Original TOS fx, good and bad….

[Warped9]

In another thread they’re discussing the transporter fx and what people think of them.So here we can broaden the discussion.

It goes without saying, for me, TOS’ transporter fx is not only one of the best they had, but one of the best the entire franchise has ever had. But here we talking about TOS’ fx…and in extent we can include the films TMP (whichever version) through TUC.

So share one original visual and/or sound fx you think still rocks and one you have found disappointing or even plain bad.

Man, there is a lot I think still works today, but I’ll start with one.

An original effect I really liked, and still do, was actually an absent effect: Scotty using a phaser in “The Naked Time” to cut through a bulkhead panel. We hear the phaser and see the cut in the bulkhead, but we don’t see an actual energy beam. Later in remastered versions they added a visible energy beam which I found disappointing as I feel it takes away from the simple coolness factor of the original version. And, yes, I know there was always supposed to be a visible beam, but they ran out of time to have the effect added. This ended up being a case where less was more.

In “The Galileo Seven” I have long been disappointed with the visual effect of exhaust plumes coming out the shuttlecraft nacelles when Spock jettisons the fuel and ignites it. First it looks sloppily done. But more so it doesn’t make sense given Scotty drained their phasers as a substitute fuel, and phasers use energy and not liquid or solid fuel. So wtf was Spock igniting?

 

[StarCruiser]

Yep - the transporter was usually very convincing (considering the limitations of the era). Some of the other effects were...less so but again, they were generally better than many contemporary shows.

Despite anything that may be somewhat primitive, I still prefer the original work over the 'enhanced' effects.

 

[Warped9]

Despite anything that may be somewhat primitive, I still prefer the original work over the 'enhanced' effects.

True. I can’t really think of anything that was made better in TOS-R. The newer fx look different and haven’t aged well.

But thats not really the point of this discussion.

Mind you we can discuss how an original fx could have been executed better within the context if what was possible back in the day.

 

[StarCruiser]

Considering that '2001: A Space Odyssey' came out 'round the end of the original series production - the technology to do much better DID exist back then (2001 STILL looks beautiful).

The issue is time and money. You have to produce episodes pretty quickly, and you have very little room in the budget for much more complex effects work.

There is also the fact that Star Trek was very much put together like a classic stage play - very much in keeping with most TV of the 1950's to the 1960's - the effects were probably not important. They were only there to help tell the story - the story itself was what mattered.

 

[Metryq]

TOS had some award-winning VFX, like the Tholian web, or the giant protozoa from "The Immunity Syndrome."

The Delta-Vega matte painting in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" still holds up very well in HD. It's almost a crime that it was made in the noisy, low-res era of '60s television.

Probably the worst visual of TOS was the true forms of Korob and Sylvia in "Catspaw."

 

[publiusr]

Sometimes mistakes work. The scene where Scotty was cutting a bulkhead with a phaser. TOS-R fixed it…but as a kid, I thought Scotty had twisted the silver cylinder right behind the clear emitter cone such that the beam was microscopically thin in order to cut Enterprise’s tough material.

Of course Doohan was just holding the prop close to a sparkler or whatever—but I bought into it and still do.

 

[Richard S. Ta]

The FX in TOS work more often than they don't, largely because of the visual style of the show. It's so obviously a product of the 1960s, so the 1960s FX fit the aesthetic of the period. I think this is the case even when the FX don't work... which is surprisingly rare.

I think were I to laud it for anything, first and foremost would be the Enterprise herself. Not just a little rocket on wires, but a massive model, filmed with an early version of motion capture against a blue-screen... I'm not sure but I guess that was unheard of on television at the time?

 

[Warped9]

Sometimes mistakes work. The scene where Scotty was cutting a bulkhead with a phaser. TOS-R fixed it…but as a kid, I thought Scotty had twisted the silver cylinder right behind the clear emitter cone such that the beam was microscopically thin in order to cut Enterprise’s tough material.

Of course Doohan was just holding the prop close to a sparkler or whatever—but I bought into it and still do.

Fixed it? In my eyes they ruined it.

 

[Richard S. Ta]

Somehow the redone effects in TOSR look more dated than the originals. They should have been left as is.

I’m sure I heard somewhere that the planets in TOS were tangerines with colour filters though I may be totally wrong about that?

Upthread, 2001 is mentioned as something contemporary that looks better than TOS but I think that misses the point. The ship exteriors adhere to the same aesthetics as the interiors in both cases. 2001 is NASA five minutes into the future, whereas TOS is much closer to the kind of retro-futurism that things like The Jetsons we’re aiming for.

All these years later and it’s still quite a glossy looking show.

 

[Henoch]

Bad: The first on-screen view of a space ship for our new big bad villains, i.e. the glowing Klingon space ship in Friday's Child. Its vague "V" shape plus its back and forth movement on the main viewer looked awful. It would have been better with no FX at all. They really needed a miniature model.

 

[Richard S. Ta]

Bad: The first on-screen view of a space ship for our new big bad villains, i.e. the glowing Klingon space ship in Friday's Child. Its vague "V" shape plus its back and forth movement on the main viewer looked awful. It would have been better with no FX at all. They really needed a miniature model.

You always have to consider that most likely on a tiny cathode ray tube with intermittent reception in a 1960s household it probably looked fine. TOS in its time was considered as ephemeral as its contemporaries. It was never intended nor expected to be up for dissection half a decade later.

The effect did its job back then and some suspension of disbelief is required anyway when watching relatively ancient stuff like TOS.

 

[blssdwlf]

Good: The space combat was generally well done. Even though there was a lot of re-use of the Enterprise shots they did change the background star motion to fit the action rather than have the Enterprise always flying forward into battle. And the lack of two ships shown firing at each other on the same screen forced the show to have some realistic combat distances.

 

[valkyrie013]

it was pretty good for its time, especially for a 26 episode a year series.
the TOS-R was hit or miss for me, some things were good adds, but when they redo it ( it'll happen, eventually, maybe in 10 years with Ai doing it) that it'll be better.

 

[Lord Garth]

I haven't seen very much TOS-R.

But this much I'll say: The only two things I should notice about a Remastering are better resolution and fixing obvious mistakes that bugged me for years. That's it. I shouldn't notice anything else. On those terms, I think the re-mastering of TNG was better.

 

[Warped9]

The remastering on TNG was better because it was largely seamless, and the aesthetic they used was the same as what TNG already had.

TOS-R was not seamless, and the aesthetic of the new fx were not the same as the originals. The new fx looked like those of TNG’s production so you ended up what looked like two disparate productions spliced together, which is exactly what it was.

 

[Christopher]

I think were I to laud it for anything, first and foremost would be the Enterprise herself. Not just a little rocket on wires, but a massive model, filmed with an early version of motion capture against a blue-screen... I'm not sure but I guess that was unheard of on television at the time?

If you mean motion control, using a computer to program repeatable camera moves, that technology didn't exist until the 1970s. The shots in TOS were done manually. (Motion capture is when a computer records an actor's movements or expressions and recreates them in a digital character.)

Bluescreen mattes were uncommon on TV, but not unheard of. Rocky Jones, Space Ranger in the 1950s had matte effects that were quite elaborate for the TV of that era. As for '60s shows, I'm not sure of anything earlier than Trek, but The Invaders from 1967-8 used optical matte effects regularly.

I’m sure I heard somewhere that the planets in TOS were tangerines with colour filters though I may be totally wrong about that?

No, they were models about a foot or so across and mounted on a rotating stand. They did use color filters to change the color of the two or three models they used. I'm aware of two main ones, a cloud-covered globe and one with continents and oceans, as well as a globe of Earth that they used several times.

I don't know what from TNG required remastering, though given my choice I'd've snarked up the computer responses whenever it was asked to locate umpteen characters each week. (''That's all I ever get to do!''/''You've got legs, USE them.''/''Too cheap for corridor cameras?'')

Ever since TOS-R came out, people have gotten the wrong idea about what the word "remaster" means, thinking it means to change or replace something. That's the exact opposite of what the word means. To remaster something is to go back to the original master print of it and make the highest-quality copy from it possible, to come as close as you can to the original, optimal visual and audio quality. (This was more of an issue in pre-digital times, since an analog copy is inferior in quality, and the more you copy it, the lower the quality gets. So if you wanted the best quality, you had to go back to the original master film or recording, the one that all the first-generation copies had been struck from.)

Most of what TOS Remastered did was actual remastering, creating new digital prints from the original film masters to achieve the highest possible image and sound quality. But since they didn't have the original VFX film elements, they were unable to restore the FX shots to HD quality (because optical effects require copying film and thus have degraded image quality), so they had to recreate them digitally instead of remastering them. The new effects shots are the only parts of TOS-R that are not remastered, but because they're the parts that got the most attention, it created the mistaken impression that "Remastered" referred to those shots, when actually it referred to everything except them.

 

[Lord Garth]

I don't know what from TNG required remastering, though given my choice I'd've snarked up the computer responses whenever it was asked to locate umpteen characters each week. (''That's all I ever get to do!''/''You've got legs, USE them.''/''Too cheap for corridor cameras?'')

I liked the brief remastered shots for assorted episodes, but I never ever watched them for that. Nichelle Nichols and James Doohan could never be remastered, nor should they, except perhaps in '89.

In terms of re-mastering, I meant they upgraded the masters from SD to HD. It was cut-and-dried. Like it should be.

 

[Ssosmcin]

Bluescreen mattes were uncommon on TV, but not unheard of. Rocky Jones, Space Ranger in the 1950s had matte effects that were quite elaborate for the TV of that era. As for '60s shows, I'm not sure of anything earlier than Trek, but The Invaders from 1967-8 used optical matte effects regularly.

Didn't The Outer Limits and the first few episodes of Lost In Space use mattes for their space work? LIS mostly used the model against the backdrop but some of those early episodes had the image bleed.

 

[Christopher]

Didn't The Outer Limits and the first few episodes of Lost In Space use mattes for their space work? LIS mostly used the model against the backdrop but some of those early episodes had the image bleed.

I don't recall. I thought that TOL might have, but I can't remember any examples. And LiS mostly did wirework and rear projection. I think they did some split-screen matte work in "There Were Giants in the Earth," though. Of course that same kind of effect was a staple in Land of the Giants a few years later. Oh, and The Time Tunnel in '66 did some terrific matte work to show Project Tic-Toc in the pilot, though that was more matte paintings and split-screen compositing than traveling-matte bluescreens. The shot of Tony and Doug in the time vortex may have been a traveling matte, but I'm not sure.

 

[drt]

But more so it doesn’t make sense given Scotty drained their phasers as a substitute fuel, and phasers use energy and not liquid or solid fuel. So wtf was Spock igniting?

Warp plasma, lol.

The remastering on TNG was better because it was largely seamless, and the aesthetic they used was the same as what TNG already had.

TOS-R was not seamless, and the aesthetic of the new fx were not the same as the originals. The new fx looked like those of TNG’s production so you ended up what looked like two disparate productions spliced together, which is exactly what it was.

TOS-R was largely done by Berman-era folks, it seemed that there was more interest in making it fit the TNG aesthetic better than being faithful to the source material (I will, however, admit to liking how they did the Orion ship in "Journey to Babel"). It didn't help that it was such a low-budget effort that it already looks crappy and dated.

At least they cleaned up the original effects the best they could, I think they look great now on the Blurays.

Back to the original topic: I always liked the Season 2 phaser firing shot. Maybe because it got used as the cover photo for my first copy of Making of Star Trek, which rendered it iconic to me.

For the worst, I'd have to say the giant cat at the door in "Catspaw" always looked a bit sloppy to me. Oddly enough, I don't mind the pipe cleaner creatures with visible wires in that episode, at least they were trying to do something weird and alien.