Universal Studios Hollywood had previously announced that Star Trek was part of its first “Fan Fest Nights” for Spring 2025, and now we are getting a sense of what fans can expect within the Star Trek interactive experience… namely, a very familiar bridge set.
Fan Fest Nights and Star Trek
Fan Fest Nights is a new type of event for Universal modeled after their annual “Hollywood Horror Nights” that invite theme parks guests and fans “to partake in all-original and immersive in-world experiences.” The inaugural Universal Fan Fest Nights will feature interactive experiences from several popular fandoms including Star Trek. At LA Comic Con, Universal Studios Hollywood revealed the actual USS Enterprise-D bridge set piece featured in the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard will be a major component of the Star Trek experience. Here is how they describe it:
“Inspired by the Star Trek universe that has entertained millions of fans, this exciting experience will boldly take guests on an immersive and thrilling adventure aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise-D where they will have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to step onto the bridge, an original set piece featured in the third and final season of Star Trek: Picard.”
In the third season of Star Trek: Picard, Geordi reveals that since the events of Star Trek: Generations, he has been working on restoring the USS Enterprise-D after recovering the crashed saucer from Veridian III. For the show, the Picard team, led by production designer David Blass, meticulously recreated the bridge set which was used in the final episodes of the season. Blass brought in a number of Star Trek: The Next Generation veterans to work with his team to both match the original set and update it for filming in the modern era. This set was one of the few things preserved by CBS Studios after the series wrapped up. Now for the first time they will be sharing it with the public at Universal Fan Fest Nights in 2025.
Universal says they included Trek in their first Fan Fest Nights because “Star Trek is one of television’s most enduring franchises, known for groundbreaking storytelling that addresses social, political and cultural issues. Its optimistic view of the future and reflection on what it means to be human has inspired generations of dreamers and doers.”
Universal Fan Fest Nights will be a limited-time, after-hours experience exclusive to Universal Studios Hollywood. The inaugural Fan Fest Nights will also include experiences from One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, Back to the Future, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS as well as all-new experiences to debut within the theme park’s The Wizarding World of Harry Potter. Fan Fest Nights guests will also be able to experience select theme park attractions open during the event, including “Jurassic World—The Ride,” SUPER NINTENDO WORLD™, The Wizarding World of Harry Potter featuring “Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey™” and “Flight of the Hippogriff™,” “Transformers™: The Ride-3D,” “Revenge of the Mummy—The Ride” and “The Simpsons Ride™.”
The separately ticketed event kicks off exclusively at Universal Studios Hollywood on Friday, April 25, 2025, and will continue on select nights through Sunday, May 18. Fore more information and updates, visit the official page for Universal Fan Fest Nights.
Behind the scenes with the Enterprise-D set
Last year Paramount+ released a featurette about restoring the bridge with commentary from the Picard crew and the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast. It includes a time-lapse video of the bridge being built at Santa Clarita Studios.
Paramount+ also released an extended version of the Enterprise-D bridge tour with designer Mike Okuda and TNG star Wil Wheaton. The new 40-minute video is presented in 180-degree VR, allowing you to look around as the pair gets into all the bridge details.
Find more news and updates for Trek events and attractions.
Very very smart to turn this into an attraction.
Yes such an amazing idea. I hope we get to see it again in a story someday but this is the next best thing for it.
I hope we never see it on screen again. Not everything needs to keep coming back. Let’s get new stories in new places. I think it was a mistake to bring it back in the first place. But it happened, so best to let fans enjoy it themselves.
I stepped on this bridge in Las Vegas summer 2001 – Star Trek The Experience (the original time travel version, not the Borg one) It was incredible literally like being in the Ent D
That’s about the same time I visited there, though I remember thinking the bridge was smaller than expected. But that beam-in trick they pulled was pretty impressive!
That was the coolest thing that I have ever experienced in a theme park. You think “ho hum, another simulator ride”, and then ZZZZZZT, you’re on the Enterprise!
You guys were pondering on the podcast how attractions might resurface, here’s the answer. It’ll also be pretty obvious that Paramount will likely be licensing the franchise out moving forward.
What was the first Star Trek attraction in a theme park? Was it the audience participation thing at Universal Studios Hollywood in the 1980s?
I think so. I also believe the theater is still there, but has been repurposed a few times now.
That’s almost certainly how the refit and the Klingon battlecruiser models got really messed up as Uni had them before TUC got made. The battlecruiser was partly. covered in white paint (trying to pull a matte maybe?) when ILM got hold of it for TUC, and the Enterprise’s electrical trunk cabling was just cut right off. It’s like they needed to send a chaperon with these models!
That bridge set is beautiful. I’m so glad they reproduced it.
I remember seeing it for the first time in Encounter at Farpoint. It was kind of shocking, so different from the bridge of the original Enterprise and the movie bridges. It was huge, carpeted, and seemed so luxurious. That, and Andrew Probert’s radical design of the Enterprise D really underscored that that this new show was set in the future of the original.
Honestly, this bridge and the original seem pretty unique. The bridges from there on seem to be kind of generic.
I loved that it felt so different from the TOS bridge. Watching it as a kid it felt so big, luxurious and futuristic. It told you up front this is not your father’s Star Trek.
Was a fan of it at first sight!
Yeah, I agree. Like I said, being a big fan of the original and the films, it was just kind of shocking to see that new bridge. It was a huge departure from what came before. Like you said, that definitely visually set TNG apart and that’s what was needed. The show had to have its own identity from the way it looked to its characters and, ultimately, its tone and how it told its stories (although that took a couple of seasons to really work).
Being a hard core TOS fan, it took me awhile to warm up to the D and its bridge, but eventually I did come to love it too.
Yes I had all the same feelings you did. It felt so different as an original TOS fan but in a good way.
TNG left its mark on me very early and I embraced the show right away even if I wasn’t in love with the opening seasons. But it was exciting to be 10p years in the future. That bridge really signified that.
Oops 100 years in the future and not 10p years haha.
Same with me with regard to the seasons. I have seasons 2-7 on blu ray but I haven’t gotten season 1. I’m kind of torn about it. IMO, I think it might be the worst season of ST ever. The characters are very wooden and there are rehashed TOS style episodes and just a lot of weak writing. In particular, I really didn’t like Riker and Troi at all. There were some episodes that were just horrible.
If it was on a network, I don’t think TNG would have survived at all.
But the first season does give good background information on the characters and some concepts are introduced, e.g. Q, Lore, the Crystalline Entity, that pay off later.
In any case, season 2 made some good changes and had some good episodes and, when Michael Pillar came aboard, the show just came together and it worked really well. It’s now a real classic like TOS. Hard to believe after a bad first season and a mediocre to good 2nd season.
Oh yes agree very much with you! Each season got better than the last but the first season was definitely the roughest. I don’t hate it but like season 3 of TOS that’s probably the least amount of episodes I watch in a season.
But there were very good bones in the early years and how much the show propelled itself after the third season.
I watch TNG usually every year but didn’t have time this year because I became fixated on Voyager and Prodigy but I will probably watch it next year and watch more of the season 1 and 2 episodes I normally skip.
And for younger people like my daughter who is also an obsessive Star Trek fan, TNG will always be her favorite and look at that show the way old birds like me grew up with TOS. But they are both very iconic shows today.
I actually think TNG season 1 is the worst season of ST ever. I watched it, because, well, it was ST, but even then I was thinking that the show just wasn’t fun at all like TOS.
Season 2 got better. Worf was moved to the front as security chief with the departure of Tasha Yar (that Skin of Evil was a terrible episode btw). One less character meant more time for the others and Worf, being a Klingon was the perfect character, the most gun ho and paranoid, to be the security chief. He should have been the security chief to begin with, but as I understand it, GR had to be convinced to even put a Klingon on the show by Robert Justman.
Similarly, they needed a chief engineer character. Why they didn’t have a voice for the ship to begin with, I don’t know. So again, moving Geordi to chief engineer (although that was a huge promotion for him), made sense. It gave Levar Burton more to do and it filled a much needed role in the stories.
Adding 10 forward and Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan was great too. It gave a sympathetic ear for the characters to really talk things out, including Picard and the 10 forward set was great.
Finally, they significantly loosened up Riker and Troi. I really disliked Riker and didn’t like Troi much at all in the first season. I thought Riker was just a wooden copy of Kirk. But I warmed to Riker in the first season. As Frakes said, they let him put more of himself into the character and it worked. That really goes for all the characters, but for me, Riker and after that, Troi, needed it the most. Now, I totally love the Riker character. How can anyone dislike Jonathan Frakes? He’s awesome!
Maybe the only ding on season 2 was replacing Dr. Crusher with Dr. Pulaski, but Diane Mulder is such a strong actress. I liked her character and, honestly, after the how wooden the characters were for the first season, I didn’t mind someone who put some friction in the relationships. Yeah, they were trying to emulate the Spock-McCoy friction with Pulaski and Data, but I don’t see anything wrong with that. It was something and it was interesting seeing her views of him change with experience. Maybe they didn’t because there wasn’t enough time, but the potential was there.
And there were some great stories in season 2, in particular, The Measure of a Man, which Michael Pillar said was his favorite episode of TNG, I believe.
I thought this was the worst bridge ever given commander unable to spin around to talk to crew, tactical officer to go flying when ship hit, carpets lighting on fire with half the bridge space for blinky uninformative hard drive lights (fixed in Generations but back to useless sides for reasons unknown) but then came all these new huge bridges with stairs for everyone to fall down when hit, no computer consoles and lots of doors behind everyone so it’s debatable now.
You’re being too practical! It’s about aesthetics! ; )
Mebbe so, but aesthetically the TNG bridge looks like an ARCHITECTURAL DIGEST mag cover image that has been grafittied with xmas lights! (to be fair, the TFF bridge does too, but I still find it to be rather elegant, even with the ‘tv showroom’ look of the monitors.)
They’ve really gone stairs-crazy with the bridges on the Kurtzmans, haven’t they? I would never be able to play a scene without worrying I was going to take a header.
This bridge just feels like home to me
Same! 🙂
I actually been on this bridge twice, including the original TV show bridge!
That one was a year or so after the show had ended. There was a small Hollywood museum at the time on Hollywood Boulevard; not too far from the Chinese theater. And Paramount had donated two sets for it, the TNG bridge and the Cheers bar set. It was so cool to see both of those; especially since I was just as big of a Cheers fan as I was a Trek fan back then. I remember both sets feeling much smaller than they looked on TV but still awesome.
The second time was the Las Vegas experience as I imagine many here went to. That too was so amazing and just being in other parts of the ship. Only did it once the first year it opened but still remember it fondly.
And it looks like I will be seeing it a third time now. That scene in Picard was so special to me when it was displayed I literally broke down. It already made an awesome season that much more memorable since it was always a huge part of my childhood like the TOS bridge of course.
Really can’t wait now.
Wow I am so jealous. You got to see the original brfge too???? And I never got to go to Star Trek The Experience either. Always wanted to just never got around to it.
But those must’ve been great memories. And I’m also a Cheers fan. Would’ve been great to see that set as well.
At the Cheers bar on Boston Common, they have a reproduction of the set upstairs. It’s not actually used by patrons of the bar (for that, you sit downstairs). I went in June; I’d never been before despite having gone to college in the Boston area.
I remember seeing the Enterprise D bridge many years ago at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, as part of a temporary Star Trek exhibit.
Really? I thought the TNG Bridge set was struck and destroyed as soon as they were done with Generations?
So far as I know all tng sets were trashed after Gen to make room for voyager.
In fact, some of the last stuff done on the bridge was a reshoot with the big explosion and slomo at tactical — source on that is Peter Lauritson, who directed it — so they may have actually damaged the set for real since there was no point in preserving it.
Aw, this is such a great idea. I will always cherish this bridge and show. So many fond memories and why season 3 of Picard was so well recieved by so many people.
That bridge has become so iconic. I think many people will be going to this.
As usual, congrats to the west-coasters, but boy, it’d be nice to have that on the other side of the country…
I don’t know if touring a set around the country is practical, however. :-)
Just driving the TMP drydock model 450 miles north to ILM for GENERATIONS practically reduced it to rubble. Bill George told me the wiring inside was the only thing holding the model together when they actually got it.
So no, until they invent structural integrity fields, a touring bridge just isn’t in the cards.
It belongs in a museum – like the MoPop or the Lucas Museum which doesn’t cost $300 just for the privilege to visit.
Unfortunately, something is very off. juliensauctions has a massive Trek auction that is oddly including multiple bridge pieces from the ‘restored USS Enterprise-D from the television series Star Trek: Picard (Paramount+, 2020 – 2023).’ The tactical panel, OPS, Engineering,etc etc. How can this be? Either the lots are fake of the bridge set will be.
In the Julien auction, the LCARS panels etc are all backups. It states that in the descriptions as I wondered the same thing. The stuff in the auction was not screen used.