Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice...

[gastrof]

One of the complaints I had about the restored version (the combined black&white/color version and then the full color version) was that they combined the original voice of the Keeper with the voice they dubbed in for him in "The Menagerie".

The switching from one voice to another was...strange at best. (If they'd used one for telepathy and the other for his audible voice it might have made SOME kind of sense, but they used both for his audible voice.)

Anyway, it just dawned on me as the episode was ending that during the whole thing, all I'd heard was the voice dubbed in for "The Menagerie".

Didn't catch ONE example of the original voice.

WERE there any such examples? Did I just miss it?

Now, if they'd switched back to the original voice for the whole thing, THAT I could have understood. They'd have had recordings of the lines spoken in that voice for the entire episode...but they shouldn't have had recordings of the dubbed voice for any scenes that didn't get used during "The Menagerie".

And yet, again, NO case (apparently) of the original voice being used.

HOW did they do that? Did TOSR's aired version simply not include any scenes that weren't in "The Menagerie"?

Any of you who have the "Remastered" DVDs... What do YOU hear when you watch the episode? You'd have heard the entire thing, uncut, so did they use only the dubbed voice (the one used in "The Menagerie") in the version on the Remastered DVDs?

I can see why'd they'd have made that choice, since it fits in with the later "Menagerie" flashbacks, but HOW did they get recordings of the Keeper's voice from lines that were never recorded for the flashbacks?

Get what I mean?

Think they re-dubbed any lines that hadn't been redubbed back in the 60s, maybe using a sound-alike voice artist, or even a computerized voice imitation?

 

[gastrof]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

Aw, come on guys. I really want some input here. It really looks like in remastering they somehow recreated the "Menagerie" version of the Keeper's voice, and if so I'm very impressed. I'm just not sure if anything we saw on the air was NOT included in "The Menagerie".

Those of you with the remastered discs that've already been released, does the Keeper have the Menagerie voice thru the whole thing? (Including in scenes that had to be edited out for time in this week's aired version?)

 

[Joanna McCoy-Kirk]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

Aw, come on guys. I really want some input here. It really looks like in remastering they somehow recreated the "Menagerie" version of the Keeper's voice, and if so I'm very impressed. I'm just not sure if anything we saw on the air was NOT included in "The Menagerie".

Those of you with the remastered discs that've already been released, does the Keeper have the Menagerie voice thru the whole thing? (Including in scenes that had to be edited out for time in this week's aired version?)

The uncut remastered version does have the "Menagerie" voice throughout the entire episode.

 

[davejames]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

Haven't seen it yet, but considering all the amazing things they can do with audio now, I wouldn't be surprised if they could alter those bits to sound like the higher-pitched female voice.

 

[Praetor]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

IIRC, it's also actually the same voice - they just sped it up to give it a higher pitch for 'The Menagerie' because the voice was provided by the actor playing Commodore Mendez and it was felt it would be recognizable and/or confusing.

 

[number6]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

IIRC, it's also actually the same voice - they just sped it up to give it a higher pitch for 'The Menagerie' because the voice was provided by the actor playing Commodore Mendez and it was felt it would be recognizable and/or confusing.

That's right. They ptiched the voice to avoid confusion.

 

[Praetor]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

Malachi Throne does have a very distinctive voice, IMO.

 

[cooleddie74]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

I've always preferred the original "Cage" version of the Keeper's voice. Just my own personal tastes.

 

[Praetor]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

It does better complete the notion of having female actors play the Talosians dubbed with male voices to feel more 'alien.'

 

[davejames]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

Plus it's just a lot less annoying.

 

[gastrof]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

So....

The already-released remastered DVDs have the same voice for the Keeper thru the whole episode, the "not deep" one?

 

[Ziz]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

I wish people would look at things from a production perspective and get their history straight.

The original half color/half black and white version (which is in the TOS R S3 set) has that same audio change for the keeper line at the end. That was one of the shots they cut out for Menagerie. When they found the remaining color footage for the subsequent restoration, that was apparently all they found. The audio element was most likely lost or damaged beyond repair. Remember, we're talking about physical film and audio tape media here, not digital data.

 

[Praetor]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

My thought is that when they found the other color footage, they sped up the other original voice audio to match the sped-up voice they had from 'The Menagerie.'

 

[GSchnitzer]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

If I have my facts correct, the Frankenstein version of "The Cage" was shown on television for the first time and released on VHS back in 1986. This was the version that took the nice, clean "Cage" footage that was used in "The Menagerie" and incorporated it with crappy black and white with lousy sound footage pulled from Roddenberry's 16 mm working print. Shortly after that, Bob Furmanek, in 1987, found the pieces that had been cut out from "The Cage" in making "The Menagerie." Unfortunately, all he found was negatives without any sound. So, it was possible to make a full color version of all of "The Cage"--but those few non-"Menagerie" scenes, although now in color, would still have the old crappy sound. But the Keeper's voice in those two "Cage"-only scenes (Malachi Throne) was digitally monkeyed with (amazing what we can do nowadays) to make it sound higher pitched--like Vic Perrin's overdubs in the rest of the Menagerie. But when you listen to the few "Cage-only" scenes, there's clearly poor quality sound with a great deal of hiss.

Both versions (the Frankenstein version with black-and-white footage with Malachi Throne's deep voice and the all color version using the "recently" found color footage with the same old black and white *sound* but tricked up to sound like Malachi Throne) are available on the original DVDs (two episodes per disc) and the "old" Third Season boxed set and the "new" Third Season Remastered boxed set.

And, of course, you can still hear Malachi Throne's voice as the Keeper in one quick scene in the "Scenes from Next Week" for "The Menagerie, Part 2."

 

[Therin of Andor]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

If I have my facts correct, the Frankenstein version of "The Cage" was shown on television for the first time

No, the b/w & color compile was a direct-to-video release. Then the lost color negatives were found. Then the all-color restored version was aired on TV, as part of "From One Saga To the Next", to kick off Season 2 of TNG, and then was released on VHS.

 

[GSchnitzer]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

If I have my facts correct, the Frankenstein version of "The Cage" was shown on television for the first time

No, the b/w & color compile was a direct-to-video release. Then the lost color negatives were found. Then the all-color restored version was aired on TV, as part of "From One Saga To the Next", to kick off Season 2 of TNG, and then was released on VHS.

Well, not exactly. The early b/w & color compile was not just a direct to video release in 1986. While the all-color version was indeed aired as part of the special "The Star Trek Saga: From One Generation to the Next" in October of 1988 to kick off TNG's second season, it was actually about two full years before that--shortly before the black and white copy Frankenstein version was released on VHS (and to help promote its release and sale)--that this b/w & color complie with Gene Roddenberry's special introduction "Star Trek: The Unseen Pilot" was made available to local stations and was actually aired in some markets. If I recall correctly, I watched this b/w & color complie in September of 1986 on KTLA (Channel 5) in Los Angeles as part of a Star Trek 20 year celebration--well before Furmanek even found the color versions of the excised "Cage" pieces--and a year before The Next Generation premiered.

FYI: US commercial VHS release contained a single episode per tape and tapes were issued in production order. (The b/w & color compliation version of "The Cage" was #1, "Where No Man..." was #2, "Corbomite..." was #3, etc. When a full color version of "The Cage" became possible after color footage was found (after the VHS releases were already out on the market), the new full-color version of "The Cage" was given a somewhat arbitary number in the series of "#99."

So, at any rate, we seem to be saying pretty much the same thing--except that you're saying that I'm wrong and that the "Direct-To-Video" version was never aired on television. I say it actually was aired in some places shortly before it was released to the general public on VHS.

 

[Christopher]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

But the Keeper's voice in those two "Cage"-only scenes (Malachi Throne) was digitally monkeyed with (amazing what we can do nowadays) to make it sound higher pitched--like Vic Perrin's overdubs in the rest of the Menagerie.

No. No. It is not Vic Perrin. It doesn't sound a thing like Vic Perrin, and I have no idea how that myth got started. As stated above, it is Malachi Throne's own voice, his original voiceover recording for "The Cage," electronically reprocessed with a higher pitch. It's not just "nowadays" that we can do that. They had the same capability in 1964, although it was done by analog rather than digital means. (And it's not speeding up either; I recently saw a 1974-ish Mission: Impossible episode where Nimoy played a dual role, and his near-lookalike had his voice electronically raised in the same way, but it obviously matched the speed of his on-camera line readings.)

Compare the Keeper's voice to Vic Perrin's and there's no resemblance. Perrin's voice is about an octave lower than the Keeper's and much more resonant, and his cadence and delivery are different too. Compare the Keeper's voice to other cases of male voices electronically raised in pitch, such as most of the Asgard from Stargate SG-1, and there's clearly a similar timbre. Compare it to the unaltered Malachi Throne voiceovers from the original "Cage" and the Keeper's high-pitched voice has the same cadence and intonation.

For the Remastered edition, the audio of Throne's voice from "The Cage" is raised in pitch to match the audio from "The Menagerie."

 

[QuasarVM]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

Deleted.

 

[ClayinCA]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

No. No. It is not Vic Perrin. It doesn't sound a thing like Vic Perrin, and I have no idea how that myth got started.

I'll check this when I get home tonight, but I believe this idea may have originated in Allan Asherman's excellent Star Trek Compendium, in which Asherman speculates that the "Menagerie" version of the Keeper might have been voiced by Vic Perrin. As I said, I'm not entirely certain of this - I'll check my copy of the Compendium when I get home tonight.

 

[number6]

Re: Just saw "The Cage" on TOSR- Help me out here...the Keeper's voice

No. No. It is not Vic Perrin. It doesn't sound a thing like Vic Perrin, and I have no idea how that myth got started.

I'll check this when I get home tonight, but I believe this idea may have originated in Allan Asherman's excellent Star Trek Compendium, in which Asherman speculates that the "Menagerie" version of the Keeper might have been voiced by Vic Perrin. As I said, I'm not entirely certain of this - I'll check my copy of the Compendium when I get home tonight.

You're right about that.. It was only speculated that it was "probably" Vic Perrin.. As an audio engineer, myself, I can tell that it is simply Throne's voice pitch manipulated. You can really tell when you compare the B&W version with the DVD version. The inflections of voice and tone are identical..just pitched slightly higher. It would also make sense from a financial standpoint, having Throne voice the Keeper in the Menagerie when he is speaking directly to Captain Kirk, thereby only paying one actor to voice both parts. The Keeper's voice was pitch shifted to avoid confusion by sounding too similar to Throne, who apeared in the two parter.