Well, this is probably an Nth generation VHS copy, wich is low-res to begin with and turns to mud as copies of copies are made. I showed this to Bill George and he's got no doubt it's authentic.
Oh no, I'm not doubting the authenticity at all. I'm actually wondering if maybe they added detailing to the ships and reshot those scenes.
II think at most they composited or re-composited elements already shot. To change the ships would mean sending them back to the model shop. I suspect if we could see a first-generation tape of this it would all look perfectly recognizable.
It looks wonky to me because I always saw those beam things coming out of the torpedo from all directions, yet in the profile firing footage they only shoot forwards.
In the first frame or two when they appear there are rays spraying back, then they all swing forward I wonder what the thinking was here, or if it was some artifact of the way they photographed the laser shooting through the crystal from than angle.
From what I remember of how that laser/rotating crystal effect was shot the rays pretty much shot out in random directions (which is how it looks in the firing and POV receding shots used in the film). That the profile shots have such a forward bias would seem to have been a creative decision, but I suppose since those shots were unused, maybe they decided that wasn't what they wanted in the end.
An obvious reason for a creative decision here would be that if these impressive rays of utter destruction extended over the firing ships themselves, the audience would think the Klingons shot themselves in the foot. Using the effect at smaller scale to avoid this overlap would in turn diminish the impact. (Is it even the same effect, or something created by different means to blend the shot to that of the torpedoes in free flight? The rays lack the alluring curvature and yellow-white core brightness. But OTOH are of such crappy quality in this reproduction that I can't be sure about that.) Timo Saloniemi
now if someone could unearth the footage of the probe killing the security officer that would be awesome
According to Return to Tomorrow none of those effects were created, as the sequence was shortened to cut down the optical load.
In ST II, I seem to remember stills that had the Enterprise hit the Reliant's torpedo bay with twin phasers--something that didn't happen in the movie itself. In one of the stills, the Reliant's "stump" trailed a blood like plasma, instead of the "sparklers" from the film
Huh...I remember seeing these shots somewhere...must have been in a promo of some kind back when I was a kid. I'm sure I've seen the "multiple torpedoes" shot of the Klingons vs V'ger before. Could they ever have been used in the various CIC VHS promos that were made in the 80s and 90s? My family had those kicking around and I might have been them there!
I seem to remember a McDonalds ad that had a phaser beam coming from Probert's torpedo bay. I wonder if you saw it there.
Eh, I'm not sure about that. I don't think we ever got those in the UK, at least not to my knowledge.