It’s funny how times which were actually crap seem like halcyon days once we are old enough.
Info on 2004 Original Series Clamshell box set.
- Thread starter James Howard
- Start date
Oh you mean like the 80's?
Having said the above....
I wish I had my old 80’s of the air VHS tapes of Trek just for whatever commercials were still on them. Especially the local ads and station break stuff. YouTube has a lot but there are a few things I would love to see again.
There was an excitement back then of getting episodes off the air or opening the mailbox and seeing the Columbia House box. I miss that feeling.
I wish I had my old 80’s of the air VHS tapes of Trek just for whatever commercials were still on them. Especially the local ads and station break stuff. YouTube has a lot but there are a few things I would love to see again.
There was an excitement back then of getting episodes off the air or opening the mailbox and seeing the Columbia House box. I miss that feeling.
If any of them would attempt to do something new, that would be a start. Currently, we have five shows that wallow in nostalgia. I think the spots for SNW look interesting, but I've been burned by CBS Trek on multiple occasions, so we'll see.
Funny enough, the only CBS Trek that has really stuck with me beyond the first few weeks of its run is Lower Decks. I am looking forward to season three of the show.
Oh you mean like the 80's?
I'm seriously contemplating stopping the Journey come the 80s. Though I do like the music and have a huge collection of personal computers from the era...
Unless you taped them directly off the air...(Then you could get 6 episodes per tape.)
That's what I did. But I think those slow-speed tapes would look soft and hazy today, if they'll play at all. Over time, entropy at the molecular level jostles the magnetic encoding on videotape. They gradually fade and blur out. It's a good thing series box sets on DVD not only came along, they were affordable.
Absolutely. I once bought several out-of-production DVD players just because they were the only ones with good sound for a number of DVDs.
Visuals are important, but sound is it for me.
(When we got a 40" flat screen, the SD stuff looked terrible on it. We tried all sorts of TV solutions, none of which worked, and finally settled on having a 32" CRT next to the flat screen. Indeed, often old movies look terrible on the flat screen, so I'll download the HD file, broadcast it over my transmitter, and watch it on bunny ears antenna CRT
)
When I got the 3 episode UK videos for season three, I was so excited coming home to watch Enterprise Incident, And The Children, even Spock's Brain! But to finally watch Cloud Minders, Way to Eden but especially Requiem for Methuselah which I only had vague memories of, was real hyper excitement! Season 3 was the mystery season for me.
In honor of Katherine Hays’ passing. I popped in “The Empath” on DVD (the single DVD version) and honestly loved the print. It was on my 65 inch HDTV about 6 feet away and had no objection to the SD picture. The sound mix was pleasant, now that I’m used to it, and not having to worry about seamless branching eliminated glitches, so I can concentrate on the episode.
Also, I don’t know if anyone else has this issue, but my LG blu ray players refuse to let me turn off the icon when there’s an effects change. The DVDs eliminate this annoyance.
Anyway, while it isn’t my favorite episode, there are so many fun, sweet and creepy touches.
The fun: seeing the Irwin Allen set pieces sold off after the cancellations of both Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The Vian lab is peppered with these props. Even the Vian makeup looks like it was cast from the Fox molds used on LIS.
The sweet: after Bones knocks Kirk out with a shot, Gem stares at Spock as he regards his unconscious friend. Spock coldly turns away and Gem walks over and touches him. Her face changes from confusion to happiness. I – finally – got the point of this. She can feel Spock’s (repressed) emotions and the bond between the men. Because Gem is mute, Hays’ performance carries this across. Does any other episode convey the depth of the friendship of the top 3 as much as this episode?
Creepy: when the Vian’s appear to tell Kirk at the end of act 2 that he needs to choose, the angle, music and fish eye lens make the aliens truly chilling. I remember watching this at midnight in the 80’s when it ran on WVIA channel 44 and it always creeped me out. This episode is a hard right into horror and it's pretty stark and graphic for the era. I wonder if moving the series to 10pm allowed them to be more grim. The season has an overall darker and spookier feel.
Anyway, the capper to these prints, as noted above, are the original 1968-69 Paramount logos. I love the little imperfections in the film and the fine grain. The clamshells would look the same, but I replaced mine and they're still shrink-wrapped, so I'm revising my 40 volume set.
Also, I don’t know if anyone else has this issue, but my LG blu ray players refuse to let me turn off the icon when there’s an effects change. The DVDs eliminate this annoyance.
Anyway, while it isn’t my favorite episode, there are so many fun, sweet and creepy touches.
The fun: seeing the Irwin Allen set pieces sold off after the cancellations of both Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The Vian lab is peppered with these props. Even the Vian makeup looks like it was cast from the Fox molds used on LIS.
The sweet: after Bones knocks Kirk out with a shot, Gem stares at Spock as he regards his unconscious friend. Spock coldly turns away and Gem walks over and touches him. Her face changes from confusion to happiness. I – finally – got the point of this. She can feel Spock’s (repressed) emotions and the bond between the men. Because Gem is mute, Hays’ performance carries this across. Does any other episode convey the depth of the friendship of the top 3 as much as this episode?
Creepy: when the Vian’s appear to tell Kirk at the end of act 2 that he needs to choose, the angle, music and fish eye lens make the aliens truly chilling. I remember watching this at midnight in the 80’s when it ran on WVIA channel 44 and it always creeped me out. This episode is a hard right into horror and it's pretty stark and graphic for the era. I wonder if moving the series to 10pm allowed them to be more grim. The season has an overall darker and spookier feel.
Anyway, the capper to these prints, as noted above, are the original 1968-69 Paramount logos. I love the little imperfections in the film and the fine grain. The clamshells would look the same, but I replaced mine and they're still shrink-wrapped, so I'm revising my 40 volume set.
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I copied some of my television tapings to DVD in 2003 and still have them today! Some look pretty good whilst others are extremely fizzy like I'm picking up spatial radiation in the imaging! 
JB
JB
So many reflexly diss Season 3, but there is actually a lot of good stuff in it. During my last rewatch I found a quarter of the season excellent, a quarter of if it good and another quarter to be fair—that makes three quarters of the season totally watchable and half of the season actually good-excellent. Only a quarter of the season was actually poor to bad.
Thats not a bad batting average by any means.
And even when poor or outright bad it was never boring. I could write off half of TNG as sleep inducing.
Thats not a bad batting average by any means.
And even when poor or outright bad it was never boring. I could write off half of TNG as sleep inducing.
I keep thinking "I should pick up TNG on Blu Ray for completion's sake." Then I scroll through the episodes on my streamer and I never land on any. I just don't like enough of the show to revisit on a regular. I loved it (mostly) when it first ran, but I rewatch the episodes I like most. And that's only a handful. If I'm not gonna go back to the show when it's on a service I already pay for, I sure won't spend a lot of time on the blu rays. I actually watch Enterprise more, mostly because it's an action adventure/exploration series. It's also shorter, so I can finish it faster.
Get them! I still watch these. I refer to them here as my beloved clamshell versions.
Now as to the “remastered” blu-rays: color and darkness/contrast are gorgeous. The tunics are back to their original greenish chartreuse as multiple eyewitnesses incl the costumer attest they were.
I see these versions on streaming tv now and the rerecorded theme music is atrocious if you grew up with the real thing.
The fx are well-documented as cartoonish and changing the stately sailing ship vibe of our good ship Enterprise.
Also as many noted, if you have a big screen tv (I guess they’re not anymore, just normal) you see way more flaws in paint and makeup that can take you out of the story,
Yet for decades, we saw them as gold. So, what's more accurate? The on set color or the color that reached our TVs? They also made Spock more "green" (or yellow or whatever) but was that the intent all along? None of these are deal killers but they blur the line between restoring the original negatives vs enhancing them. I totally cop to being a purist; I want the 35mm prints cleaned up and made to look like they just finalized the episodes. But that's all. No color changes, no new effects, no new Paramount logos, no fancy 7.1 surround sound and certainly no new recording of the opening theme. God that still sounds like a steaming pile.
Hell, if someone said to me "hey Scott, I have all 79 episodes on 16mm reels, do you want me to make you DVDs of them?" I'd explode.
Hey, Scott... *ducks*
Seriously, back in the '80s, a station up in Humboldt County touted that they were going to be showing Star Trek on THE ORIGINAL 16 MM!!!!
So my brother tuned in, and the sound was garbled, and it was just a mess. So I guess they'd need some remastering...
Well, Fred Phillips created a special Nimoy-Spock green for him. And I’ve read complicated NTSC color posts here that have me fairly convinced the colors aired and received in the 60s were darker, lusher, and more like the remastereds we see now.
The engineering tunics are more cherry red now, than the fire engine red I saw in the 80s once we got color tv, and on my beloved clamshells. Based on my studying of mid-60s color palettes I think this is also more accurate. With the green-chartreuse, cherry red and cadet blue, it’s real lucky we didn’t get a lemon yellow in there too.
The engineering tunics are more cherry red now, than the fire engine red I saw in the 80s once we got color tv, and on my beloved clamshells. Based on my studying of mid-60s color palettes I think this is also more accurate. With the green-chartreuse, cherry red and cadet blue, it’s real lucky we didn’t get a lemon yellow in there too.
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