Friday, 12 January 2018

2019 Star Trek calendar range revealed

Universe Publishing have revealed their line-up of Star Trek calendars for 2019, which features six different designs, continuing every format they offered for this year. Continue below to check out what is on offer.

Now one should note off the bat, that these are very early listings, and the artwork for at least some of them will certainly change before their release later in the year.

That could not be more true than for the Ships of the Line calendar. The latest in the long-running series, this calendar will feature loads of brand-new starship artwork, in panoramic format - For now though the interior previews are re-using images from this year's edition to illustrate the style. The cover image currently in use, featuring a visit from the Enterprise-E to the new Deep Space 9, doesn't seem familiar to me though, but lacking a spacey background I suspect it is also a stand-in.




The concept art inspiration for the new image
We do already know about one image coming to the final version of the calendar, Doug Drexler announced a few months ago that Bill George, of ILM special effect fame (many Star Trek films, Blade Runner, Harry Potter, Star Wars, Indiana Jones, to name but a few of his huge credits), is building a new miniature of the concept version of the TOS shuttle Galileo. Here's how Doug introduced it:
I'm utterly thrilled to tell you that Bill's page will lift into reality Thomas Kellogg and Gene Winfield's seminal design for the the original series Galileo shuttle. We've also seen the sketches of it, and all wondered how cool it would have been to have seen it realized. Wonder no more. 
And here's are a couple of in-progress shots of the model itself:



I'll be sure to keep you posted as we find out more about the contents of the next Ships of the Line.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of other 2019 calendar to choose from. For the second year Discovery obviously gets its own calendar. At the moment it has almost exactly the same cover as the 2018 edition; hopefully they can come with something a little more exciting!



And of course TOS gets a calendar every year. They've already posted a back-cover image for this one, and given they've already picked out a new selection of images for that, I'm more inclined to think this one is closer to the final form than the others so far.




For the third year running we have a poster format calendar, but unlike the previous two editions, this one is not using artwork from the 50th anniversary 50 Artists, 50 Years collection. Instead next year will be featuring a selection of Juan Ortiz's retro TOS episode poster designs - Which have adorned a great many products since he created them, including a previous calendar release, for 2014.



The Weekly Calendar (diary format) is currently sporting a blue cover. The last couple of years these have been designed with a strong single series theme, but this time they've gone back to franchise-wide approach that used to be used for this format, promising "more than 40 fan-favorite images from across the franchise's six live action television shows".



Neatly the Daily Calendar is sporting the same blue design, so you can co-ordinate! The format for this has been the same for many years, with bits of trivia on each daily page.




The Daily Calendar is currently listed for release in July, while all the others are expected to be available from August.

Universe Publishing services the North American market, and the last couple of years other companies have produced calendars for other markets, so I'd not be surprised to see additional designs from Danilo in the UK and Heye in Germany appear some time late in the year as well. For 2018 we've had no fewer than twelve different designs to choose from, produced by four different publishers!



3 comments:

  1. Love that shot of the Enterprise-E. If it's not the final cover image, I really hope it shows up somewhere else.

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  2. That shot of the Ent-E appears to be one of the images at the bottom of this article but at a different angle

    http://www.thetrekcollective.com/2013/11/behind-scenes-of-new-deep-space-9.html

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  3. I agree Tuskin, I had a good dig back through all those images from a few articles to see if I could find it. I guess it was a view Doug never bothered to publish before, but definitely feels like it comes form that batch!

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