Season 3 Theatrical Event Date Revealed

A large, packed house in downtown San Francisco. A bunch of Command and Academy bigwigs must have come straight from the office, because there were uniforms everywhere, and one guy with an impressive amount of Borg costuming.

Big laughs at Wesley's foibles, the "heat" between Rikes and Shelby, and, breaking the tension, towards the end: Picard says "sleeeep", and Crusher exclaims "he's exhausted!" Oh, and the yellow-shirt toss in that scene got a laugh, too.

The ep itself was pretty darn good, if a tad claustrophobic when taken in all at once on such a large screen. But hey, didn't the cube blow up right on top of Earth? Could definitely have used a bit more denouement to address that and Picard's recovery instead of Guinan's out-of-nowhere Ready Room pep talk.

Anyhow, tons of fun, and definitely worth the price at least this one time. Would love to see AGT at the same spot.

 

^

Its about twenty years too late to criticize content, don't ya think?

I enjoyed the event tonight, and was given a miniposter for dressin' up for it in my yellow DS9 uniform. While some folks had Trek-themed t-shirts, I was the only one in a costume.

I do prefer the seperate episodes, rather than feature version...the music & tension are a part of the story, which the feature edit eliminates.

While the theater wasn't packed, it was a larger crowd than the one that came out for the second season event ('Q Who?' and the extended version of 'The Measure of a Man').

Lookin' forward to the fourth season event, if there is one...

 

I had lots of fun tonight going to see BOBW on the big screen.

I got there 30 minutes early to see everyone waiting outside the theater room. I was worried that the whole thing was canceled, but it turned out to be that an employee was just a little late cleaning things up. The preshow Quiz on screen were cute. I got all of them right after answering them in my head. They must have shown those pictures of people Borgafied from the online app about a million times though! It must have been from the same link that I posted a while ago? The one with the small Borg standing besides some huge yellow flowers was quite out there.

The documentary shown before BOBW was quite indepth, though I expect that it was an edited version of the one that is going to be on the separate BD release. There were lots of interesting info at the making of the episode. Pretty much all of TNG cast was involved. I was surprised how much Elizabeth Dennehy was involved though, newcomers might have mistaken her for one of the main cast members. It was interesting how she learned to deal with being on a Sci Fi show like TNG, and how unprepared she was at first. The tidbit of information about Frakes asking her to play up some heat between Riker and Shelby was a riot because they still didn't know how Part 2 could have gone. Dennehy wondered if he asked all the female guest stars that! The only person we didn't hear anything from was Gates McFadden.

Onto BOBW, it was great. I have no problems with the remastered effects. They did a great job going back to the quality of the first season. We still got the scenes cutting to black unlike what a previous poster said, but I am glad I was prepared for the edited scene with Riker's order to fire and the cut to the scene with the Enterprise firing from the deflector. I still prefer the cliffhanger ending from Part 1, nothing beats that ending. The new Season 3 uniforms looked great and reminded me of when we saw them clearly for the first time in "Generations". All the ship shots, the Enterprise and the Borg cube were quite nice. The planets were all nearly movie quality effects, the best was of Earth near the end of the episode. I'm quite glad they seem to be keeping those kind of quality shots for the planets for season 4 and probably all future seasons.

The bloopers were fun. Guinan had the best ones with him telling Geordi to **** a program, and her crazy wiggle while the camera was on her. Patrick Stewart has quite the funny freak out face when he flubs his lines doesn't he? Nice to see the new season 4 teaser too.

Overall it was great. There were about 70 people there, in a stadium theater that could probably hold 200. My audience had one guy going as a redshirt from TOS. The best part was that while I was leaving, I heard a woman saying how she had been hoping they had also shown the "First Contact" movie too!

 

The theater in Hooksett, New Hampshire, which is 65 miles from our house, was 80% full. The doc before the show was good, with Elizabeth Denehy's bits standing out. Though I thought it went about 5-10 minutes too long. I was ready for the main feature after Seth McFarlane's gush on the big build up on the end of part one. "FIRE" would have been a good end to the intro feature.
BOBW looked great on the big screen, except for the rolling scan lines that really stood out during the darker scenes. Brighter scenes it didn't stand out as much, but those floating upward bands were always present. Did this happen for every screening location?
The bloopers were hilarious! I'll never watch that scene in Yesterday's Enterprise with Richard Castille with out "You can call me Dick." popping in my head. It was fun to have a whole theater of people laughing along.
The beautiful 'Pink Moon' greeted us leaving the cinema, echoing the shots of the Enterprise in orbit above Earth with a big moon in view. Then we went out to eat, to 'make a night' to remember.

 

No scan line issues at our theater.

 

Did anyone else notice in the documentary that the Borg cube exploding was remastered in 16:9 and then cropped to 4:3?

 

The original film elements were shot in 35 mm widescreen, then cropped to 4:3 for broadcast.
I noticed the blooper reel was 16:9. and I didn't see any 'junk' off to the sides. Wonder if a widescreen TNG is really that 'impossible'.

 

New to the BBS, are ye?

 

I really enjoyed the screening. I saw it in Dublin, CA and the screening was about 80% full, which was a much better turnout than the season 2 screening.

The remastering was perfect. No complaints.

At first, I thought the tone of the Season 4 trailer was silly, but coming right after the gag reel, it fit the tone quite well.

Christopher McDonald brought the house down.

 

I saw it last night in Olympia, Washington. The room was packed, much more than for the Season 2 event. Everyone applauded at the end. I felt like watching First Contact right away.

 

Yes if you watch the documentary on Season 1 about remastering, they usually recreate a VFX scene in 16:9 to give them lots of room to work with, then they crop to the best/most esthetically pleasing 4:3 area. TOS-R was done in much the same way.

Incorrect. They were filmed on 35mm film with standard spherical lenses which has a raw aspect ratio of ~1.37:1 which is just slightly wider than 1.33:1 (4:3). So yes there is a slight bit of more information on the sides, but nothing huge and usually it has equipment and other things never meant to be seen. To film in real widescreen would require framing it that way from the get go, which they did not.
Again this has been explained many times around the web, but also pretty clearly explained on the Season 1 doc.

 

I was in San Francisco as well... lots of folks in Starfleet uniforms! And the Borg was pretty cool, saw people taking pictures with him after the show.

We had a blast. Nostalgia all over the place, and also a genuinely good story even after all this time. Some rough spots, sure (I think the laughter during some of Wesley's lines were simply because of how over-the-top some of his lines were, in both writing and delivery, i.e. "The saucer section's a sitting duck!!!"), but for the most part, it holds up remarkably well. And seeing some of those shots on the big screen and with restored effects (such as the Ent-D in the nebula, the battle scenes, the ship graveyard, and of course the big explosion) was just amazing. The music, too, which has always been among Trek's best, sounded great in this setting.

Someone upthread made the joke "best TNG movie ever!". While it's still technically an episode that is simply being shown on the big screen, it is a better story than all eleven Trek movies, so I'd say it's only partially a joke.

Loved the blooper reel. The crowd was in stitches throughout most of it, especially the "I did not play with bo-" segment. I especially loved how Stewart and Spiner start cracking up, and then just kind of back off the platform like "NOPE, not touching that one", while Dorn - who usually loses it and starts laughing when he flubs a line - just stands there with a very Worf like grimace on his face.

I do agree that setting the behind the scenes stuff after the ep itself would have been better, since it showed many of the key scenes that we were about to watch (and as someone else pointed out, yes we've all seen the ep plenty of times, but not with restored visuals and on the big screen), but eh. They probably wanted to make sure people saw all that, since it was basically an extended ad for the blu-ray sets, and figured some people would just leave after the episode itself if that ran first, heh.

I kind of agree with odo here. Seems odd to bother critiquing the episode itself in a thread like this, since the point of the event was to see this episode on the big screen, even though the it was originally made so long ago that we've all already seen it a million times.

And I find your criticisms baffling, to be honest. A big ship blowing up in Earth orbit should not at all be a big deal. With all the technology they have, including the presence of inhabited settlements on other Sol system planetary bodies that are subject to meteor strikes, it's pretty easy to imagine that dealing with the debris and radiation and whatever else resulted from the explosion would be quite simple.

The ready room scene was fantastic. Some of the best dialog of the entire two-parter between Guinan and and Riker there.

Picard's recovery is addressed a bit at the end, and more in the next episode. You seem to be forgetting that this ISN'T actually a movie, and never was meant to be. Given how much time passes between the Borg cube exploding (which is "the resolution of the episode's plot/threat") and the time the episode actually ends, this already has more wind-down time than the vast majority of episodes in the Trek franchise, since the formula is usually "plot resolved/threat defeated, maybe a bit of dialog, roll credits". Also, it ends on a drawn out, somber note as Picard reflects on what happened, which was pretty unusual for Trek at the time. As I said, this is a television episode, not a movie; they had time and structural constraints that a movie doesn't have, and still managed to present an actual ending with way more meat to it than most other episodes, so I'm not sure what you were expecting.

 

Saw it in a fairly packed large theatre in Plano, Texas last night - had a blast! I do wish they'd shown the documentary afterwards, though - it definitely spoiled the drama a little bit, even to people like myself who've seen the original two-parter dozens of times. Lots of laughs. I was kind of disappointed that no one mentioned my DS9 baseball cap, though.

Listening to the conversations of folks as we were leaving the theatre, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that a fairly significant percentage of the audience either had never seen the episode before at all, or hadn't seen it since its original airing in 1990. Nice to see that new people are discovering and/or rediscovering TNG after all these years.

Biggest laugh of the night was at the very end during the preview of the S4 blu-ray - the "I am NOT a merry man!" line from Worf brought the house down!

 

http://www.startrek.com/article/the-best-of-both-worlds-in-theater-event-a-fan-perspective

Fan perspective, ST.com

 

http://pgsrealmoviereviews.blogspot.com/2013/04/star-trek-next-gen-best-of-both-worlds.html

More fan reviews

 

I had lots of fun with this showing. It was very fortunate one of my friends on facebook posted about how he was planning on going, otherwise I wouldn't have even known it existed.

My showing here in Spokane sold out, and from the reactions from the crowd, you could tell everyone that went was a Trekkie. It was just a lot of fun.

What is the interval between these screenings? I suppose it all depends on what episodes they decide to show, but I know I'll definitely go if they show "All Good Things..." That still remains one of my favorite episodes of any Trek show ever.

 

For the first three seasons, they have always shown the episodes in theaters the Thursday on the week before the release of a new TNG season on Blu-Ray. I'm expecting it to be the same for season four. You just have to keep an eye out for it by looking at theater listings in your area for that night you expect it to be shown. It's a Fanthom Event so each of these showings have been one night only.

 

Well like I said upthread, my theater was sold out for the BOBW event. So I imagine they'll keep doing them as well.

 

http://trekcore.com/blog/2013/04/the-best-of-both-worlds-a-showing-to-remember/

This showing seems to have been a huge success.

RAMA

 

It's a shame we don't get the theatrical screenings in the UK, but I was lucky enough to watch The Best of Both Worlds blu-ray on a friend's projector screen last night, and the quality is absolutely fantastic. It does not look 24 years at all, it looks positively brand new. The picture is crisp and clear and the newly composited special effects looks outstanding.

By comparison, we watched season 2's 'Q Who' beforehand, and although it's nice and clean and sharp, the extra sparkle that CBS-Digital adds in-house just isn't there. The ships don't blend with the backgrounds quite right, they're too washed out, and the big pull-out reveal of the Borg interior (which is supposed to be a an awe-inspiring moment), was spoiled somewhat by the overly smooth picture due to excessive grain removal. One thing they did improve on is when the dead Borg drone in engineering disappears, there's now an excellent dissolve effect and a burn mark on the carpet.

Aside from that, CBS-Digital's work is just so much better. Better colours, better constrast and yet it still looks how you remember it looking. Just when you get used to everything being in HD, those three seconds of upconverted footage appear, and when it happened we all went "bleugh! WTF?" (or words to that effect), as we were suddenly reminded of just how awful the show actually used to look.

It's lovely now, though. I must have them all in HD! I just need to sell one of my livers to afford it. It's okay, I can get by with just one.