileo 7,” the initial program to
feature a Starfleet shuttle craft. The
bay was depicted in miniature form only, though in “Journey to Babel,” during
the second season, Sarek (Mark Lenard) and Amanda (Jane Wyatt) can be seen
disembarking from a shuttle in a room that is ostensibly the hangar bay. Very little background detail of the bay is evident.
In The Animated Series (1973 – 1974),
the hangar bay was depicted in more epic terms, with several shuttles -- of
various designs -- docked there.
By the time of The Next Generation (1987
– 1994), special effects technology had improved considerably, and several
episodes, such as “The Child” and “Time Squared” depicted crew-members walking
about while shuttles landed and took-off from the bay.
In the case of the Enterprise-D, there were multiple-hangar decks, and
crafts could leave and enter by piercing an invisible forcefield.
In the 1970s, the great Gerry Anderson series Space:1999
(1975 – 1977) featured several incredible views of Moonbase Alpha’s
subterranean hangar or repair bays, where Eagle transports stood at rest until
called upon for reconaissance. A Kaldorian spaceship came
to rest in the Alpha hangar bay in the early first season episode
“Earthbound.”
One of the most amazing special effects sequences
in the entire series also occurred in the hangar bay. In the second season
story “Space Warp,” a very sick Maya (Catherine Schell) began to transform into various aliens,
and suffer from dangerous delusions. At one point,
she made it to the hangar bay, and attempted to launch an Eagle while it was
still billeted there. The Eagle takes
off rockily, and careens through the bay, with catastrophic results.
Two Glen Larson series -- Battlestar Galactica
(1978 – 1979) and Buck Rogers (1979-1981) – featured hangar bays as standing
sets. In the case of the former, the
Galactica landing bay is the location where the Colonial Vipers are housed. In the latter case, Buck (Gil
Gerard) would often launch his starfighter from the Directorate hangar bay in
New Chicago.
In V (1983), V: The Final Battle (1984),
and V:
The Series (1985), the Visitor Mothership hangar bay was also a
standing set. This Hangar Bay was
a multi-level affair, filled with Visitor transports, cargo-ships and fighters
too. On several occasions, resistance fighter Mike Donovan (Marc Singer) stole
a ship from the Hangar Bay, and attempted to make it back safely to Terra Firma.
Other space oriented series have also featured
hangar bays over the years. In the
1970s, The Starlost visited the Earthship Ark’s hangar bay in the
episode “The Pisces.”
And in Gerry
Anderson’s UFO, single-seat interceptors were docked in a subterranean bay
on the Moon, much like the Eagles.
As
recently as The Clone Wars (2008 – 2013), hangar bays continue to be
featured on television.
John ever since I was a boy in the '70s in science-fiction the hangar with spaceships inside always attracted me. The production designs were great. I know it is not television, but we finally saw the set that would have been seen in "Journey To Babel" in the Kirk era Enterprise hangar deck complete with two shuttlecrafts in Star Trek V:The Final Frontier(1989).
ReplyDeleteSGB
While I was in college, I used to work as a security guard at some large textile mills in my hometown. As grand as these buildings seemed from the outside, they seemed grander from the inside because you had a keener sense of their scale. Warehouses and any other large interior spaces have always impressed me for the same reason.
ReplyDeleteThe true scale of various spaceships (or moonbases in the case of Space:1999) were difficult to judge until you saw an interior space that held the more humanly-scaled shuttles. With the addition of the shuttle bay interior, the Enterprise seems so much more defined in size and yet grander at the same time.
Hanger bays also imply that for every high point in science and technology, there has to be a garage where everything is maintained and repaired. The Enterprise is filled with scientists and highly trained technicians but was there a maintenance facility where these high-tech machines were maintained? That certainly seemed to be the case on Space:1999 whenever we saw the hanger bays. There was always the feeling that a team was on constant standby to repair those constantly crashing Eagle spacecraft.
Babylon 5 drew attention to the blue collar workers who did the grunt work that no one else wanted to do. In one episode, these workers strike because they feel they are taken for granted and their working conditions are the worse on the station.
Thank you for highlighting these special environments that always made the imaginary much more visceral and realistic.