Why no decent shots of Klingon D7 in Remastered Trek??

Shucks, Remastered Trek is nice and all. There is plenty of visual improvement.

Why are all the shots of the Klingon Cruiser so far away? There've been three so far (I think) featuring the ol' D7 and not one of them has a glory shot.

Even the DS9 Tribbles episode had a decent glory shot. Anyone know if there are future RMTrek episodes featuring the D7?

 

Because they're trying to walk that fine line between completely retconning the series and slavishly adhering to the old F/X shots. The Klingon battlecruiser didn't make its original TOS debut until the third season episode "The Enterprise Incident" (and playing the role of a Romulan battlecruiser, no less!), so I would expect we won't see nice closeups of the cruiser until that episode or "Elaan of Troyius" is remastered.

 

Oh and p.s., I hope that CBS Digital paints a Romulan warbird on the belly of the battlecruiser model when she appears in "The Enterprise Incident". Either that, or at the very least slap a coat of Romulan green on the hull... anything to visually distinguish the Romulan variant of the battlecruiser from her Klingon counterpart.

 

^^^ FASA's variant of the upgraded K't'inga D7 had a huge gradiant-blue winged paint job on the top and bottom portion of the hull and forward "head" section, along with upgraded "Romulan-esque" warp nacelles. I quite liked the design:

The Upgrade of the V-11 type vas'Kalabam ("Stormbird") Class.

 

Ehhh...kinda-sorta.

 

Plus, let's not forget that the new f/x shots have to occupy more or less the same amount of on-screen time as the original opticals. If a glowing blob or dot in a 1967 episode was supposed to be a distant Klingon cruiser and it was on-screen for about four seconds, then the new 2006 CGI ship will be distant and on-screen for about four seconds.

 

Thank you--I'm well aware of the airing snafu that caused the Klingon battlecruiser to make its first appearance as a "Romulan" battlecruiser (one of the reasons that the AMT model didn't sell so well). Nonetheless, it doesn't change the historical fact that the first glimpse viewers got of the Klingon battlecruiser was the Romulan variant.

 

We will get to see one get blown up in "Day of the Dove". That is if it makes it by the syndication cuts...

 

I'm guessing they're saving all the beauty shots for the season three episodes, which were the real first appearances of the D7.

 

IMHO, both designations sound rather fakey and un-TOSlike. Given that virtually every conventional starship encountered was described in conventional terms (Klingon "battlecruiser" or "scout", Catullan "space cruiser") if at all, I'd expect the TOS-era Starfleet description of this vessel to be "light cruiser" or something like that.

Nicknames or the adoption of alien designations just don't become our conservatively thinking TOS heroes.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I still fantasize that the Remastered "Enterprise Incidents" will use Romulan ships instead of D-7s....

 

They why would Scott comment that they were Klingon vessels?

 

Exactly. Onscreen dialogue limits what CBS Digital can do, but I like the FASA idea--show what looks like a Klingon Battlecruiser from a distance, but closeup has the markings and subtle differences that make it clearly a Romulan vessel.

 

I fantasize about that episode in a completely different way.

Joe, behind the Romulan commander

 

Thanks for clearing that up.

Considering the fact I wasn't around during the original run... It doesn't make any sense that the first appearance of the D7 would be in Enterprise Incident. If it was, why would they have Spock explain that the Romulans were using Klingon design, if the ship hadn't previously been shown as a Klingon ship? It had to be introduced first as a Klingon ship.

 

Well, if I remember correctly the shot of the Enterprise destroying Kang's ship remains intact in the TV LAND cable edit of the episode, and so far the edits in the Remastered and TV LAND versions sync up exactly.

 

Because they wanted to employ it primarily as a Klingon vessel, and this provided an oblique yet elegant way of allowing the model to serve two masters.

 

Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Star Trek production team was really stretching budget dollars by the third season. Bob Justman and Fred Freiberger were squeezing nickels till the buffaloes pooped--they needed to captialize on their investment in very expensive filming miniature by reusing it as much as possible. Hence, the framing device of a "Romulan/Klingon alliance" was employed to explain why Romulans would be using a Klingon design for their battlecruisers.