AMT’s “Deep Space” Lights – The Enterprise at 55
By Glen Swanson
The very first AMT Enterprise model kit that began to appear on store shelves in June 1967 featured “deep space lights.” These were tiny grain of wheat incandescent bulbs imported from Japan that lit up the small translucent green upper and lower saucer domes of the model. Two AA batteries were housed in the secondary hull that could turn the lights off and on by rotating the main deflector dish mount.
Even though “deep space lights” sounds cool how do you convey what exactly that is in advertising? Don Greer, the artist that did the original artwork for the first AMT long box kit, tried to illustrate what this feature was by drawing animated conical rays coming from the bottom saucer dome. This feature is nearly lost in some of AMT’s b&w adds.
The second long box issue of the kit added lights to the engine nacelles and replaced Greer’s original artwork with a picture of the built-up kit orbiting Earth and the Moon in the background. The engine nacelles in the built-up kit box photo are shown clearly painted over which seems to counter the promotion that they light up. The third long box issue of the kit kept the lights for the upper and lower domes in the saucer section but removed the engine nacelle lighting altogether. With Greer’s box artwork gone the only way buyers knew about the deep space lights prior to actually purchasing the kit was to read about the feature on the box.
This is one in a series of original postings created to commemorate the 55th anniversary of the very first Star Trek model kit. In June of 1967, Michigan-based Aluminum Model Toys (AMT) Corporation began selling an 18-inch injection-molded model of the starship Enterprise. Before the year was out, AMT would sell over a million copies of the kit. Since that first release, AMT and its successors went on to release at least 23 unique kits making it one of the longest running and most successful Star Trek licensees in the history of the franchise. A close-to-the-original 1:650 scale model kit is still being manufactured and sold through Round2 LLC, the current AMT licensee. Just in time to celebrate the 55th anniversary of the kit’s first release, Round2 has reissued the kit in the more commonly seen second long box (S951) form that first appeared in 1968 which features on the box top an assembled model kit orbiting the Earth.
