What?
TOS original or Remastered, which is canon?
- Thread starter Drewmax
- Start date
- Status
What?
I'll agree with you there. hell, you in Where No Man Has Gone Before in HD where you see spots on the set 'consoles' where it obvious they've been sanded down, and quickly repainted.
Although that's one reason I don't mind the remastered ship visual effects; as it's VERY true that when the effects were done in the 1960ies, the effects companies (and show producers) also realized just what would be visable on most sets; AND had they known that 40+ years later, the show would be remastered, make Paramount a lot of money over time, and thus be subjected to more scrutiny at higher levels of screen resolution, it probably would have affect what we saw on the screen with regard to the visuals.
Oh, yeah. TV in the sixties.
I've been watching the entire series run of Mission Impossible recently (got on the kick -- don't know why -- so I got the whole series). One of the things that I noticed over and over was that all those prison and dungeon cells were silver painted wood dowels and 2x4s -- the grain on the wood was clearly visible through the paint, and there were even chips out of the wood where it was sawn to size. And all those cell doors that actually had no locking mechanisms on the doors despite the huge lock panels being picked.
Oh, and the number of sets that were just redressed and reused -- over a period of months or weeks, people probably wouldn't have noticed that, but watching several episodes a day, I started to notice the same staircase set over and over.
^Yeah, I've gone through the first two seasons of M:I recently myself, and I noticed that in episodes 2-4 of the first season, they reused the same prison set three weeks in a row. Then there was a mansion interior set used frequently in the late first season. And a huge office set that was used several times in the second season, and so on.
Not to mention the constant use of the Culver City "Forty Acres" backlot for street scenes, building facades, and so forth. One of the best second-season episodes, "Trial by Fury" (with Paul Winfield), was shot on the same prison-camp backlot location used for Stalag 13 in Hogan's Heroes.
Not to mention the constant use of the Culver City "Forty Acres" backlot for street scenes, building facades, and so forth. One of the best second-season episodes, "Trial by Fury" (with Paul Winfield), was shot on the same prison-camp backlot location used for Stalag 13 in Hogan's Heroes.
A lot of the production "seams" were plainly visible even on televisions of the 60s. It never affected my enjoyment of the series.
It was always a blast picking out the props and sets shared all throughout the 20th Century Fox TV shows of the era. The batcave had all sorts of instrumentation and control panels from Lost in Space, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and so on. And vice versa. Talk about your reused props. But, yeah, the wood grain through the paint thing wasn't nearly as apparent as it is now.
Nor should it. Many of these shows, especially TOS, took a theatrical approach. Hiding all the seams was priority #237.
And a lot of the stuff used in those shows originated in Fox movies like Fantastic Voyage. For instance, the air nozzle of the Proteus became the laser drill of the Jupiter 2, and some alien-ship sets in LiS episodes were reworked "innards" from FV. And I think the surgical laser from FV became a laser rifle on LiS and possibly Mr. Freeze's cold gun on Batman, though I'm not as sure of that one.
Yeah, in a way it's a shame they were eventually supplanted by the various sci-fi consoles and wall pieces and blinkies supplied by Modern Props. Their paraphernalia were seen all over in the '80s and '90s. For instance, there was a set of standup wall consoles that were added to the engine room set for TWOK, so I've always thought of them as "the Wrath of Khansoles," but they can also be seen in earlier productions like The Incredible Hulk's Andromeda Strain knockoff "Prometheus." They and a bunch of other Modern Props gear are perhaps best known from the William Shatner scenes in Airplane II. But I think they remained in use as late as Star Trek Generations and are probably still occasionally seen today.
What puzzles me are those light-box computer consoles that were seen as the Batcomputer and also as parts of the Jupiter 2 controls on Lis. I've sometimes wondered, did they make a bunch of identical ones, or did they move them back and forth from the J2 set to the Batcave set as needed? Probably there were a bunch of them built for some movie and they got split between the productions as needed.
This is true to an extent, but it is much more so now. It's also true that when watching something for the fourth - or fortieth
- time, one's attention is more likely to wander from the faces of actors on to details of the carpet or ceiling behind them. Watching the show on NBC meant that you just caught it as it went by - no pause, no rewind, no TIVO - and maybe once more during summer reruns.
Perhaps it's because I'm pretentious, or perhaps it's because I'm a purist (I tend to make them go hand in hand XD), but I definitely prefer to Original all the way. I had pretty intense rage in my soul when I first saw the changes, so...in other words, I really don't like them. I'm all about my perception of "canon", though (which generally includes liberal amounts of Kirk/Spock), so I don't actually know what I'm talking about... ^_^;
These weren't Fox built props, but a real computer, the Burroughs B205, and a lot of productions used them.
http://www.angelfire.com/scifi/B205/index.html
Fox probably picked up more than enough to go around. It's funny learning that many of the stuff that Irwin Allen used as comtrol panels were really part of one large, actual computer. No wonder so much of it looked functional.
In a late 1st season LIS, Irwin used sets of the Seaview as an underground alien complex. The Batman movie used Seaview sets as well, but that was filmed during the summer hiatus, so the Voyage sets were available. It was easier, I imagine, for Irwin Allen to swap stuff between his own programs (which he did constantly), but Fox was Fox and they spread the wealth. Their sound effects were pretty distinctive also, and all of their sf/fantasy shows shared them. But that was pretty common at any studio.
Speaking of props, there's that damned "table with two flashing rods" that's in Wrath of Khan, The Final Frontier, The Incredible Hulk Returns, V, and a ton of other shows. Damned thing never goes away. It's in the scene when Kirk and co. leave the shuttle craft after shore leave, against the wall as they talk to Scotty. You kow what I mean, I'm sure.
Last edited:
Fascinating, about the B-205. I guess that explains why '60s shows depicted computers as these banks of blinky lights -- because at the time, they actually were.
Which reactions? The very positive ones or the very negative ones? I seem to recall the creators of the new CGI conversing here at the time. And they kept tweaking those nacelle caps lots of people complained about.
Question: were you tempted to put a baby horta behind Vanderberg at the end of DITD?
If you look out the window you'll see tiny CGI human extras patting a newly-hatched horta. IIRC.
I don't know what it's called either, but it was EVERYwhere! My wife and I would just yell "there's that thing again!" every time.
No. They didn't do that. There are two guys working on a piece of equipment, as in this screencap.Question: were you tempted to put a baby horta behind Vanderberg at the end of DITD?
If you look out the window you'll see tiny CGI human extras patting a newly-hatched horta. IIRC.
I don't know what it's called either, but it was EVERYwhere! My wife and I would just yell "there's that thing again!" every time.
It was in Airplane 2: The Sequel, too! Where William Shatner played Commander Buck Murdock...
It can be found at Modern Props at item number 195-290-1
Here's a picture (not hotlinking, if I know the definition of the term):
http://www.modernprops.com/propimage/195/full/195-0290.jpg
Last edited:
- Status
Similar threads
