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Spoilers (2)
The name "Sha Ka Ree" is a play on words from the original actor asked to play the part of Sybok: Sean Connery.
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The surface of Nimbus III as viewed during reconnaissance by Captain Kirk was generated from an electron microscope image of a lobster's claw.
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One of William Shatner's daughters, Melanie Shatner, appears as the yeoman that holds Kirk's malfunctioning Captain's log. She also hands him his jacket when he first boards the bridge of The Enterprise.
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The film's special effects were not done by ILM because the members of ILM were already working on Ghostbusters II and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. This hindered the film's ending greatly because the ending was to be much longer than Kirk simply being chased by "God." However, the sequence had to be cut out as a result of awful-looking special effects. The scenes were replaced by more shots of George Murdock's face, except his eyes glowed.
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Enterprise-D corridor sets from Star Trek: The Next Generation were used as Enterprise-A corridors in this film. Very few cosmetic alterations were made so as not to interfere with filming of the TV series, which was under way at the same time.
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The sick-bay from Star Trek: The Next Generation is used, unaltered in the film, which marks the first appearance of Star Trek's LCARS computer system.
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Shots of the Enterprise-A in space dock and of space dock itself were originally produced by Industrial Light and Magic for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
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An entirely new Enterprise bridge, with the single solitary exception of the Turbolift foyers, was built for this film.
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Shots of Spock talking to Kirk while he is climbing El Capitan in Yosemite were actually filmed on a set in a parking lot at a vista point overlooking the valley. The actual face of El Capitan is just visible in the background behind Kirk.
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William Shatner asked Paramount for money to complete the film the way he originally intended, for release on DVD. Paramount refused.
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Stuntman Kenny Bates is credited with the highest descender fall in the U.S., standing in for William Shatner's fall from El Capitan.
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One of the blip sound effects on Enterprise-A shuttlecraft Copernicus was from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Another, in the scene where the Galileo makes an emergency landing to avoid a Klingon attack, is from 2010.
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Teamsters, or drivers, to transport the crew, cast and equipment to Yosemite were hard to find due to a strike that was going on at the time.
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Cut scenes included Kirk being pursued by rock monsters on the 'God' planet. The rock monsters were men in rubber suits, and also included a smoking effect. According to William Shatner, in order to achieve this, cigarette smoke was blown in the suits before cameras rolled. The rock monsters were scrapped due to lack of believability and time constraints.
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Final film voyage of the complete original crew of the USS Enterprise. Although there would be one more film featuring the original cast, the character of Sulu is no longer a member of the Enterprise crew in the next movie, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
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The name of Dr. McCoy's dying father, according to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, is David.
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Laurence Luckinbill (Sybok) is the real-life son-in-law of Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Desi and Lucy's production company, Desilu Productions, produced the first two seasons of Star Trek.
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This film contains the first confirmed appearance of Starfleet Marines - the officers accompanying Kirk and crew down to Nimbus III have since been said to be Marines.
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William Shatner, in an interview on E! Entertainment Television, said that David Warner's character was going to have a prop that consisted of a self-lighting cigarette. According to Shatner, they simply forgot to use it in one of the scenes even though the prop actually worked and cost thousands of dollars.
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To achieve the shot of the shuttlecraft crashing onto the landing deck of the Enterprise, a scale model was placed on a launching pad connected to garage door springs. A crane was used to move the catapult into place.
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Originally, the opening of Kirk's El Capitan ascent would have been a galactic shot of the Milky Way, zooming into the solar system, and finally an aerial view of Yosemite. This was too expensive to film. But a similar tracking shot was done years later at the beginning of Star Trek: First Contact during Picard's Borg assimilation flashback dream.
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The malfunctioning log recorder uttering "Good morning, Captain." was an in-joke for Admiral Kirk and party's sabotage of the USS Excelsior's bridge computer in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock which read the same thing across the helm screen.
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The instrument panel tones are the original, bridge sound effects from the series, only more digitally synthesized.
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EASTER EGG: From the "Deleted Scenes" page on disk 2 of the Special Collector's Edition, scrolling to "Behold Paradise" and pressing the left arrow highlights a round icon. Selecting this button shows gag reel footage of David Loughery, Ralph Winter, and Harve Bennett integrated with material from the turbo shaft sequence.
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The on-screen confrontation between William Shatner (Captain Kirk) and George Murdock ("God") is not the first for these two actors. They went head-to-head in Crash, with Shatner as an air-crash investigator and Murdock as his excessively bureaucratic superior. This was the film Shatner made just before returning to the Kirk role in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
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During pre-production meetings, screenwriter David Loughery jokingly proposed to have Commander Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) appear as an erotic dancer in order to lure away the hostage takers from the Paradise compound. He was surprised to learn that the producers approved of the idea right away.
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Captain Klaa's Klingon Bird-of-Prey "Okrona", as it was named in the script, was named after linguist and Klingon language co-creator Marc Okrand.
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The space probe that was destroyed by the Klingon Bird of Prey was the Pioneer 10 space probe, which was launched in March of 1972 and became the first space probe to pass by and photograph the planet Jupiter. It is currently heading towards the star of Aldebaran, which it should reach in about 2 million years.
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The shuttlecraft Uhura uses to pick up Kirk, Spock, and McCoy from Yosemite Park is the Shuttlecraft "Galileo". The Galileo was prominently featured in the original series episode "The Galileo Seven" in which Spock, McCoy, Scotty and a survey team in the shuttlecraft get stranded on an alien planet.
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According to the text commentary on the DVD, Sulu and Chekov were supposed to be seen hiking at Mount Rushmore (even though the scene was filmed at Yosimite along with the scenes of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy). Originally, there was supposed to be a tracking shot going up to reveal the Presidents' faces on a matte painting and that the matte would feature an African-American female president. The crew did do a rough matte of the Presidents' faces but the idea was scrapped due to budget constraints.
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According to William Shatner on the DVD Commentary, two of his stunt doubles in the movie were his stunt doubles on T.J. Hooker. The two men are Don Pulford (who was credited as stunt double) and R.A. Rondell (who was NOT credited as stunt double). R.A. Rondell also served as stunt coordinator in T.J. Hooker.
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In McCoy's first scene, where he complains about Kirk's rock climbing, he says "If I'm not careful, I'll end up talking to myself." McCoy said the exact same thing in the original series episode Star Trek: The Corbomite Maneuver.
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William Shatner's original idea for the climactic battle with the "False God" was for the ground to give away and reveal the ten levels of Hell in a homage to Dante's Inferno. The rock monsters were supposed to be apart of this sequence but Paramount refused to increase the film's budget so the idea, along with the already created rock monster, was canceled.
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According to George Takei, he originally turned down this film because he did not want to be directed by William Shatner with whom he has had a long standing feud. But Shatner convinced Takei to reprise his role.
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As the Shuttlecraft Galileo is en route back to the Enterprise-A, Captain Kirk recites the line "All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by" from the John Masefield poem "Sea Fever". Kirk had originally recited that same line years earlier during the episode Star Trek: The Ultimate Computer.
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The movie's climax was cut almost entirely out due to the writers strike going on at the time, and a result of that was the budget for the special effects being cut drastically. Otherwise, the film's ending would have been entirely different.
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Linda Fetters, a stunt performer, played the "felinoid" exotic dancer. She wore airbrush makeup that covered most of her body, prosthetic claws on her hands and feet, a wig and clip-on tail made of human hair, contacts to make her eyes appear cat-like, and a full face mask. The makeup application took about six hours to complete. She has approximately 53 seconds of screen time.
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Only Star Trek film to feature a pre-credits scene, and the only one to have the opening credits play over the action of the story rather than over a star field.
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Kim Cattrall auditioned for the part of Vixis. She would later appear in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
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Harve Bennett blamed the relatively low box office results partly on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Bennett believed the series had eased the Trek fan base's desire for more product. As a result, he felt the fans preferred to stay home weekend evenings for first run TNG episodes rather than going out for multiple viewings of the film.
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Gene Roddenberry was said to be unhappy with the movie, as the story was too similar to his initial script for the Star Trek revival project which he wrote during the '70s. Roddenberry's script, which centered around the Enterprise discovering, and eventually killing God, was rejected by Paramount, who felt the subject matter would be too controversial.
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Used the same opening theme song as Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was also used as the theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation.
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Gene Roddenberry was highly critical over the idea of Sybok being Spock's half brother. He felt it apocryphal for Sarek to have had a son with another woman prior to his marriage to Amanda.
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Sound Effect used for the Klingon Ship's scanner was from one of the "engine" sounds attributed to each of the Mars' planet's ships in the original Movie "War of the Worlds". That sound was later used in THX1138 as one of its many SFX.
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A Sound Effect montage using the vocal styling of James Brown as part of the Cat Creature sound, when it attacked Jim Kirk upon the away team's arrival on the "Hostage Planet".
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The Wilhelm Scream makes an appearance attributed to one of the insurgents when he gets knocked off his horse in the brief battle.
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William Shatner was inspired to approach Laurence Luckinbill for the part of Sybok after seeing a PBS presentation of Luckinbill's one man stage show about Lyndon Johnson.
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According to William Shatner, the film's main plot themes and elements were inspired by the Televangelist movement of the late 1980s.
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Made its Network Television debut on CBS as opposed to ABC which initially broadcast the first four Star Trek movies. CBS had bought the rights as part of a package of Paramount movies released in 1989.
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Due to the film's relatively poor box office performance, it was released directly to video in most foreign locations.
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Sybok was originally named Zon, and in early drafts was unrelated to Spock. Harve Bennett came up with the Spock-Sybok family relationship to strengthen Spock's rationale regarding his actions relating to Sybok. William Shatner was opposed to the idea, feeling it was too gimmicky and too much like a plot-line out of a soap opera.
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Spoilers
Kirk prophetically tells Spock and McCoy he'll die in their absence. In Star Trek: Generations, Kirk does just that.
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During the film's climax, Spock is revealed to have negotiated a peaceful resolution to the conflict with the Klingons. The film's final scenes center around a reception involving the Enterprise crew and their Klingon counterparts to celebrate their newfound cooperation. While not intentional, this would provide something of a lead in to Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
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