The stuff of "Star Trek" — uniforms, communicators and other props, including
pointy rubber ears — has boldly gone to a place where the intrepid crew never
took the Enterprise: the Bronx.
In a windowless warehouse in Crotona Park East, boxes of "Star Trek"
memorabilia that were shipped from the part of the galaxy known as Hollywood are
being cataloged and photographed. The catalogers and photographers work for
Christie's, the auction house that more often handles impressionists and old
masters.
The trove will be sold for dollars. Not Federation credits.
So, hanging on one coat rack in the warehouse are Klingon costumes. On
another are the Enterprise crew's uniforms, even William Shatner's uniform.
"It's a great" — long pause — "leisure suit," said Cathy Elkies, the Christie's
official overseeing the sale.
"Star Trek" fans are passionate. They attend conventions. They know "Star
Trek V: The Final Frontier" and "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country." They
correct dumb mistakes, no matter how obscure, in any articles having anything to
do with "Star Trek." They take the idea of being a fan to extremes, and proudly
so. And they are not Christie's usual crowd. No one dressed as a Klingon was in
attendance when Christie's sold the dress Marilyn Monroe wore when she sashayed
into Madison Square Garden and sang "Happy Birthday" to President John F. Kennedy.
So when Christie's marketers asked Ms. Elkies who was the intended audience
for the sale, which is scheduled for Oct. 5-7, she did not have a ready answer.
"I had to say, I really don't know," she said.
That is partly because so few actual props from the various television series
and films have been sold before. The items in the sale had been stored in
warehouses, some since the original 1960's television series went off the air.
But after the cancellation of the UPN prequel "Star Trek: Enterprise" last year,
Paramount decided to lighten its holdings.
Now Christie's is preparing descriptions for each item — descriptions that
are decidedly different from the ones usually found in Christie's catalogs.
Consider this one, for a pair of items that Christie's expects to sell for
$1,000 to $1,500: "Two tribbles of imitation fur stuffed with foam rubber, one
gray and black, the other white, gray and brown."
Tribbles were small life forms that reproduced at remarkable rates, according
to Memory-Alpha.org, one of many sites on the Web devoted
to "Star Trek." Christie's says this pair was used in the "Deep Space Nine"
episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" and also in a "Star Trek: Enterprise"
episode.
Ms. Elkies said she was approaching the sale in "a democratic way" — meaning,
she explained, "We are pricing it so there will be something for everyone." She
said there would be items with estimated prices of $200 or so.
But the estimates on some items are far higher. Christie's expects to sell a
model of the Starship Enterprise-A, made from a plastic hobby kit and used on
"Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" in 1991, for $15,000 to $25,000.
According to the Memory-Alpha site, the Enterprise-A had made its debut in "Star
Trek IV: The Voyage Home" and had gone on a surprisingly speedy journey to the
center of the galaxy in "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier."
Christie's also has a model of a Work Bee, which, according to Memory-Alpha,
was "a small utility craft in use by the Federation since the mid-23rd century."
Ms. Elkies said this one was used in the drydock sequences in "Star Trek: The
Motion Picture" and also in the main title sequence of "Deep Space Nine."
Christie's estimates that it will sell for $6,000 to $8,000 at the auction.
Ms. Elkies said she was impressed by the craftsmanship of the costumes and
props. "If you see something on TV, you don't think there's a backside to it,"
she said. "But you see these things and you realize how much time and labor went
into each object."
The Starfleet officer Worf's silver rifle "almost looks like an Uzi," Ms.
Elkies said, lifting it off the shelf, "and it's heavy."
And then there was the Xindi alien in the stasis chamber from the series
"Enterprise." The stasis chamber was a clear plastic cylinder. The Xindi alien
was a yellow figure about the size of a 5-year-old child, with wires attached to
places that, on a human, would be painful if attached without anesthetic.
Ms. Elkies was not a major "Star Trek" fan before she started to organize the
sale. She got her baptism in "Star Trek" mania when she went to a convention in
Germany in May. "The funny part was, I couldn't always tell if it was German or
Klingon that they were speaking," she said.
At 41, she was a small child when "Star Trek" originally went on the air. "I
think it was so different than anything else that was on," she said. "Remember,
we had five channels back then, so we weren't inundated with programming the way
we are now. It was so original, it was so different, it was gripping, there was
always something that hooked you in — and Captain Kirk was very
cute."
