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Original Star Trek Getting CGI Makeover
Tony Pascale writes "Star Trek is the latest sci-fi classic to get the CGI 'special edition' treatment. According to rumors picked up by
TrekMovie.com, CBS and
Paramount have been secretly working on a new version of Star Trek: The Original Series for HDTV. The shows will feature the original episodes with brand new state-of-the-art CGI visual effects, including a a redone title sequence (with re-recorded music). The effects are likely to be limited to the space scenes and not effect the live action scenes, so Edith Keeler will not shoot first. The HDTV Star Trek series will begin broadcasting this fall just in time for the 40th Anniversary of Star Trek."
I downloaded a sample CGI demo from some company about 5 years ago that was supposed to be a 'what if' they were doing. It had the TOS titles redone in their entirety in CGI and a separate scene getting similar treatment.
It looked fine but really, why? I LIKE the way the SFX clips of the Enterprise are complete with nose hair, fluff and other sundry gunk. It's supposed to be like that!
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Instead of spending money on remastering startrek, why not spend the cash on producing a new, good series? Yeah, seeing TOS in new, 3d graphics is appealing, but i would much rather see a new show of the same quality of TOS but with the new eye candy.
This might actually not be a horrible thing. The effects in the original were bad at times and I am willing to except that; however, Star Trek is turning 40 and with that age come a great many people who have probably never seen all of the Original Series (or maybe not even parts of it). The only Trek even fewer may know is those two most recent atrocities. Instead of complaining, this about how this could possibly turn Star Trek on to a whole new generation of people.
So long as the effects changes have no real impact of the story or the idea of the show I do not see a huge problem here. If the shows old film is getting cleaned up too, then that is also something to cheer about. I personally would feel better knowing that they are actually caring for the old film and not letting it just rot in some warehouse.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
I just hope the remasters are as good as the Red Dwarf remasters. It was so good they put the unremastered ones on the DVDs instead of the remasters nowadays.
I don't get the need to do this. People like the show as it is, why go muck with it? Same thing with Star Wars.
:-/
I was over at the starwars.com yesterday looking for information about the release of the unedited versions in a week or so. They have a side by side comparison of many frames they changed from the film. With something along the lines of "Many people don't realize the technical capabiltiy that went into this!"
Stop right there. I'm an engineer and I appreciate technical achievement as much as the next geek. But you're trying to SELL ME ON YOUR TECHNICAL MERITS?
Most people who don't like the edits don't like them for one of two reasons. 1) You're messing with something they remember and liked. This almost always pisses people off. 2) The CGI doesn't look right in the movie with late 1970s effects.
Star Wars was one of the highest grossing movies of all time without any mucking about. Star Trek is insanely popular. I think it's pretty arrogant to go messing with a historical show that's stood up for 30-40 years and expect people to like it (or not be outraged) because it's a technical feat.
I guess I better run buy a copy of the original series DVDs before someone at Paramount decides I don't have the privilidge to see them in their original form again.
*beats head on desk some more*
KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNN!!!
Now that we've gotten that out of the way, this might actually be cool. If they don't change the charater acting any, and only focus on effects, it really won't harm the show. Of course, sometimes the 60's effects technology is what makes the show good, so I guess we'll just see.
This would be a good chance to retcon the Klingons into Klingons that look like Klingons.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I know a lot of people (myself included) who refuse to purchase Star Wars until the originals are released on DVD. It looks like that's going to happen soon, but not in a particularly satisfactory way.
What annoys me about TOS is the way the technology looks outdated even by 1990s standards. It'd take an awful lot of CGI to fix that.
Wait, I thought copyright protection was evil and that an artist really should have no control over his work once he releases it? Or are mash-ups and re-cuttings only fair when they are posted to YouTube instead of released on DVD?
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
Which is not a good reason to do anything.
/., which given the stature of the moview probably should have rated him an obit here. Robert Wise was also the director on a very different movie: Star Trek the Motion Picture. The commentary on TDTESS makes it clear why: Wise was originally a cinematographer, and as a director he studied each script and meticulously planned each shot before the first frame of film was exposed. On STTMP, he never had a full script. The script was being written as the movie was shot, and as he received more script he'd shoot some more. This accounts, I think, for the remarkable difference between the two films. TDTESS is notable for its brisk pace, strong characterizations, clean story telling and restraint (technologically and budget driven to be sure) in the use of special effects. STTMP is exactly opposite in each of these areas. Under the circumstances, it's remarkable that the film wasn't an utter fiasco. Robert Wise later did a Director's Edition, which I have not seen, in which he reportedly was able to impose some order on the film. This is regarded by some as the best of the film series, wheras the theatrical release version is widely regarded as, not the worst, but close to it.
I recently rented the remastered DVD of "The Day The Earth Stood Still", which to this day is one of the great science fiction movies of all time. What makes it a great science fiction movie? It is credible. It presents the story in a way that compels you to believe it on some level.
The producer was Julian Blaustein. He says in an interview that he decided to do a sneak preview, a Hollywood practice that allows the filmmakers to find and tweak problem spots in a movie. Blaustein's biggest concern: Gort's knees. Gort the robot was just a very tall man in a foam rubber suit. It was very convincing, except when Gort walked away from the camera: the backs of his knees didn't look robotic, they looked like a man trying to walk in a stiff foam rubber suit. Every time he looked at a scene in which Gort walked away, it bothered him.
A few minutes into the movie, there is a scene where tank after tank skids around the corner, racing to confront the flying saucer. The audience reacted in a completely unexpected way to this: they laughed. Blaustein recounts sinking lower and lower in his seat until his eyes were level with the seat in front of him. He knew to the precisely how many seconds it would be until the audience would see Gort, and exactly how many seconds after that Gort would turn around and the world would see his cheesy foam rubber knees. If they laughed, he was finished: no Gort, no movie.
Naturally, nobody laughed. He found out later that the reason the audience laughed was the absurdity of confronting the advanced technology of the flying saucer with tanks and guns. Nobody every thinks Gort's knees are cheesy. Lesson learned: the audience will accept anything once you make them believe. Ang Lee did a movie of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility in which Emma Thompson played a character almost twenty years younger than she was when she made the movie. Lee managed this by avoiding closeups until well into the movie, after Thompson had managed to sell the audience on her performance.
So -- I'd conclude this. If a TOS episode works, it doesn't need CGI rework. The CGI work might help a less credible episode.
As a side note, Robert Wise, the director of The Day The Earth Stood Still, died last September. So far as I know this was not commemorated on
It's worth noting that nobody says the special effects for the theatrical version were wanting. On the contrary, they were excellent, but there was too much of them and not enough story.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What might be better is for Star Trek, as a whole, to move in a new direction. In the commentary for Star Trek - First Contact the creators commented that what Star Trek might need is its own 'Crisis On Infinite Earths.'
The above was a reference to the DC miniseries which literally destroyed the entire DC comic book multiverse, and replaced it with a single universe. The DC Multiverse had become so convoluted that this was needed to simply things and fix continuity problems.
Rather than altering the original series, I think a better move would be to start a new Star Trek from ground zero, with nothing retained from any previous series (it could start with Kirk's arrival on the Enterprise as its new captain). As has been shown by Battlestar Galatica it would be possible to do this with Star Trek.
Sometimes the limitations of the time cause innovative solutions. For example, the need to save time resulted in the introduction of the transporters (rather taking the time to have the ship land and take off during each episode). Do the advances in special effects technology mean that we will replace the classic transporter scenes with scenes of a shuttlecraft travelling from the ship to the planet and then back? After all, I'm sure we can do a much better job of showing a ship taking off and landing now than was possible in the 1960s.
A phrase comes to mind (I don't remember where I heard it): Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should do something.
Kids today are tyrants. They contradict their parent, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers. - Socrates 400 BC
Fans should understand that this is not about them and that it's ok not to like it. If it's done reasonably well we might end up with something better.
I agree totally. The problem is, it won't be done reasonably well, because it can't be done reasonably well without pouring an enormous amount of money into it, and that won't happen because by the time you've got a budget large enough to do the project justice, you could have funded several original projects.
The problem is always going to be the juxtaposition of state of the art space scenes with shaky 60's interior/planet-side scenes. The only way to do this properly would be to CGI the non-space scenes, which would be a total money-sink (probably cheaper to just remake the originals).
I remember when they re-did Red Dwarf with CGI effects, it just didn't sit well at all. Not only did the CGI add nothing to the show, it just served to make the non-CGI parts look dated and shaky and you instantly lost all the charm of the plastic models. No matter how sympathetic the graphics guys are to the original ST, the effect will only be the same as with RD (probably worse, since the show is so much older the differences will be even more pronounced).
That leaves the possibility that there will be an interest in putting in more effects than they have time for and they already cut stuff from the original to get it into an hour runtime as is.
... pauses ... from Shatner's ... dialog ... they may not need to cut anything else.
No, not an hour runtime -- unless you're counting commercials. The thing is, back in the 60s they didn't show nearly as many minutes of commercials per hour as they do now. It has become very obvious as various TV shows are released on DVD -- more recent ones run to about 42 minutes per show, from 10-15 years ago it's more like 45-46 minutes per show, and the original Trek may well have been closer to 50 minutes. (Haven't watched a TOS episode recently enough to say for sure.)
That means they'll need to cut nearly 8 minutes of content anyway just to fit in the modern format. Perhaps that's one reason they're completely re-doing the title sequence -- to make it shorter.
On the plus side, if they cut all the
-- Alastair