Star Trek Adventure

Beam aboard the bridge of the Starship ENTERPRISE. Your mission? To explore the limits of your imagination with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. To battle Klingons, space creatures and alien superbeings! To boldly go where no man has gone before.

Note This article is part of our USA Retrospective series, featuring images captured on an early generation Kodak DC220 digital camera with 1280x1024 resolution. The images have post processed to artificially increase sharpness. Please forgive us if they do not meet your expectations of photographic quality.

From 1988 to 1994, Universal Studios Hollywood featured a live action performance attraction that no self-respecting fan of the TV show would want to miss: Star Trek Adventure!

According to the Memory Alpha Fandom:

In the performance, ten volunteers from the audience were dressed in Starfleet uniforms, placed on sets and coached to deliver scripted dialogue for several Star Trek scenes with Captain Kirk, Spock, Doctor McCoy, and Montgomery Scott. Four audience members competed for the role of the Klingon captain in a growl-off, with the runners up playing his crew members. A very young audience member became a “dragonhound” (as coined in the end credit roll), based on Kruge’s Klingon reptilian dog seen in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Other audience members played the alien Preceptors, who were testing both crews via mind control. The scenes were recorded on video, inter-cut with stock footage from the movies, edited into a eight-minute short film, and shown to the audience in the newly built, 1200 seat Panasonic Theater. The “actors” had the opportunity to purchase a VHS copy of their video after the show for US$29.95 (plus tax). The attraction had the capacity to do ten performances a day, each taking up approximately thirty minutes in total.

Sets that were (partially) recreated in the Panasonic Theater included a bridge of the Klingon Bird-of-Prey, a transporter room, a nondescript landscape, main engineering and the bridge of the refit-USS Enterprise. The latter in particular warranted attention, as it was one of the very few times that a refit-Enterprise bridge recreation has seen the light of day, as it has been the original Enterprise bridge, considered the quintessential Star Trek set by many in the Star Trek community, which was the one that has been recreated numerous times for these kind of occasions.

We saw the show when we visited Universal Studios in 1993. The “volunteers” were all kids, I think the adults may have been a bit shy.