The words are real, the order is not. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), Kirk tells Gillian Taylor “Thank you, …for everything. Scotty, beam me up!” — the same four words the public quotes, simply front-loaded with the name. No Star Trek episode or film contains the sentence in its famous order, and the catchphrase was already in print in 1975, eleven years before this film gave it its closest on-screen echo.
“Beam me up, Scotty” Scotty, beam me up! — Adm. James T. Kirk (William Shatner), Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Paramount Pictures, 1986); screenplay by Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Harve Bennett & Nicholas Meyer. The popular "Beam me up, Scotty" is never spoken in any Star Trek episode or film.
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In context
Evoking the world of Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Harve Bennett & Nicholas Meyer — Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Paramount, 1986) · credit settled by WGA arbitration. Theme: "Beam me up, Scotty". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Beam me up, Scotty". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The line as actually filmed
Work
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Paramount Pictures, 1986)
Written by
Screenplay by Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Harve Bennett & Nicholas Meyer; story by Harve Bennett & Leonard Nimoy. Directed by Leonard Nimoy. Credit settled by WGA arbitration.
Spoken by
Adm. James T. Kirk (William Shatner) — a fictional character
Scene
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, 1986; Kirk parting from Gillian Taylor
Kirk has just prised the whales' tracking frequency out of Gillian Taylor and is refusing to take her to the 23rd century; he gives the order, and she leaps into his arms and transports with him anyway. Quoted at minimum length: the film is in copyright, and the wording — not the scene — is what this page exists to establish.
The wording. Wikiquote's page for the film is a selection, not a transcript, and does not carry the line at all — so the claim was checked against the full film transcript ↗, where Kirk's Golden Gate Park line reads “Thank you, …for everything. Scotty, beam me up!” Same four words as the catchphrase; different order.
The specialist anchor. Quote Investigator has no article on this phrase, so the authority is Fred R. Shapiro of The Yale Book of Quotations ↗, who confirms the phrase was never said in the original series and dates its earliest documented appearance to the Aeronautical Journal, April 1975. This page adopts that date and asserts nothing earlier.
The negative claim.Wikipedia ↗ states the exact phrase “was never actually spoken in any Star Trek television episode or film,” and independently names Star Trek IV as carrying “Scotty, beam me up” — an attribution that page leaves uncited, which is why it was confirmed against the transcript above rather than taken on trust.
The authorship. The four-way screenplay credit, the Writers Guild arbitration that produced it, and the note that Meyer wrote the 20th-century Earth section in which this line falls all come from Wikipedia's article on the film ↗. No source assigns this particular sentence to one writer, so none is named here.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was first released on 26 November 1986 and is firmly in copyright — US public domain currently reaches only works published through 1930. Screenwriting is work-for-hire: the rights sit with Paramount Pictures as the studio, not with the four credited screenwriters, who are the line's authors but not its owners. The popular wording “Beam me up, Scotty” is a separate matter — a short folk phrase of no identifiable authorship, and in any case too brief to carry copyright on its own.
Fact-check
Where the credit goes wrong
Nothing here is fabricated and nobody is falsely accused — the show is the right show and Kirk is the right captain. What went wrong is narrower and stranger: the word order, and the assumption that a script produced the phrase at all.
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The seriesStar Trek: The Original Series (1966–69) never said it
The catchphrase is filed in memory under the 1960s show, but the sentence appears in no episode. The nearest approaches are all worded differently: Kirk says “This is the Captain. Beam me up” in “This Side of Paradise” ↗, “Scotty, beam us up fast” in “The Savage Curtain” ↗, and “Mister Scott, beam us up” in “The Cloud Minders” ↗.
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The filmStar Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) close, not exact
The film most often produced as proof does contain every word — in the wrong order. The transcript ↗ reads “Scotty, beam me up!”, the name leading rather than trailing. Cite this film for the words if you like; you cannot cite it for the sentence.
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The actorJames Doohan (Scotty) misquoted in his own obituary
The drift outlived the man who supposedly answered it. Wikipedia ↗ records that Doohan's obituary described him as the character who “responded to the command, ‘Beam me up, Scotty’” — a command he was never actually given. Doohan then used the phrase as the title of his 1996 autobiography.
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The originAny Star Trek script, as the source of the phrase the misquote came first
This is the load-bearing error. Fred Shapiro dates the wording in print to the Aeronautical Journal, April 1975 ↗ — eleven years before Star Trek IV. No screenplay can be the origin of a phrase that was already circulating before it was written.
✓Nobody wrote “Beam me up, Scotty.” The closest anyone came on screen is Kirk's “Scotty, beam me up!” ↗ in Star Trek IV (1986) — and by then the catchphrase had been in print for eleven years. It is less a misquotation of Star Trek than a piece of folk language the franchise never quite caught up with.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Credited screenwriters · Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Paramount, 1986) · credit settled by WGA arbitration
The real line belongs to a four-way screenplay credit, and a contested one. Paramount, dissatisfied with the first script by Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes, brought in producer Harve Bennett (1930–2015) and Wrath of Khan director Nicholas Meyer (b. 1945) to rewrite it, from a story by Bennett and Leonard Nimoy, who directed. Meyer and Bennett were originally credited alone; Krikes and Meerson filed for arbitration with the Writers Guild and were awarded credit as well — a ruling that, by Meyer's account, embittered him for years. Wikipedia records that Meyer wrote the 20th-century Earth middle portion, which is where this line falls, but no source assigns the sentence itself to any one of the four, so it is the credited team's line rather than a single writer's.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, directed by Leonard Nimoy, screenplay by Steve Meerson, Peter Krikes, Harve Bennett, and Nicholas Meyer, story by Harve Bennett and Leonard Nimoy (Hollywood, CA: Paramount Pictures, 1986). Line transcribed in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,” The Movie Transcripts, chakoteya.net. Earliest documented use of the popular wording: Aeronautical Journal, April 1975, per Fred R. Shapiro, “‘Beam Me Up, Mr. Scott’ (Revisited),” Yale University Press, December 15, 2021.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Beam me up, Scotty’?” Last verified 16 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/beam-me-up-scotty