Animated Series Blu-Ray Plans

[Christopher]

TREK_GOD_1 wrote:

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You were not arguing the artistic value with:

That was an argument of being practical for the sake of character recognition. The point was that character recognition (your point) was possible and proven in a series which mirrored ST to some degree.

Please don't presume to tell me what I intended by my own statement. My point in both cases was about whether it was a good idea from a design standpoint. You may think I was saying two different things in the two posts, but I wasn't.

The TOS spacesuits could have been used for continuity's sake, and not sacrifice the audience's ability to recognize characters no matter their placement in a scene, just as it was accomplished on Sealab: 2020.

Prove it. Prove that the audience for that show was not confused about who was who. Give me testimonials to that effect.

Anyway, I think you're making the mistake of arguing from hindsight. You see the force field belts as a continuity error because later productions went back to spacesuits. But again I need to point out to you something that should be immediately obvious: the people making TAS in 1973-4 did not know that there would be any later ST productions at all, let alone that they'd go back to using spacesuits. As far as they knew, they were the only continuation of ST there was ever going to be. And they made a choice to depict a more futuristic technology than their live-action predecessor was able to achieve, just as they made a choice to depict more exotic aliens and landscapes, a wider array of starship and shuttle designs, etc. It was meant to be a more advanced design taking the place of the older spacesuits. That's not a continuity error any more than the upgraded communicators of TNG were. It was meant to represent progress. The decision of later productions to ignore the force field belts was what created the continuity problem.

[Robert Comsol]

Christopher wrote:

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The decision of later productions to ignore the force field belts was what created the continuity problem.

Technically correct. But already as a kid, having watched TOS, I thought these force field belts not to be believable. They seemed to be goofy and after TMP they definitely did look goofy. And I'm quite relieved they used real EVA suits in TMP or could you imagine Leonard Nimoy in TMP just floating around being surrounded by a glowing energy field? (He wasn't a Q)
Just my personal opinion.

Bob

[Christopher]

Hey, I'm not personally a fan of the force field belts either. I'm not arguing personal opinion, I'm discussing the facts of the situation and the intentions of the people involved in the show's production. I'm saying that the premise that they should have kept the TOS spacesuits "for continuity's sake" doesn't make sense, because the change was not a continuity problem -- not at the time the show was made.

[CorporalCaptain]

Christopher wrote:

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Please don't presume to tell me what I intended by my own statement.

Christopher wrote:

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That's sure how that "welcome to the club" line sounded. It was needlessly dismissive.

Interesting.

[Lucky]

Nice that it is coming to blu-ray. If the price is right I might pick it up.

[Sector 7]

BillJ wrote:

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Why does every thread have to turn into a Trek 09 pissing match?

I agree with Lokai of Cheron, day one purchase.

So true, Bill. I was excited to find a TAS Blu-ray thread, but by page 2 I could not read farther. The "Trek 09 pissing match" thing is beyond annoying. Listening to the haters is as tedious as listening to Birthers... and makes about as much sense.

I'll be in line with BillJ and Lokai of Cheron on Day 1. I may be wearing out the TAS on DVD set I received for Father's Day. I just received a BR player for Christmas... TAS would break it in properly!

[TREK_GOD_1]

Christopher wrote:

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Please don't presume to tell me what I intended by my own statement.

No presumption was necessary, as your original statement was clear:

Characters in animation need to be easily distinguishable on sight. Putting them in spacesuits would've made it harder to tell who was who in a long shot. The force field belts let viewers see the characters just as clearly as they could normally

....then you followed it in another post by making a second argument having no connection to the first. Your own words and now your defensive position only hammers home the validity of the charge.

Prove it. Prove that the audience for that show was not confused about who was who. Give me testimonials to that effect.

I watched the series first run and had no problem recognizing the main characters in and out of diving suits. It is not some stretch to say others did not have that problem, either. Moreover, other series of the same era such as Science Ninja Team Gathaman (some may know the series by its westernized version Battle of the Planets) and Space Battleship Yamato (syndicated as Space Cruiser Yamato) featured main cast in and out of helmets/costumes at every angle/distance with no problem with character recognition. There are no published accounts of any of the three series cited as having this imagined issue with audiences of the 1970s.

So, you already have one historical account, and other series which worked quite well with characters wearing space suits, helmets, etc., lending more support to the idea of TAS being able to use the TOS spacesuits.

Further, you were the one--sans any sort of hard evidence--that TAS would not use TOS spacesuits because the audience would not be able to recognize characters, but where is your evidence to support this claim?

You see the force field belts as a continuity error because later productions went back to spacesuits.

Now that is a presumption, if not a wild leap. I watched TAS first run and immediately noticed the force field belts, the light gray Phasers, larger delta symbols, etc. Anyone familiar with TOS would notice the changes--and in fact, commented on it at the time--not in the wake of ST movies or spin-off TV series.

[Mr_Homn]

Christopher wrote:

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Prove it. Prove that the audience for that show was not confused about who was who. Give me testimonials to that effect.

Seriously? This is the last resort of every 1st grader who has tried to win an argument.

[Redfern]

I suspect it's time to provide an "obvious distraction", but something still tangently related.

A 3D modeler whom I "casually" know on-line is currently making the "Tholian Web" EVA suit in digital form. He's completed the modeling and is currently trying to work out the Poser/DAZ "rigging". When finished, he plans to share it with the hobbyist community, for free of couse.

Sincerely,

Bill

[Christopher]

Mr_Homn wrote:

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Seriously? This is the last resort of every 1st grader who has tried to win an argument.

What? On the contrary, evidence is the basis of any legitimate argument. If one is going to claim something as a fact, one needs to be able to support the claim. The poster in question was stating something as an absolute fact but offered no data to support it. Anyone is perfectly entitled to question that. I don't understand why you'd think otherwise. Without data and evidentiary support, any argument is just people tossing empty words at each other, and what's the point of that?

[Robert Comsol]

Christopher wrote:

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On the contrary, evidence is the basis of any legitimate argument.

Allan Asherman noted in his Star Trek Compendium that these EVA suits are controversial among fans, you either like them or dislike them and that's all there is apparently to it. Had there been complaints from viewers that you couldn't see the actors' faces in the TOS space suits, I'm sure we would have heard or read about that.

Christopher wrote:

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If one is going to claim something as a fact, one needs to be able to support the claim.

Like your most recent unfounded claim in the "Court-Martial" thread, that the Starfleet officers from the trial were "definitely" not seen earlier in the Starbase club?

Or is it now something you learned from the experience?

Bob

[Christopher]

Robert Comsol wrote:

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Allan Asherman noted in his Star Trek Compendium that these EVA suits are controversial among fans, you either like them or dislike them and that's all there is apparently to it. Had there been complaints from viewers that you couldn't see the actors' faces in the TOS space suits, I'm sure we would have heard or read about that.

The issue of character recognition is one that applies in cel animation more than live action, as I said. So the way the suits appeared in TOS was irrelevant to the point I was making. Look at animated adaptations of live-action films and shows and you often see that the character designs are modified to make the characters more easily recognizable at a distance -- for instance, the Ghostbusters. In the movie, three of them were brown-haired white men of similar build, and all four wore identically colored costumes with only nametags differentiating them. But in The Real Ghostbusters, they were all given different unform colors, hair colors, hairstyles, and body types so they could be easily distinguished at a distance or in rapid motion where subtle details would be hard to discern. When you're pointing a camera at real people, those subtle differences are still going to be there even at a distance, but animation cels would have less detail, less individualized body language, and the like, so you want more exaggerated design differences to differentiate your characters. This is a commonplace principle of animation design.

Besides, even if TAS had used spacesuits rather than force field belts, there's no guarantee they would've used the "Tholian Web" spacesuit design, which after all only appeared once and was not standardized. TAS updated some design elements such as the shuttlecraft and the layout of engineering, so it's possible they would've come up with an updated spacesuit design as well. Indeed, I don't think the "Web" spacesuits would've worked well for Filmation at all, since so much of their composition relied on stock shots of characters in profile or turning their heads to and from profile, which wouldn't have worked at all with those suits.

Like your most recent unfounded claim in the "Court-Martial" thread, that the Starfleet officers from the trial were "definitely" not seen earlier in the Starbase club?

Or is it now something you learned from the experience?

Actually I did base that on evidence, to the extent that I checked screencaps of the bar scene and looked at people's sleeves to see what rank stripes were there. There was nobody in the bar scene wearing captain's stripes other than Kirk; all the background extras, as I said at the time, either had a single stripe or none at all. I did, admittedly, overlook the fact that the extras who played the board members also appeared in the bar scene, but as I said, that doesn't mean they were playing the same characters, since there are multiple precedents for the same extra appearing in two different roles at different points in a TOS episode (in fact, I think there's one early case of Eddie Paskey appearing in two different, intercut parts of the ship during the same scene). And I did explain all this in the thread at the time; you must have overlooked it.

[CorporalCaptain]

Had spacesuits been used in TAS, fishbowl helmets and color variations by division should have been more than enough to make the characters recognizable and distinguishable. The point that the diving suits in Sealab 2020 worked well enough is all the proof needed to show that spacesuits could have worked adequately in TAS.

Regardless of the advantages in production to using the life support belts, and it's been clearly established that there were definite advantages in both character recognition and animation cost, it's worth emphasizing again that the concept of the belts was one originally conceived of for TOS, in order to demonstrate that it's unfair to assert that Filmation, say, "watered down" TOS tech to adapt it to animation. Additionally, the point that continuity issues with later shows exist only because the later shows failed to use something similar to the belts is a good one, I think.

[Christopher]

CorporalCaptain wrote:

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Had spacesuits been used in TAS, fishbowl helmets and color variations by division should have been more than enough to make the characters recognizable and distinguishable. The point that the diving suits in Sealab 2020 worked well enough is all the proof needed to show that spacesuits could have worked adequately in TAS.

Sure, they could have, but that doesn't mean that character recognizability wasn't one of the factors that led to the decision to use force field belts instead. I never meant to suggest that the belts were the only possible result of that consideration -- just that it was probably one of the reasons behind the decision to use the belts, reasons which also included simplicity, economy, and perhaps the desire to take advantage of the freedom of animation to depict something more futuristic than TOS could've done. Although of course simplicity was probably the primary consideration.

Additionally, the point that continuity issues with later shows exist only because the later shows failed to use something similar to the belts is a good one, I think.

Might be worth mentioning that a DC Comics Star Trek annual written by George Takei and Peter David did have characters in the Enterprise-A era use force field belts of a sort, although they were for biohazard protection rather than taking the place of a spacesuit.

[CorporalCaptain]

Christopher wrote:

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Sure, they could have, but that doesn't mean that character recognizability wasn't one of the factors that led to the decision to use force field belts instead.

Yeah, I already agreed with that.

CorporalCaptain wrote:

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Regardless of the advantages in production to using the life support belts, and it's been clearly established that there were definite advantages in both character recognition and animation cost