TOS in High-Def?

[RAMA]

BillJ wrote:

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I love ya, RAMA! Don't ever change!

I don't want to get into this discussion again, but I figured someone new to the TOS-R bluray should know why it looks like it does.

RAMA

[TREK_GOD_1]

Robert Comsol wrote:

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Which cretin is responsible for adding welding seam lines and weathering on the model? Our airplanes and even ships don't have such archaic welding lines and you could assume that by the 23rd Century you'd have welding techniques leaving no traces whatsoever.
Add to this that the Enterprise's creator Matt Jefferies deliberately designed the ship to keep whatever protruding elements to the absolute minimum - but somebody felt it necessary to inflict the worst retcon surgery you can think of to the most cherished, international icon of science fiction.

Agreed. Too many of those in modern ST (Berman-forward) are too influenced by Star Wars, so they think every spaceship is not realistic if it lacks the weathering and pieced-together look of the Lucas movies. If these hired hands paid attention, ST--unlike SW--is supposed to be a projection of our own reality, where with each generation, space vehicles lose the pieced together look once common during the Space Race.

Even conceptuals for the next wave of NASA (and other developer) spacecraft make the shuttle fleet look rather rough, so with that in mind, there's no way a 23rd century starship--the assumed technological best of the best--would look like a Navy carrier, Apollo rocket...or ship from a "galaxy far, far away."

The remastered CG was unprofessional enough, but the SW-ing of 1701 (including an unforgivably out of scale hangar deck) is the reason I only watch the original version on blu ray, where the miniuature actually appears to have scale and a sense of weight.

[Sector 7]

I love TOS-R. The newer CGI looks great. I think they achieved their goal of updating effects while keeping the spirit of the original TOS.

[ssosmcin]

Harvey wrote:

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I don't know if it's fair to say that these shows were never meant to be seen in anything but standard definition television broadcasts. Roddenberry tried to get Jeffrey Hunter to shoot extra footage so that "The Menagerie" (i.e. "The Cage") could be released theatrically, and many of the cast had clauses in their contracts covering theatrical exhibition.

Mission: Impossible, the Desilu series which premiered the same year as Star Trek, actually did cut together a pair of episodes for foreign theatrical distribution (the second season two-parter "The Council" became Mission Impossible vs. The Mob).

That's a valid point, but I think even to audiences of the day, these were obviously not "feature films" in budget or scope. I thought The Cage would have been broadcast as a movie of the week with the additional footage to bring it to around 90 minutes.

And back then even movies were "one and done." See it in the theater and then that's it. Maybe it would be on TV once in a great while. Today, everyone watches stuff over and over on DVR and home video and with HD inches from your face, everything comes to light. Aside from a couple of space shots, all of the effects in The Cage are fine. Mostly laser effects, illusion dissolves and matte paintings. Generally, though, TV production at 5 or 6 days per episode on very small budgets, shortcuts had to be taken and a lot of them could be obscured by low resolution broadcasts. Even the amazing effects work on Space:1999 and Battlestar Galactica in the 70's is betrayed by hi-def.

The illusions are preserved in lower def. Do I really want to see the strings holding up the Flying Sub on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea? I had never noticed the ear seams on Nimoy until the blu-rays. Now I can't unsee them.