TMP: Robert Wise's 1980/81 Edit Ideas VS. DE Version

[Christopher]

Typically movies spun-off from another medium would simply be subtitled "The Movie", much like Superman was advertised as such a year prior. I honestly can't recall many movies that use "The Motion Picture" as a subtitle prior to Trek. An IMDb search isn't really helping either.

Well, why wouldn't they? "Motion picture" is the more formal term; "movie" is (or was originally) a slang shorthand for "moving picture." Maybe the distinction is gone by now, but when I was young, I had the impression that "movie" was still considered slang. So a film that wanted to appear reputable and classy, as TMP did, would prefer to use "The Motion Picture." Or maybe "The Film."

 

[F. King Daniel]

They probably should have just called it Star Trek

 

[mb22]

They probably should have just called it Star Trek

Plenty of marquees and newspaper listings did just that.

 

[Maurice]

Well, Superman was just Superman in the movie credits, and Superman The Movie in advertising.

 

[Indysolo]

Cash Markman...
JB

Did someone say Cash?

 

[Maurice]

Did someone say Cash?

Oh, there you are!

 

[MCKurland]

I'm very fond of the DE (aside from the sound mix and cutting out all of Bones's one-liners from the SLV), but there are a few shots where I feel like the CG recreations were a little off. They didn't match the Earth model/paintings used in the original film, so any new shot including the planet looks weird, and there are a couple that didn't fit in with the style of the VFX elsewhere. The V'Ger reveal has a camera pan and move, which wasn't used on any of the existing shots but one, where it was motivated, and while I love the extra final tunnel inside V'Ger, and I think the exterior shot looks good in a vacuum, I don't think it would've been technically possible to create it in 1979, no matter what their budget and timeframe was. Oh, and the sparkles that form the hex bridge being animated on twos... well, their heart was in the wrong place, but all of the other animated effects were at full resolution, and I'm not sure they would've resorted to hand-animating the bridge forming, anyway (I can think of one interesting way to film it that could've worked).

I spoke with FX Supervisor Daren Dochterman about certain shots. He said that they would be easier to fix in HD.

 

[MCKurland]

I'm not sure how much I can generalize this, but my own computer animation curriculum had a lot of emphasis on drawing and traditional cartoon animation, with a specific emphasis on characterization. I imagine that has as much to do with the generation of people who'd moved into teaching by that point as anything else, but if the people at FI who weren't the self-taught pioneers had anything like the education I did, they'd know a lot more about animating on twos and fours than about moire-pattern slot gags. Never mind the fact that research on one movie's troubled production was a lot harder to come by almost twenty years ago, and even now there's a lot of stuff that's fairly vauge or handwavey in what's public that'd make it challenging to recreate it. I couldn't recreate, say, the engineering reactor lighting rig based on what's in Return to Tomorrow, and I'd love to try.



It was almost certainly the same Earth model FI would've used for everything else, based on modern satellite photography. All bright blues and greens and whites. Most of the TMP Earth shots (and all of the ones kept in the DE) were very dark with a strong blue cast over the land and clouds.



Sweet! There is a world where I would've driven myself nuts trying to figure out what landmasses that shot corresponded to.

So that’s how that shot was created. Sweet!

 

[MCKurland]

I really don't like any of the changes made for the DE.

Not even if they helped fix several problems with continuity or completed scenes that they weren’t able to do the first time?

 

[MCKurland]

I recall reading in one of the novels that the machine planet V’Ger landed on was the homeworld of the Borg. Would that explain how it became such a destructive force on its return trip?

 

[Christopher]

I recall reading in one of the novels that the machine planet V’Ger landed on was the homeworld of the Borg. Would that explain how it became such a destructive force on its return trip?

That was in The Return by William Shatner and Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens, and it's a claim that makes no sense at all, given the vast differences between V'Ger and the Borg. For one thing, V'Ger's technology was as advanced as anything in this universe, so much so that the only way it could progress further was to ascend to a whole new plane of existence. The Borg are horse-and-buggy stuff compared to that. Why would they have to use cutting beams to carve out a sample of the Enterprise-D if they had V'Ger's ability to digitize entire ships? For another, the Borg's whole deal is that they're a hybrid of biology and technology; that's obvious from their name (Borg = cyborg = cybernetic organism). V'Ger, on the other hand, was a pure technological entity that didn't even acknowledge biological organisms as true life, dismissing them as unnecessary parasites. For a third thing, the Borg only exist within our galaxy, while the imagery and narration in the "Spock Walk" sequence make it explicit that V'Ger's journey spanned much of the universe. (Yes, yes, Kirk had a line about them coming from the far side of the galaxy, but Spock was the one who'd directly observed V'Ger's database, so his account is obviously more reliable, except in the ego-driven world of the Shatner novels where Kirk is always better than everybody at everything.)

The writers of The Return even knew that these contradictions existed, and in order to get around them, they had to toss in a deeply unconvincing handwave about the Borg having several separate, drastically different sub-branches that didn't communicate -- which pretty much negates the whole idea of linking V'Ger to the Borg in the first place, so why even bother? It was a very, very clumsy and unnecessary insertion into a book that had a lot of other conceptual problems on top of that.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Not even if they helped fix several problems with continuity or completed scenes that they weren’t able to do the first time?

Like what, exactly? Ask me about specific scenes, and I'll answer specifically.

 

[Qonundrum]

The writers of The Return even knew that these contradictions existed, and in order to get around them, they had to toss in a deeply unconvincing handwave about the Borg having several separate, drastically different sub-branches that didn't communicate -- which pretty much negates the whole idea of linking V'Ger to the Borg in the first place, so why even bother? It was a very, very clumsy and unnecessary insertion into a book that had a lot of other conceptual problems on top of that.

Except those contradictions then make the notion of why the Borg from Descent were never explained off as they became their usual emotionless selves after that story (even a "we blocked them off before their disarray tore the collective apart" would have sufficed.)

If TNG won't respect its continuity it spent more time crafting then ditching, why not anyone else?

 

[Christopher]

Except those contradictions then make the notion of why the Borg from Descent were never explained off as they became their usual emotionless selves after that story (even a "we blocked them off before their disarray tore the collective apart" would have sufficed.)

That wasn't all the Borg, just the complement of the single cube that Hugh infected. "Descent" is ambiguous about that, but it's implied when Lore says "When I stumbled on their ship, they were lost... they couldn't even navigate their own vessel," and further confirmed at the end when Hugh said "We can't go back to the Borg Collective," meaning that there still was a Collective that Hugh's group had become severed from. "Descent" was never meant to be a permanent end to the Borg as we knew them, although I agree it gave the impression that it could have been. But of course they wanted to leave the option open for further Borg stories down the road.

If TNG won't respect its continuity it spent more time crafting then ditching, why not anyone else?

The irony is, it's actually the other way around. The creators of new canon are perfectly entitled to rewrite or ignore older continuity if they want, but those of us who write licensed tie-in fiction are not given the same freedom, since the studio has to approve our work and we're obligated to stay consistent with what came before. After all, the studio owns the property, while we're just hired to work with it. It's like they're the landlords and we're the renters, so they have more freedom to remodel their property than we do.

 

[Maurice]

Not even if they helped fix several problems with continuity or completed scenes that they weren’t able to do the first time?

Like how they broke directional continuity with their new asteroid explosion shot?

 

[David cgc]

Like how they broke directional continuity with their new asteroid explosion shot?

Do you know that until I looked just now to see what the hell you could possibly be talking about, I never once in seventeen years noticed that shot wasn't straight down centerline of the ship? One can only assume the intent of moving a little to the right instead of a little to the left was to better match the following shot on the bridge, which is very definitely on the right side of the ship (and, come to think of it, is one of the only times that setup is used. Most of the shots of the viewer-and-bridge are from the left side of the bridge. The only other one is the beginning of the lightning probe sequence).

 

[Maurice]

Do you know that until I looked just now to see what the hell you could possibly be talking about, I never once in seventeen years noticed that shot wasn't straight down centerline of the ship? One can only assume the intent of moving a little to the right instead of a little to the left was to better match the following shot on the bridge, which is very definitely on the right side of the ship (and, come to think of it, is one of the only times that setup is used. Most of the shots of the viewer-and-bridge are from the left side of the bridge. The only other one is the beginning of the lightning probe sequence).

Heh. It's a common mistake guys with CGI but no film backgrounds make. Guarantee you the original VFX teams wouldn't have made that 1st year film school error: i.e. the Enterprise steadfastly travels R to L throughout the film except is this one added DE shot where it is aimed slightly L-R.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Heh. It's a common mistake guys with CGI but no film backgrounds make. Guarantee you the original VFX teams wouldn't have made that 1st year film school error: i.e. the Enterprise steadfastly travels R to L throughout the film except is this one added DE shot where it is aimed slightly L-R.

Interesting! I never noticed that, but I'll be sure to keep an eye out for it on my next rewatch.