Why did 90s Star Trek look like that?

Source: Why Did 90s Star Trek Look Like That?, Eleven Yearz, 26:17, uploaded 2026-11-04.

Eleven Yearz begins on the bridge of the Enterprise-D and asks the viewer to listen before looking. Beneath the dialogue sits a constant bed of computer consoles, ventilation and engine hum, a low-frequency drone that he compares to brown noise. The question behind the video is why Star Trek: The Next Generation felt so luxurious, chic and cosy to a child watching it every Wednesday on BBC Two in the 1990s. His answer rests on three supports: the look of the ship, its sound, and the utopian society it belongs to. He then finds the same combination in a real place, the Barbican in London, which grew out of a similarly optimistic post-war vision of the future.

The look of the ship

The series first aired in the United States in 1987 and reached the United Kingdom in September 1990. It was shot on 35mm film in a 4:3 frame, with sets built so that the essential elements and characters fit inside that frame. The film grain gave the show a sophistication that made it look like a movie to him as a child, whilst other television of the period looked cheaper. Compared with newer Star Trek series, which move the camera more, cut faster and use a shallower depth of field, the 90s show is restrained and lets the viewer sit with the crew for a moment. Later seasons changed the details without losing the mood: a cleaner Eastman EXR film stock, Marvin Rush taking over as director of photography and subtly reworking the interior lighting, and conventional wool two-piece uniforms replacing the onesies of the first two seasons. The same cosiness carried into Deep Space Nine and Voyager, each with its own flavour of mellow space drama.

The interiors combine 80s beige, carpets, soft curves, strip lighting, smooth panelled lockers and wood on the bridge. Michael Okuda’s colourful LCARS interfaces reject the convention of monochrome blue sci-fi screens, and the technology looks closer to a digital Casio watch or a 90s remote control than to a conventional spaceship. Eleven Yearz sets this against the dark, industrial and militaristic ships that were becoming common in film and television at the time. The Enterprise instead resembles a high-spec luxury office drifting through space, a place designed for work, science and exploration but above all for people.

Ten Forward makes that point most clearly. The light is dimmer, the chairs are relaxed, acoustic panelling keeps sound from bouncing around, and Guinan makes small talk at a glowing bar whilst crew members play three-dimensional chess in front of windows onto permanent darkness. He describes it as a perpetual night shift in which everyone calmly burns the midnight oil, and as the closest the ship comes to the nightclubs in unlikely places that he has covered in earlier videos. The objects on board matter too. In a world where replicators can produce any non-mechanical object, the crew still surround themselves with classic pieces of furniture, tableware and lighting. Those objects have almost no monetary value in that economy, but they keep cultural value and taste. He credits the Star Trek Design catalogue for documenting them.

Generations and the darker bridge

The original series had a more adventurous and pulpy tone that suited its own time, and Patrick Stewart’s calm, reserved and authoritative Picard is part of what separates the later show from it. When Kirk and Picard meet in Star Trek Generations in 1994, the Enterprise is redesigned for a 16:9 frame. The bridge becomes darker and moodier and looks more prepared for conflict. Eleven Yearz grants that these changes cost some of the cosiness, but the low hum of the engines remains, and he argues that this sound is what viewers still remember most vividly.

Brown noise

He contrasts the Enterprise with the sound of a busy shopping mall, which is loud and abrasive and keeps peaking in the high frequencies. Noise of that kind can cause fatigue or stress and may trigger a fight-or-flight response. The ship’s background lives in the lows instead. White noise spreads its energy evenly across the frequency spectrum, pink noise shifts more of it towards the low end, and brown noise goes further still, with power falling as frequency rises. The name comes from Robert Brown, the Scottish botanist who described Brownian motion, the random movement of particles suspended in a fluid, in 1827.

Eleven Yearz is careful about the evidence here. Claims about the benefits of brown noise exist, but he notes that there is little consensus on any direct biological effect. His suggestion is more modest: viewers may have learned positive associations with these sounds. In his account, the steady drone and the gentle bleeps of the computers form an acoustic floor that covers sudden, punctuated noises, and that drone becomes the ship’s heartbeat. Nobody needs to know how the warp drive works, only that it always will. Each ship in each series had its own version of that heartbeat.

A utopian future

The third support is the society around the ship. The Federation imagines a future in which money and scarcity have largely disappeared, replicators meet basic material needs, education is widely accessible, and nobody has to compete for survival or worry about making ends meet. The premise asks what people do once economic desperation is gone and they are free to pursue their goals. The Federation and the Enterprise appear as large non-commercial projects built for the betterment of humanity. Together with the aesthetics and the drone, this setting completes what he calls the trifecta that made 90s Star Trek feel so comforting.

Golden Lane and the Barbican

The search for a real Enterprise begins in 1951 with a competition for a new inner-city residential development in London. Three architecture lecturers at the Kingston School of Art agreed to share the commission if any one of them won. When Geoffry Powell’s entry was selected, the partnership of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon was formed. The first phase of the Golden Lane Estate opened in 1957 with just over 550 homes on land devastated by German bombing in the Second World War, providing council housing for low-income families still living in the area.

The council hired the same architects in the 1960s for the much larger Barbican across the road: more than 2,000 homes in towers and terraces, together with a cinema, an arts centre, restaurants, gardens and a pub. The Barbican was not subsidised housing, yet it was not designed for high-end luxury either. It was meant for upwardly mobile workers who could start in a one-bedroom flat and move into larger flats across the estate as their salaries rose. Eleven Yearz sees the egalitarian economics of Golden Lane carried into this plan. Cultural venues, parks, lakes, pubs and shops sit within the estate, so life outside work could be rich and work itself could take place in a calm and aesthetically sensitive environment.

The estate has no roads for cars or large vehicles. Like the Enterprise, it is designed to be walked, with corridors, stairways and elevated pedways connecting residential and institutional, private and public spaces so that nothing is far away. The beige, brown and orange palette, the carpeted interiors and the people working on laptops give it an Enterprise-like quality. He reads this look as the visual expression of optimistic ideas from post-war Britain that also appear in leisure centres, local theatres, housing estates and new towns, and he recalls feeling as a child on school trips to the Barbican theatre that he was on a giant and cosy spaceship. The Barbican was not seeking out new life, in his phrase, but it was discovering new ways of living.

Now will never come again

The video then turns to what happened to that energy. From 1980, Margaret Thatcher’s government introduced the Right to Buy scheme, which let council tenants buy their homes at a substantial discount. It helped many families onto the housing ladder, but homes were not replaced at anything like the rate they were sold. Eleven Yearz cites more than two million social homes sold across England since 1980 and argues that this has worsened the current housing crisis. The ambition for urban planning that ran through the twentieth century has, in his view, largely dissipated, and he connects it to the core ethos of The Next Generation: optimistic, inquisitive and bold.

He returns to the opening narration of each episode, which presents the story as the voyage of the ship rather than of its crew. The Enterprise itself becomes the main character, and like those housing projects it is designed as a place where people actually enjoy spending their lives.

Conclusion

The cosiness of 90s Star Trek, he concludes, did not come from the 80s-inspired interiors, the mid-century design, the permanent night outside the windows or the hum of the engine alone. It came from all of them together with the feeling of belonging to something larger, of being safe on a protected floating city whilst conflict happens somewhere else in the galaxy. The series imagined a world in which everyday struggles had been solved and deeper problems lay ahead. Against overlit streets and piercing noise, public spaces like the Barbican still offer some respite. With the Barbican Centre’s refurbishment planned for 2028, he hopes it will keep some of that softness, in the way the Enterprise brought warmth to the coldness of space.

References

• Sarah Hardy and Rebecca Kukla, “A Paramount Narrative: Exploring Space on the Starship Enterprise,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 2 (1999).
• Larry Nemecek, Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion (1995).
• Marianna Charitonidou, Drawing and Experiencing Architecture (2023).
• “a+p smithson: golden lane,” archiflux.wordpress.com (2010).