Around 1964, Gene Roddenberry came up with the now legendary
“transporter” effect for Star Trek, mostly out of necessity. I
don’t think he believed that teleportation technology would
actually exist within 300 years or so, but as a writer’s device,
the transporter solved a myriad of production problems for
Roddenberry’s planned TV series. Compared with having to build
complex miniatures to show the USS Enterprise landing on a new
planet each week, “beaming” actors off the set was a much
simpler effect to insert each week. “Land a ship fourteen
stories tall on a planet surface every week?” Roddenberry
exclaimed to writer Stephen E. Whitfield in his classic 1968
book, The Making of Star Trek. “Not only would it have blown our
entire weekly budget, but just suggesting it would have probably
ruined my reputation in the industry forever.” Or as Mark Steyn
summed things up nearly 40 years later in his 2005 obituary for
James Doohan, the transporter’s most famous operator, “‘Beaming’
was the special effect – the one