Can You Register Star Trek’s Enterprise D As A Support Animal?
In the most recent Best of the Worst episode from RedLetterMedia, it was clear that the movie they had watched was worse than usual. As soon as the video begins, we can see cohost Rich Evans (also known as Dick the Birthday Boy) clutching a Star Trek toy. Specifically, he’s clutching a replica of the Enterprise-D, prompting cohost Mike Stoklassa to jokingly ask if the toy ship could be registered as a support animal.
We decided to answer this silly question and discovered that while you can’t register your Star Trek toys, that doesn’t necessarily keep you from bringing the Enterprise everywhere you go for support.
What Is A Support Animal?
It’s a bit pedantic, but the first reason you can’t register Star Trek merch like the Enterprise as a support animal is that you don’t even need to register the animals themselves. Neither emotional support animals nor service animals need to be officially registered with your state or federal government.
As for emotional support animals, you would have to be “prescribed” one by a mental health professional, after which federal law would allow you to fly with the animal and get reasonable accommodations from housing providers.
Does this mean that Rich Evans or other Star Trek nerds could get a mental health professional to prescribe them an emotional support Enterprise? While Spock would remind us there are “always possibilities,” most professionals would never do this because it could put both their reputation and license at risk.
From where we’re standing, Rich Evans made the right choice: thanks to its chunky saucer and wide hull design, the Enterprise-D is likely the cuddliest starship in Star Trek history.
Even if they were nominally willing to do so, even living creatures can’t be prescribed as support animals unless their owner has a mental disability or suffers from certain emotional issues such as anxiety and depression.
Unless you’re a RedLetterMedia fan, your big question now is probably why Rich Evans felt he needed an emotional support starship in the first place. The answer is that he’s a big Star Trek fan, and he needed to cuddle the Enterprise for strength after he and the rest of the group watched the Glenn Danzig film Death Rider in the House of Vampires.
While Danzig’s previous film Verotika offered some trashy gonzo entertainment, his follow-up movie had such bad sound editing and mixing that some of the scenes (which felt like the longest scenes in film history) had no music or ambient noise.
That lack of music and sound made Danzig’s already bad film even worse than anyone could have imagined. It was certainly more than Rich Evans could imagine, and after seeing clips from this amateur film, we can understand why a Star Trek fan like himself would need to clutch some official merchandise for emotional support.
From where we’re standing, he made the right choice: thanks to its chunky saucer and wide hull design, the Enterprise-D is likely the cuddliest starship in Star Trek history.
While you can’t register your Star Trek toys, that doesn’t necessarily keep you from bringing the Enterprise everywhere you go for support.
Incidentally, while we doubt they did this intentionally, the RedLetterMedia boys ended up bringing a recent viral meme to life. Prompted by a popular post from @isawken, X/Twitter users spent the back half of 2022 making jokes about the unconventional things users rely on for their own emotional support.
There weren’t many Star Trek-adjacent answers, but users mentioned plenty of inanimate objects they relied on, including everything from iced coffee to marital aids. Nobody mentioned the starship Enterprise, but we’re not surprised: after all, Rich Evans has always been a trendsetter.
After watching this episode of Best of the Worst, we began thinking about which of our own toys we’d like to use as emotional support objects. Looking around the office, this G.I. Joe Skystriker jet and Halo Master Chief helmet are both strong contenders. If you invite us over to watch something as bad as Aquaman 2, though, don’t be surprised if we have to clutch one toy in each arm to make it to the credits.
Source: Red Letter Media
