So, Pulse weapons.

^ The Encounters game for the PS2 does amend that, when Phasers hit something they do seem to melt and burn the target and you see debris and venting atmosphere coming from the damaged section too. Nice little effect.

 

I hope they get away from assigning stereotypical ideas of blues equaling the 'good guys', 'bad guys' have red.

One logical way to portray the weapon beam colors (imo) is, (and this is how I hope the Producers saw it too for this film) to have the color of the beam match the intensity setting. Stun settings would be in the 'cool' color ranging up to 'hot' colors for vaporizing.

 

Then again, GL could have also gotten SW out on schedule in 1976.

As I recall, the primary driver for the Trek revival's brief detour as TV series was the attempted creation of the Paramount network. Certainly, the success of SW made it an easy decision to re-greenlight the film after UPN Mark I failed.

 

To address the last point first: Par decided they waited too late for a trek film and admitted 'we're beaten' in cancelling TITANS. The Phase 2 thing came along handily, and at least allowed set construction to begin.

SW could NEVER EVER have gotten out in 1976. Believe me, I've talked to lots of ILM employees (hell, I wrote a screenplay based on the ILM end of the making of SW), and you would not have had anything close to a releasable pic. They didn't even start ILM up till summer 75, and only had 4 FX shots done by summer of 76 (that's out of 360+) ... Considering that a lot of that time was spent designing and building and debugging a brand new repeatable camera system (one so good that it had less than a week of downtime for the entire period it was fully operational), the idea of xmas 76 was blue-sky in the extreme.

 

Yes and considering the Film would have ended with Kirk and company pretty much stuck in the distant past founding the advanced civilization they were looking for in th film Star Trek probably would have ended then.

 

There were endings where they were in the past, endings where they were in the future, and probably a security ending where a few of them stayed behind and the rest went back to century 23.

But I'd've been fine with them ending it then, too, though I doubt it'd have kept sequels from happening (look at the APES movies.)

I'd also have been fine with seeing them do TITANS as the new movie, with Capt April or whoever, as a standalone story.

 

On the OP subject the reason pulse weapons are in this movie is simply Captain Robau LIKES pulse weapons and JJ Abrams LIKES living you do the math.

 

Captain Robau doesn't need pulse weapons. He can rid you of your pulse simply by staring into your soul.