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''The Cage'' - to watch, or not to watch?

I absolutely LOVE the planet they used in that remastered VFX link, but that obvious stock Hubble telescope photo in the credits was ridiculous... they could have done something a bit more original, or left it out, because ironically, the drifting stars in front of it only helped reinforce the fact that it was a stock still image, IMO.
 
Then again, where I live, The Cage has been included only on the Third season's Blu Ray set, which remains unreleased here. :thumbdown:

Still not? Glad I went for the three tin-boxed DVD new-CGI versions to supplement my old TOS DVD season sets.

:techman:

Anticipating a quick Blu Ray release, I sold my old DVD's, so I have been Cage and Turd Season deprived for nearly two years now :scream:

Any idea WTF the hold up is? Can't believe it's poor sales.
 
It's a must see The Cage is great not longer ago I showed it to one of my friends he was gob smacked he did not know they made two pilots, I did show him the remasterd version on blu ray. My favourite scene is when pike orders the enterprise to warp to talos and u get that great moment that mankind had broken the light speed barrier it's cheesy now but I love that scene.?
 
It is funny how The Cage is only a year younger than WNMHGB and the rest of the series! What a difference a year makes! The funny thing is, it fits perfect with "this was 13 years ago"!

They are both fun to watch.

''The Menagerie'' was a brilliant episode reusing an unaired pilot! True genius!

Exactly what I'm talking about! The Cage somehows seem like a whole different series to me... I don't know, it must be the uniforms... :lol:
 
It's a must see The Cage is great not longer ago I showed it to one of my friends he was gob smacked he did not know they made two pilots, I did show him the remasterd version on blu ray. My favourite scene is when pike orders the enterprise to warp to talos and u get that great moment that mankind had broken the light speed barrier it's cheesy now but I love that scene.?

The Full Stop (aka Period) is your friend. :p
 
Personally, I'd watch "The Cage" and contemplate skipping "The Menagerie".

That would be a mistake, IMHO. If you watched "The Cage" and started going through the 1st season, I'd postpone "The Menagerie" up to moving onto Season 2. It's really great seeing "The Cage" incorporated into a double-episode, a flash-back in several ways. It was ingenious how they reused that discarded pilot. And that's why "The Menagerie" won the Hugo Nebula award.


Wow, that new CGI footage looks amazing. They did a great job... although I think the star field on the main viewer is much too saturated. And it wasn't necessary to show so much star movement outside the window of Captain Pike's room. But it was tastefully done in a lot of other areas. As for the elevator doors not lining up with the turbolift tube attached to the bridge, there's little they could do about that, save moving the tube on the ship and making it inaccurate that way. It's easy enough to ignore. The transition was brilliantly done.
 
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Defintely watch both. "The Menagerie" is one of my favorite episodes and "The Cage" should be watched if for nothing else, it was the original pilot. Whether or not it's canon is debatle.

I agree. Watch both. As for weither or not it's cannon (It is, you know, after all, it's onscreen), who cares? It's part of Star Trek.

Yeah, watch both. I always do.
 
As for the elevator doors not lining up with the turbolift tube attached to the bridge, there's little they could do about that, save moving the tube on the ship and making it inaccurate that way. It's easy enough to ignore. The transition was brilliantly done.

:rolleyes:

The official stance is that the bridge faces forward. That was Matt Jefferies' intent, and it was the mindset of the producers at the time the show was made. The offset bridge is a Franz Joseph invention, and Roddenberry disavowed all the FJ material fairly early in TNG's run.
 
The official stance is that the bridge faces forward. That was Matt Jefferies' intent, and it was the mindset of the producers at the time the show was made. The offset bridge is a Franz Joseph invention, and Roddenberry disavowed all the FJ material fairly early in TNG's run.
The bridge has to be offset 36 degrees for the turbolift doors to line up with the external lift tube.

(Oy, here we go again for the 96th time!) :brickwall:
 
Show me a contemporaneous diagram, i.e., from the time the show was produced, that identifies that external tube as anything, turbolift shaft or whatever.

I'll give you a hint, there are no such diagrams. There are plenty that identify the bridge, but none that identify that tube structure.

Could be the subspace radio transceiver array, could be the bridge toilet.
 
Show me a contemporaneous diagram, i.e., from the time the show was produced, that identifies that external tube as anything, turbolift shaft or whatever.
You mean like the turbolift diagram posted on the bridge?

The offset bridge is a Franz Joseph invention...
No... but the idea that it was is a Captain Robert April invention.


And for the record... you aren't official.
 
The perception created for the audience is that the bridge faces directly forward. In reality it wouldn't matter, because the view screen is not a window. But from an inertial perspective it might. All speculation, because we don't have any of those technologies to validate. As to whether it was intended or not for the Enterprise, it's useless trivia that doesn't impact anything. The CGI pretty much lines up the command center facing front. That's all that really matters.


I really like the updates to the original matte backgrounds. On the camping trip with Pike & Vena, the city in the distance looks much more real. Did they update Rigel at all? Or did they use the original painting for it?
 
That would be the turbolift diagram with half the decks and contours that aren't even close to the final design? And still doesn't actually label anything?

And I don't have to be official. The fact remains that in the TOS-R version of "The Cage", it's made absolutely certain that the bridge faces forward, making it official, along with the numerous times Mike Okuda has cited his conversation with Matt Jefferies over this very subject, in which MJ stated that not only does the bridge face forward, but it would never occur to him to face the bridge of a ship anywhere BUT forward.
 
That would be the turbolift diagram with half the decks and contours that aren't even close to the final design? And still doesn't actually label anything?
:guffaw: What a dance!

... Mike Okuda ...
Until a time machine is invented that can send Okuda back to the late 1960s and he is lucky enough to get a job at TOS while there, he is no more than you or I... a TOS fan. Okuda is no more official than you are in my book. He's a nice guy who didn't work on TOS.

As for Jefferies... he knew the issues, and didn't have final say. But he never (ever) considered the exterior turbolift tube to be anything else. And when given the chance to revisit the design, he added a second one (rather than try to do a LiS solution or moving the bridge somewhere else).

Did he like the angled bridge? No. But he lived with it.

And unless Okuda was making transcripts, his personal interactions with Jefferies have no weight.

Here is the thing... if I (today) decided I wanted to study every aspect of the Spirit of St. Louis (in the same way that I study the models from TOS), would my conversations with the builders of that plane make me more of an expert? I was only a child at the time, but I did talked to them.

The answer is no... it wouldn't add anything to my position on any aspect of that plane. And in the same way, Okuda gets no additional weight for having talked with Jefferies.

... and you get even less for having talked with Okuda.

And now you can return to your endless ranting about a forward facing bridge (along with your life long attempts to fit a square peg in a round hole).
 
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