Star Trek is such a massive pop culture phenomenon these days. New Trek shows get millions of dollars poured into creating glossy, futuristic sets, hiring A-list actors, and elaborate, beautifully designed alien makeup. It's hard to remember sometimes that when Star Trek first started, it was stretching the limits of its original budget. Not only that, but some studio heads were unsure that this wacky show about aliens and humans coexisting and traversing space would even last a season.

One of the toughest obstacles in those early days, budget-wise, was the sets. Gene Roddenberry, after all, wanted to really create a universe that felt as vast and different as life itself. That isn't exactly an easy order. 

In William Shatner's book Star Trek Memories, he describes the blood, sweat, and tears that went into making that vision a reality. "Once Jefferies [Star Trek art director] had finished describing the basic 'look' he was after, it was up to our set decorators to go out and dig up the appropriate trappings," Shatner wrote. "This is a tough job on any series, but when you take into consideration the fact that Star Trek created whole new sets every week, that our budget was minuscule, and that each of these sets had to believably reflect the premise that we were a hundred million light-years away from the nearest furniture store, it became a giant headache."

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These set decorators, Shatner explains, would "spend the better part of each day digging through musty thrift shops, plastic mills, army surplus warehouses, local junkyards and the entire Desilu lot in search of the unusual appointments that our set demanded."

When those didn't turn up the perfect item for a deserted planet or bizarre alien dwelling, "it was not at all uncommon to find [the] crew rummaging through the Desilu trash bins, looking for anything that might prove useful."

These useful items, Shatner explains, included odd plywood shapes discarded by other sets, discarded fabric scraps, sheet metal remnants, and the large tubes that fabric came wrapped around, all of which were frequently repurposed for Star Trek sets.

"I can remember standing around the studio lot when all of a sudden you'd hear this loud, gleeful yelp rising up out of a Desilu dumpster. If you were to look inside the thing, you'd find [set decorators] Biddiscombe, March and a couple of assistants smiling and congratulating each other as if they'd struck gold instead of garbage."

Shatner recalls set decorator Marvin March yelling "Alright! Paint those whatchamacallits purple! We'll hang 'em on the wall and make them look like... something. Doesn't matter what they are, so long as they look weird."

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