TMP: Director's Edition

[USS KG5]

Shatmandu said:
When the technology gets cheap enough, I'll cut the fucker down to an hour and have a servicable episode.

Cheap enough? There are free tools to re-edit video?

 

[Jon1701]

^ Try scissors...

 

[entfan4ever]

DS9Sega said:

trevanian said:
If they had just gone for the Probert view on the DE, they'd have had an aesthetically pleasing twin nacelle view, instead of that sore thumb nacelle.

Something that could have looked vaguely like this, had someone been desperate enough to rotomatte a million frames:

That pic is AWESOME! Why weren't there fixes like that in the DE?

 

[David cgc]

Because they'd probably still be working on painting out the background of the original footage to this day. Even then, there are problems (the view is too high on the saucer because they couldn't place the camera inside the model, and Kirk, Spock, and McCoy look like they're fifteen feet tall and standing on a slope since the angles of the two shots being merged aren't the same). So, to get the kind of quality that would be expected, not only would they have to paint out the entire room for most of the shots in the scene, they'd have to create and render a new 3D officer's lounge that would match the live-action footage in lighting and scale. Think about how cartoony that sort of thing looked in the Star Wars prequels, which had budgets about a billion times higher than that of the DE.

 

[adg]

Kinnison said:

Therin of Andor said:

ancient said:
You can fing the DE new on VHS for about $1 in video stores that still have stocks of VHS.

The "Director's Edition" found on double DVD sets has never been released on VHS.

That's not true. I definately owned a copy. I bought it as soon as it came out, and I recall commenting on this very BBS that I was glad that the resolution was so bad that I couldn't distinguish the poorly-done CGI effects from the beautiful model work.

I seem to recall, from those days, that the new material was only rendered in NTSC-standard resolution. With the inevitable upgrade to HD and Blue Ray and all those fancy new video standards, the TMP DE will become obsolete. I can't say that's a bad thing. While I prefer the newer edit, some of the other choices made were rather poor. Aridas's description of that matte painting a couple of pages back almost made me cry!

So you're saying that the DE did come out on VHS? If so, I would buy both the DVD and the VHS.Thanks everybody for responding to my query. I love this movie!

 

[Therin of Andor]

Yeah, I found it on Amazon the other day but my screen froze so I couldn't post back to here that day.

I'm amazed that people in Region 1 were still buying VHS at this point; single disk DVDs of ST movies II to VI were already out, and TMP on double disk DE kicked off all the double-disks.

 

[Kinnison]

Hey, I didn't have a DVD player!

 

[ancient]

Plus VHS is dirt cheap so, you'know, people with 1975 TV's are happy...

 

[Procutus]

Christopher said:

The spaceship miniatures in TMP were the best, most sophisticated and detailed spaceship miniatures ever built at the time. And they were utterly gorgeous. The miniature effects were extraordinary for their time and hold up superbly today.

I'm glad I'm not the only person who feels that way.

Although modern CGI has come a long way from a decade ago, I still have this old-fashioned notion that physical models of spaceships still look more real.

Both the Enterprise and the Klingon ships were wonderful crafted models, bringing a sense of realism to the film that in many ways, hasn't been surpassed. Despite its various flaws, this movie had a sense of wonder and scale the other nine films to date didn't.

After all this time, TMP is still my favorite.

 

[aridas sofia]

Despite its various flaws, this movie had a sense of wonder and scale the other nine films to date didn't.

That really hits the nail on the head, for me. It is a flawed film, sure. But it is that sense of awe and wonder that really captures the best of TOS, and then some. Not only TOS, but the early first season of TOS, where the little operational details were attended to, and the stories were bottled up on the ship, adding additional tension to the traditional SF concepts.

I still love the movie, but I wish the DE had done the job it should have, of reinforcing that magic, instead of rewriting it as something more pedestrian. From the revisualizing of San Francisco as just another uber-metropolis, to the mistreatment of V'ger, to the miniaturization of its cloud, it was anything but the fulfillment of its makers' ideas. It might have been the fulfillment of Wise's ideas, but you can be sure that it would have been different had Roddenberry been alive and involved. The fact it was his vision, strenuously fought for, makes his absence from the creation of this supposed "definitive" version all the more wrong.

 

[Therin of Andor]

aridas sofia said:
I wish the DE had done the job it should have, of reinforcing that magic, instead of rewriting it as something more pedestrian. From the revisualizing of San Francisco as just another uber-metropolis, to the mistreatment of V'ger, to the miniaturization of its cloud, it was anything but the fulfillment of its makers' ideas. It might have been the fulfillment of Wise's ideas, but you can be sure that it would have been different had Roddenberry been alive and involved. The fact it was his vision, strenuously fought for, makes his absence from the creation of this supposed "definitive" version all the more wrong.

Huh?

I really cannot see that the additions made to TMPE take anything away from Roddenberry's "vision". You've been listening to The God Thing too much.

I didn't mind the San Francisco scenes in 1979 (I'd have preferred a few more panning closeups of alien ambassadors), but I used to hear lots of complaints about the hasty matte paintings and the place-holder emblem on the floor.

82 AUs for the cloud's diameter sounds mighty big to a novice, but 2 AUs is still a bloody enormous cloud, and should be big enough to satisfy any astronomers in the audience who know how big just 1 AU is.

 

[Indysolo]

If the cloud was 82 AUs I'm sure it would have turned up on their sensors a day or two earlier.

Neil

 

[RyanKCR]

Therin of Andor said:

aridas sofia said:
I wish the DE had done the job it should have, of reinforcing that magic, instead of rewriting it as something more pedestrian. From the revisualizing of San Francisco as just another uber-metropolis, to the mistreatment of V'ger, to the miniaturization of its cloud, it was anything but the fulfillment of its makers' ideas. It might have been the fulfillment of Wise's ideas, but you can be sure that it would have been different had Roddenberry been alive and involved. The fact it was his vision, strenuously fought for, makes his absence from the creation of this supposed "definitive" version all the more wrong.

Huh?

I really cannot see that the additions made to TMPE take anything away from Roddenberry's "vision". You've been listening to The God Thing too much.

I didn't mind the San Francisco scenes in 1979 (I'd have preferred a few more panning closeups of alien ambassadors), but I used to hear lots of complaints about the hasty matte paintings and the place-holder emblem on the floor.

82 AUs for the cloud's diameter sounds mighty big to a novice, but 2 AUs is still a bloody enormous cloud, and should be big enough to satisfy any astronomers in the audience who know how big just 1 AU is.

There was an awe feeling about the movie that the new sound effects destroyed. Instead of a serious Sci-Fi thought provoking movie now we get serious dialoge and imagry coupled with b-rated sound mix that sounds like a film student was doing for his first movie.

 

[Indysolo]

RyanKCR said:
There was an awe feeling about the movie that the new sound effects destroyed. Instead of a serious Sci-Fi thought provoking movie now we get serious dialoge and imagry coupled with b-rated sound mix that sounds like a film student was doing for his first movie.

It's a very good mix. I had the opportunity to hear it at a recent screening at the Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills, CA and it sounded fantastic. I was told after the screening that it sounded as good as it did on the dub stage. It was quite an experience.

Neil

 

[Therin of Andor]

RyanKCR said:
There was an awe feeling about the movie that the new sound effects destroyed.

Again, huh?

I had an awe feeling with TMP but it was on a huge screen in a real cinema, one with art deco decore.

I saw TMP DE on my home DVD and TV, and it still had plenty of awe. I'm sure there's even more awe to be had on a proper surround sound system. Some of the new sound FX are different, sure, but they sound as awe-inspiring to me as TMP ever did, esp. on VHS. It's impossible to compare TMP in a cinema in 1979 and TMP DE DVD in a house and declare one more awe-inspiring than the other.

Both versions (and the ABC-TV "special longer version") are still my favourite movie. "There is no (need for) comparison."

Gee, where have I heard that before?

 

[aridas sofia]

Therin of Andor said:

Huh?

I really cannot see that the additions made to TMPE take anything away from Roddenberry's "vision". You've been listening to The God Thing too much.

I'm quite competent of forming my own opinion, and I assure you Therin, it is as well informed as yours. The fact that I share an opinion with TGT simply means that on this subject we... share an opinion. It does not mean that someone is cribbing off someone else's fact sheet.

The fact is that in particular, the scrapping of the Yuricich-led matte work for the San Francisco scenes gutted the only glimpse of Roddenberry's vision of Earth we ever got to see (save a few tiny, tiny snippets featuring Lassie in "One of Our Planets Is Missing"). It is rich in speculation on the future of humanity, with its Paolo Soleri-esque arcologies that afford the restoration of so much of the natural landscape and waterfront, and GR-directed speculations built upon the work of artists as diverse as Hieronymus Bosch, Walter Dorwin Teague, and Arthur F. Mathews, among others. But it was arrogantly removed for something that better (retro)fit "canon".

I didn't like it, and still don't like it. And the fact that TGT agrees makes me the slightest bit more secure in that judgement.

 

[Therin of Andor]

aridas sofia said:
It is rich in speculation on the future of humanity, with its Paolo Soleri-esque arcologies that afford the restoration of so much of the natural landscape and waterfront, and GR-directed speculations built upon the work of artists as diverse as Hieronymus Bosch, Walter Dorwin Teague, and Arthur F. Mathews, among others.

Pardon my ignorance for not noticing this obvious factoid in December 1979. I was too busy looking out for the three Andorian ambassadors. Found 'em, too.

Not to mention Worene in the Rec Deck.

 

[Peach Wookiee]

It is fun to look for new things you haven't seen before.