After listening to the Wrath of Kahn radio spots, I hunted down this souvenir book that was lost in the nebula that is my closet. After Star Trek: The Motion Picture managed to earn enough money and then some to justify a sequel, Paramount green-lit a second movie, but with a reduced budget. The second movie, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, was a more energetically paced and tense cat-and-mouse battle of wits between Kirk and an old foe, ending on a daring and very depressing climax for many fans. It cost around 13 million to produce, but took in close to a 100 million dollars. Less than the first movie, but with the lower budget, it did make a greater profit. Helping shaving the production costs down, sets from the first movie were redressed and reused, and ILM reused models and flipped and modified an existing design for the Reliant. The costuming, thankfully, got a more nautical military look to fit the ‘Horatio Hornblower in space’ drama that Nicholas Meyer was going for. The Graphics Group at ILM (which would later become Pixar) also created the Genesis Effect, a 67 second animation demo of Genesis that took ten artists months to produce (web sources say two years). It was the first computer-generated sequence in a movie. A light-sensitive pen on a special screen was used to draw directly into a Cray supercomputer to render the fractal landscape and particle wave sweeping over the planet. Even today it still stands out. By 1985, Young Sherlock Holmes would introduce the first fully CGI character, also by ILM, designed by John Lasseter. For an exciting and informative book on the best original Star Trek movie, read Allan Asherman’s The Making of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn.
