That’s certainly an exaggeration. That sequence is not a single shot.
TOS ‘Cheesy’ Special Effects
- Thread starter Spock's Barber
- Start date
Exactly.
The effects shots on Blakes 7 look terrible now, but back when it was made they were...terrible !
There is a book about the making of Blake's 7. The BBC gave them the budget of the show they replaced 'Softly, Softly'.
The producers told the SFX team to go see this new movie 'Star Wars' in order to get visual effects ideas.
The two sat there in the theater watching the Star Destroyer cross the screen.
One turned to the other and said, 'We are in serious trouble'.
What space effects, if any, do you find convincing?
Damn kids and their CGI these days. Killed their imagination and they expect everything to look real.
Of course they're cues. All effects were cues for the imagination to pick up and run with. That was the contract between storyteller and audience. Star Trek's effects were better visually than were most of that time, but still very much functioned as prompts for imagination and never pretended to be anything else.
Now get off my lawn, grumble grumble grumble...
Well, the point is that everybody knows what space looks like. The same way that everybody knows what sea looks like, even if one hasn't ever actually been aboard a boat or anything. The expectation is there, and just like a tempest-in-a-teapot scale model of water always utterly fails to deliver, so does a starfield that doesn't look like a starfield.
Any space effect that describes something unfamilliar to us is fair game for "being good enough" unless there are damning factors such as poor stability or focus or whatever. Every instance of the Galactic Barrier thus convinces the bejesus out of me. The Doomsday Machine is great. Balok's Fesarius is awesome.
The space in which they supposedly exist is not. That is, it's not space. And the movements of the Enterprise, arguably an acceptable spacecraft, are not movements, but merely sorry imitations thereof.
Modern VFX can do photorealistic space (even if it's quite a bit on the dull side) and convincing movement. Nothing back then could, not even on a movie budget, but certain movies at least got significantly closer.
Between that and old-style visuals lies an uncanny valley parsecs wide. It simply fails to deliver, when every filler shot of a cop show or a cowboy series automatically succeeds (unless they try to get smart and portray movement with back projections or reality with sets, but the point is that they don't need to do that). This in turn digs another deep and wide chasm, this time between space scifi and almost all the rest. And Trek sits on the wrong side of that chasm, in the 1960s and the 1990s and basically in the 2020s still. But not all of it: modern Trek manages to slip in some shots that meet the cop show or sitcom standard of convincing, while TOS never did.
As regards the space shots, that is. To step outside the parameters of your question, many of the surface sets and associated mattes were quite effective, sometimes by virtue of being convincing, sometimes by virtue of being fantastic. But the space shots only succeed when they describe the fantastic. Which, thankfully enough, happens often in TOS...
Timo Saloniemi
So...we're not going to discuss the Denevan neural parasites flying through the air???
You know even as a kid of about eight when I finally saw that episode, Even I knew that the Denovan parasites were just rubber vomit on a string.
Your post is dope.
If you can weed through all the others...
Nimoy is a true professional! Hell, they all are to play it so straight!
Now I wonder if there is a credit for "Neural Parasite Wrangler" out there somewhere...
I always thought the simple special effect scene where Kirk stuns Luma in ‘Spock’s Brain’ was cool. 
More like eggs over easy made by a drunken cook.Someone else called them Denny’s Omelettes.
That sounds like a Denny’s employee.
Flying fake barf is what we called them.
The "green flash for stun" effect first showed up in Season Two. Prior to that, "stun" had the same visual effect as the "kill" setting.I always thought the simple special effect scene where Kirk stuns Luma in ‘Spock’s Brain’ was cool.
Actually it didn't. In the first season most of the time the sun effect was a blue beam, and a phaser on kill was a red beam. (But like everything else across TOS visual effects-wise; It still wasn't 100% consistent)
And there’s a couple of first season episodes where the special effects house misaligned the angle and/or point of origin of a phaser pistol.
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