For Drexler, the thing that stands out most was the friends that he made over the years. “These people are still my friends, and I still work with many of them, too,” he said. Those friends included Mike and Denise Okuda. “I owe [Mike] much for [taking a chance on me], but the friendship that we have, it’s something you can’t put any price on.”

Star Trek: The Next Generation was the most fun time for Drexler. “I’ve been in this business for thirty-two years, and I’ve never seen anything like the cast on TNG,” he said. “You read about shows where they say it’s a big family and then you find out they really hated each other. Not on TNG. It was a genuine family and everyone had a ball. It was sheer fun, no matter how late you worked. Brent Spiner and Jonathan Frakes, the guys were wacky and totally loony. They didn’t take anything seriously until the camera was rolling. Honestly, I don’t think I ever saw a normal rehearsal. Every rehearsal had somebody trying to crack somebody else up. But once they called action, they were right on the money. If I could go back to a time, it would probably be to that show.”

After Star Trek: Enterprise wrapped, Drexler worried about future employment. “When Enterprise ended, I was thinking, ‘Man, I was on Star Trek shows for seventeen years! This could be the end of it! I’ll never work again! Who gets a streak of luck like that?’ But when I get home, there’s a message from Gary [Hutzel] on the answering machine. Lightning! Right away I knew he was going to ask me to come to Battlestar Galactica. I called him and he said, ‘I heard about Enterprise.’ I said, ‘Yeah…’ He said, ‘You know, Doug, every cloud has a silver lining.’ And that was it, I was on the show.

Drexler is currently working on Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome, and waiting to see if it is picked up as a series.

Even though a change in publishers from Pocket Books to Rizzoli meant a shorter lead time for the Ships of the Line 2013 calendar, fans should be pleased when it comes out, and they will have Doug Drexler to thank for not being stuck with a rerun calendar due to that shorter lead time.

“Rizzoli is the new publisher,” explained Drexler. “Pocket Books is not continuing on. I don’t know exactly the reason. All I know is that their licensing agreement with CBS came up again and it didn’t survive through that. So, Rizzoli has picked it up. Their publishing schedule is totally different from Pocket Books’. If it was Pocket, we would have until March to finish the image. But Rizzoli just got the license and there wasn’t enough time. Their thought, was, ‘Let’s do a Best of…’ issue.”

But Drexler wasn’t happy with that idea. “Now, frankly, when you’re making a transition like that it’s really important how you look when you come out the other side,” he said. “You can’t look like a retread. So I talked to my buddies who work on the calendar and I said, ‘Look, they want to do a rerun thing. Personally, I’m not going to do that; I’m going to create new art for the rerun price, and you guys are free to do that as well if you want. I hope you will.” And everyone just jumped in. We actually got the calendar together in about three weeks. I think it’s one of the best-looking calendars yet. So, sometimes extra-cool stuff comes out of adversity. I’m real excited about it.”

Expect to spend some time at Drexler’s site today. Topics include: novel cover art, Ships of the Line, a six-foot model of the original series Enterprise, a VFX panel, designing props, Robert Lansing (Gary Seven of Assignment: Earth) and more.

First, Drexler shared the news that he will be working with Dan Curry, Mike and Denise Okuda and David Takemura on Star Trek: The Next Generation Remastered. “You heard right,” said Drexler, “this time around Paramount is bringing in a team that lived TNG as it happened. Dan, as I’m sure you know, was the visual effects supervisor on Next Gen. Unlike the remastering of TOS, this job will be 100% true to the original. Visual effects shots will not be reinvented, pulling you out of the show. What’s about to happen is truly extraordinary.

“The studio has saved all the original footage, and VFX elements from the good old days. We will be recompositing them, and then outputting them in high definition. Here and there, elements have been lost, and we will recreate only those missing pieces,  and with this promise: aside from looking like you had your windshield cleaned, you won’t know the difference. Star Trek: The Next Generation is Gene Roddenberry‘s legacy, it is culturally significant, and we will rejuvenate the show with curatorial eyes only. Paramount Picture deserves a round of applause, and I can’t wait to dig in with my friends.”

Next up is a post on novel cover art, where Drexler explains how he approaches working on artwork for a book. “On a novel I go larger than life, and painterly,” he said. Two covers are shown, one for David Mack‘s Star Trek: Vanguard: Storming Heaven and one for Michael A. Martin‘s Enterprise: The Romulan Wars: To Brave the Storm.

Several other blog posts concern the Ships of the Line calendars. One blog entry features a fourteen-minute video with Craig Frey discussing creating the cover art for the new Ships of the Line calendar for next year.

Also, take time to watch a twenty-minute Drex-TV video, the topic of which is Ships of the Line, Active Duty.

In a post that is certain to inspire serious model envy in any original series fan, Drexler shares beautiful photos from a six foot original series Enterprise created by Steve Neil, who will answer any questions that viewers may have.

Another video features a visual effects panel Drexler attended, which was held in North Hollywood. Others on the panel included Ron Thornton, Chuck Comsky and Eric Hance.

Sketches from Drexler’s first day on the job at Star Trek: Deep Space Nine are shown, including hand props.

Finally, Drexler shares his thoughts about an actor familiar to original series fans, Robert Lansing (Assignment: Earth‘s Gary Seven) but the topic is not Star Trek this time, but Lansing’s role in the Twelve O’clock High television series, where he played General Frank Savage.

The first part of the episode features the Reliant/Saratoga model, and in the second part of the episode, Drexler takes one last look at the Star Trek: Voyager sets.

“First up is some lost handycam footage shot at Image G,” explained Drexler. “It was Gary [Hutzel's] task to uncrate the Reliant/Saratoga and see if it still worked, since the last time the Teamsters tossed it on the back of a truck and bounced it along bumpy roads to the storage facility up north. Naturally, it doesn’t. In a classic example of roll with the punches, Gary invents another class of ship. Whenever I see old footage like this, I kick myself for not shooting more.”

In the second part of The Drex Files #4, Drexler shared a story about his final visit to the Star Trek: Voyager sets. Mike Okuda knocked on Drexler’s door one day, and when Drexler answered, Okuda said to him, ‘They’ve lit the Voyager sets one last time before they strike ‘em. Grab the cam, and meet me on the bridge!’

“It’s funny the quiet reverence you experience when saying goodbye to a make-believe spaceship. The show over seven years becomes a family, and the starship sets are where that family lives. Sure, it’s the family you see on the screen every week, but even more so the collection of quirky, talented and lovely human beings behind the scenes that you fall in love with, too.”

The video can be seen here.

In addition, Drexler takes fans inside Westmore’s house, in a video seen here, where fans can see Westmore’s many awards on his mantel, including nine Emmys and one Oscar.

Drexler found working with Westmore to be “sheer fun. He always wears a smile, and is just a delight. He is a dear, dear man. If you know anything about the Westmores of Hollywood, you know that the family practically invented the movie makeup game.”

The Westmore family’s tenure in Hollywood dates back to 1917, and Michael Westmore’s children are the fourth generation to carry on the Hollywood tradition. A book about the family, The Westmores of Hollywood, written by his uncle, Frank Westmore, chronicles the Westmore family’s Hollywood tenure. Michael Westmore’s own career began on Flower Drum Song (1961) where he worked as an apprentice.

Westmore shared a story with Drexler about his uncle, Bud, about a time when Bud was apprenticing on a Tarzan movie. “Cheetah the chimp was played by a male ape,” said Drexler. “Bud’s job was to take a wet sponge and burnt cork, and use it to black out the chimp’s ‘water works’ so that they would not show up on the big screen. After about a week of that, whenever Bud walked on stage, Cheetah would scamper over excitedly, take the cork and sponge out of Bud’s pocket and hand it to him.”

The second live interview is a direct result of the first interview, which was “so successful that we had to wrap it up less than halfway through our list of talking topics,” according to Trek Radio.

Drexler returns on Saturday, January 22nd at 11 AM PST (2 PM EST, 7 PM GMT) for that second live interview. Those who missed the first part of the interview, conducted December 18, can listen to it by heading to the link located here where it is listed under “Doug Drexler on Trek Radio – Part 1.”

Other Trek-related Trek Radio interviews are also available at that link, including Rod Roddenberry, Rick Sternbach, Chase Masterson and others.

The nineteen-minute video posted by Drexler, which can be seen at StarTrek.com, has a lot of goodies for fans, with segments about the original series, Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Enterprise.

The Drex files opens with an interview of Mike Forest, who played Apollo in the second season original series episode Who Mourns for Adonais. Then The Next Generation fans can see the story of the “Thanksgiving battle for the four-footer,” where Greg Jein and several others try to move a four-foot long model of the USS Enterprise without damaging it.

Star Trek: Enterprise fans should tune in at the 13:27 mark in the video, where Drexler has made a short blooper reel of the crew filmed during the first season’s Desert Crossing. Following the blooper reel, go back in time to when the Star Trek: Enterprise pilot was being shot and see what it was really like – with all the bells and whistles included.

But beware Romulan spies!

The second video posted today features an hour-long interview with Sir Patrick Stewart, which can be seen here. In the interview, Stewart shares “inside-the-theater tales,” and talks about his knighthood and his years on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Science fiction often influences the development of new technology and in the case of the communicator and the PADD, fans today can see that with flip cellphones and the Apple iPad.

Michael and Denise Okuda and Doug Drexler, all of whom were involved in production art for Star Trek, spoke about the similarities between the “futuristic” gadgets of yesterday and today’s counterparts. “”Going back to the original series, when you look at forty-five years ago, look at the communicator they used,” said Denise Okuda. “Then fast forward and look at what we are using today: flip phones.” It’s really mind-blowing when you look at things today, like the iPad—we were using those things on Star Trek.”

The touchscreen PADDs designed for The Next Generation were meant to replace the original series “electronic clipboards.” “The idea was that we wanted to make them sleeker, slimmer, and way more advanced than the electronic clipboards were on the original series,” explained Michael Okuda.

Budgetary concerns drove the development of the graphic Okudagrams and the PADD. “The initial motivation for that was in fact cost,” said Okuda. “Doing it purely as a graphic was considerably less expensive than buying electronic components.”

Okuda began to think about how the PADD would actually work if it was real. “But very quickly we began to realize—as we figured out how these things would work and how someone would operate them, people would come to me and say, ‘What happens if I need to do this?’ Perhaps it was some action I hadn’t thought of, and we didn’t have a specific control for that. And I realized the proper answer to that was, ‘It’s in the software.’ All the things we needed could be software-definable.”

Drexler listed gadgets of today that were probably influenced by Star Trek. “Swiss army knife-like cell phones, wall-sized TV screens a quarter of an inch thick, GPS devices that nag you with voice, body scanners at airports, voice recognition, remotely operated fighter planes [and] surgical robots,” he said.

What will tomorrow bring? “Once you don’t have to physically touch the screen,” said Michael Okuda, “I think yet another window is going to open up.”

Drexler sees something introduced in the Terminator movies as a possible future technology. “Interactive ocular HUD [head-up display]” he said.

The first edition of “The Drex Files – A Video Addendum” features Andrew Probert and his Sphinx shuttle, starship construction sets, an encounter with BarBara Luna and animated ships from the Ships of the Line calendar.

The Sphinx shuttle was a shuttle designed for Star Trek: The Next Generation by Andrew Probert, but it was never built and used in a show because “there were no scripts written to accommodate a little service craft of that sort. But fans can see what it would have looked like in 3-D.

Next up in the video is a fascinating look into the world of a construction crew responsible for creating starships and interiors of starships from sketches and blueprints. Drexler remembered that there were days when he would leave at 2 A.M., the saying in the makeup department being “first to get there, last to leave,” but the construction crew would still be there. “[I'd] be blown away that the construction guys would still be at it full tilt” he said. “Later, when I made the jump from the makeup department to art department, I would learn who this amazing powerhouse of a gang was. Not only would I be privy to their world and particular brand of magic, but I would now be working with them hand in hand. I would not only be wowed by their incredible talent and skill, but by the unique characters and personalities that drove the Trek construction juggernaut.”

Mirror, Mirror fans remember the “Captain’s woman” from that episode, played by BarBara Luna. “When I was thirteen years old,” said Drexler, “four of the sexiest women on Earth were Raquel Welch, Brigitte Bardot, Ursula Andress, and BarBara Luna. When I saw Luna as the captain’s woman in the classic Trek episode Mirror, Mirror she was IT. She still has more of IT than any two women have a right to have of IT. How does she do it? ”

Drexler caught up with Luna recently and videotaped the results. According to Drexler, “She’s silly and zany and adorable. Scamp, vixen, brat, comedian, artist and legend.”

Finally, welcome to Ships of the Line: Active Duty! Drexler and Tobias Richter, Mark Rademaker, and Rob Wilde got together to animate ships from the Ships of the Line calendar. “Check your inertial dampers, fasten your seat belts, and be sure you’ve got your extra heavy reinforced Depends on because this is gold, Jerry!” said Drexler. “See the launch of the refit NX and Matt Jefferies‘ iconic ringship taking flight! “SOTL: Active Duty” is the kick in the PTC you have been yearning for!”

The video can be seen here.

Items of interest to Star Trek fans include a found shuttlepod, a Ships of the Line flashback, original series set studies and the NCC-1701-D.

“Making for Deep Water” features a beautiful image of the USS Enterprise 1701-D and another ship above a planet, with a moon behind them and a spacedock slightly below the two ships.

Next up is a photo of Drexler and Hollywood makeup artist John Caglione, shortly after winning the Academy Award for the makeup in Dick Tracy. The two were in attendance at Dick Tracy Days in Woodstock, Illinois.

Drexler posted the results of his experimentation with Adobe Dimension. “This was one of my earliest experiments in 3D,” he said. “It was a real thrill!”

Trek fans will enjoy the Ships of the Line 2008 flashback, featuring the Enterprise D and the USS Stargazer.

Other entries of note concern one of the two shuttlepods made for Star Trek: Enterprise, one of which went to a collector in Germany, the other to the Hollywood Studio Collection which hopes to restore it, and an alien transport ship from Star Trek: Enterprise: The Breach.