Trivia / Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: This is the closest the franchise comes to actually featuring the Trope Namer, though it's phrased "Scotty, beam me up."
• California Doubling:
  • Despite most of the film being filmed in and around San Francisco, the Cetacean Institute was actually filmed in Monterrey Bay, more than a hundred miles from Sausalito (where the institute supposedly was located), with the San Francisco skyline added in later.
  • The conventionally powered USS Ranger (CV-61) stood in for the USS Enterprise (CVN-65) as the Enterprise was deployed at the time. This was the second time Ranger stood in for Enterprise, as she had also stood in for some scenes on the Enterprise in Top Gun.
• Cast the Expert: The marines who chase Chekov on the "nuclear wessel" are real marines, and many of the background characters in that sequence were the actual crew of the vessel it was filmed on.
• Defictionalization: Within three years of this film coming out, there was a formula for transparent aluminum.
  • Transparent aluminum oxide—also known as synthetic white sapphire—has existed since the early 1900s, but not typically in large glass-like sheets as opposed to the aluminium oxynitride referenced above.
• Deleted Scene:
  • A scene which was originally filmed to give Sulu a look at his great-grandfather whom he met as a young boy while in a backstreet of San Francisco was excluded from the final movie. The boy who was cast to portray Sulu's ancestor was so unsettled by his mother, who was also on set that day, that Harve Bennett decided to cut this scene because of the unacceptable acting ability of the boy.
  • A short scene between Sarek and Christine Chapel, set before the first Federation Council scene was filmed, but cut from the final film. Sarek arrives to the council chambers, escorted by Chapel, hoping he's not too late to testify in behalf of Kirk and his crew. Chapel tells him that things are not going well.
• Descended Creator: Associate producer Kirk Thatcher played the Bus Punk and also provided the voice for the computer testing Spock on Vulcan (with some electronic modulation).
• Directed by Cast Member: Leonard Nimoy again.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • The Navy and Marine personnel used in the film were very gung-ho, leaving Walter Koenig in some doubt as to what would happen if he failed to outrun them during the chase scene—so he really ran.
  • As stated below, the random cop Uhura and Chekov ask about "nuklear wessels"? An actual cop who had no idea what was going on and ended up in the final cut.
• Executive Veto: Even though Paramount liked the film's storyline, the studio was dissatisfied with the first screenplay. In response, its head of production Dawn Steel asked Nicholas Meyer to help rewrite the film from scratch.
• In Memoriam: The film was dedicated to the memory of the Challenger astronauts.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Retroactively thanks to this film. Brock Peters, civil rights activist, playing a virulently anti-Klingon bigot.
• Prop Recycling:
  • The look of the alien probe may remind science fiction fans of another classic Big Dumb Object. The probe model prop was actually built for an intended movie based on Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, a film project that has been in and out of Development Hell since The '80s. Hollywood warehouses store many props and items that were made for aborted film projects and this one was probably altered and used in the interests of keeping costs down on this film.
  • The USS Saratoga is a reuse of the Miranda-class USS Reliant model from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
  • Parts of the Bird of Prey exterior set were made from bits of the Regula 1 set.
  • The dilithium crystal is the lid of the reactor core Spock lifted and realigned in Wrath of Khan.
• Real-Life Relative: Walter Koenig’s wife Judy Levitt appears as a doctor.
• Reality Subtext: At the end of the movie, when the crew are speculating what ship they're going to get:
  Sulu: I'm counting on Excelsior.
  Scotty: Excelsior? Why in God's name would you want that bucket of bolts?
  • This is a twofer: Harve Bennett, producer and writer of the film, had initially wanted the crew to end up commanding the USS Excelsior (which had been seen in the previous film) but was overruled; and Sulu himself ends up as captain of the Excelsior two films later.
  • Ironically, the crew of the Enterprise did command the Excelsior in the interim between The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home in the DC Comics series, but were promptly tossed out to match the movie.
• Recycled Soundtrack: "I Hate You", the song listened to by the punk on the bus, later wound up in, of all films, Back to the Beach (also a Paramount production); funnily enough, Kirk Thatcher later stated he got paid more for the song's usage there than in this film.
• Role Reprise:
  • Majel Barrett returns as Christine Chapel seven years after Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
  • Jane Wyatt returns as Amanda 19 years after her appearance in Star Trek: The Original Series.
• Technology Marches On:
  • Gillian mistakes Kirk's communicator (when it beeps in the restaurant scene) for "pocket pager" and inquires if he's a doctor (the most obvious kind of person to be using such a device). That is, before he starts talking through it. Nowadays, it could simply be passed off as a rather odd-looking cellphone set to speaker.
  • While keyboards, mice and WIMP interfaces are still the norm for desktop PCs and Macs, Scotty's futile attempt to talk to a Mac Plus is now even more Hilarious in Hindsight now we have Siri. Likewise as smartphones and tablets seem to be almost taking over, so is his description of the keyboard as "quaint" (well, almost).
  • Kirk and Spock have trouble taking a bus because they don't understand what "exact change" means (they had just gotten $100 that, presumably, comprises larger bank notes). Today, MUNI buses support prepaid Clipper cards, making carrying the correct coins and bills no longer necessary.
• Throw It In!:
  • They actually had Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig asking real San Franciscans where the nuclear submarine in Alameda was, although they were all employed as non-speaking extras. However, Layla Sarakalo, the woman who answers, "I don't know if I know the answer to that — I think it's across the bay, in Alameda", wasn't an actor at all: she had woken up that morning to find that her car had been impounded as part of the traffic reorganisation surrounding the movie shoot. Determined to make enough cash to get it back, she approached the film crew, got herself hired as an extra and deliberately ad-libbed so that they'd have to pay her. Her line ended up in the movie and, as a result, she had to be inducted into the Screen Actors Guild. See details here.
  • That cop staring at Uhura and Chekov suspiciously? That's a real SF cop who had no idea what was going on.
  • Leonard Nimoy was trying to crawl out of the water during the final scene, but the rest of the cast members just dragged him back in.
  • The scene where Spock nerve-pinched the punk rocker originally ended with Spock turning the punk's radio off manually, but they went with the take where the radio shuts off from the punk's head falling on the button.
    • The idea that the punk, while passing out, should turn off the stereo with his own head, came from the actor who played him, Kirk Thatcher, who was an associate producer on the film. The generic Punk Rock that the punk is listening to (it's a song called "I Hate You") was composed and recorded by Thatcher himself and Mark Mangini, a member of the sound effects team.
• What Could Have Been: See the page.
• Write What You Know: Kirk and Spock are on a bus where they encounter a punk loudly playing his boombox before Spock nerve-pinches him into unconsciousness when he refuses to turn down his music. According to Leonard Nimoy, this was inspired by an actual incident while visiting New York City, where he saw a punk loudly playing his music while walking in the street, saying afterwards, "[I was struck] by the arrogance of it, the aggressiveness of it, and I thought if I was Spock I'd pinch his brains out!".
• Written by Cast Member: The first instance of someone, namely Leonard Nimoy, being both a cast member and a credited writer in a Star Trek film or TV episode. While Nimoy had actually done both in the previous film as well, his writing contribution went uncredited and he only appeared on-screen for the last ten minutes of the film, and though Walter Koenig had previously wrote an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, he didn't lend his voice to that or any other TAS episode.

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