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Star Trek - Special Edition
Deathlizard writes "Confirming rumours from last month, Trekkies will finally join their Star Wars brethren and get a taste of the 'George Lucas Treatment' this year. CBS will be rebroadcasting The Original Star Trek Series for it's 40th anniversary. The catch? New Digital Graphics." From the article: "Digitally created images will replace the miniature-scale models used for exterior shots of the various spacecraft on the show, including Kirk's Starship Enterprise and the enemy war vessels of the alien Klingons and Romulans. Shots of distant galaxies and planets also will be touched up with computer graphics to give them greater depth. The flat matte paintings used as backdrops on the surface of the strange new worlds visited by the Enterprise crew will be digitally enhanced to add texture, atmosphere and lighting."
As long as Kirk shoots first (or only, as applicable) I'll still be happy.
Next they'll be digitally editing Shatner's hair and waist lines.
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Too late:
http://imdb.com/title/tt0373908/
The flat matte paintings used as backdrops on the surface of the strange new worlds visited by the Enterprise crew will be digitally enhanced to add texture, atmosphere and lighting.
Obviously the dorks at CBS/NBC/ABC or whomever seem to have missed the point: It's the cheese that makes Trek taste so good after all these years.
TOS is a classic, in part, because we get to sit back and see the innovation Roddenberry and crew had enough insight to bring to the surface but not enough FX abilities to make it convincing (even back when TOS was in first run). Aside from Shatner's bad acting what else will we have to cheer for?
Frankly, this blows. If people like it I have nothing against it but I will not be party to it either. This is akin to updating all the antiquated language and references in, let's say, War of the Worlds and try to make it new and accessible to a new fanbase... Oh, sorry! (See! I've proven my own point)
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And to improve the acting, Kirk will now be played by Jar Jar Binks. Thanks to the wonders of digital compositing.
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Part of the charm of watching old Tom Baker Dr Who or ST:TOS episodes is to see how _good_ the shows were with such primitive budgets. I will go on a shooting rampage is someone tries to add CG backdrops to the scenes in I, Claudius.
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I hope it's a labor of love where they replace the crude effects with superior ones without letting themselves get carried away. Hopefully they won't go the Hollywood route and let the effects overwhelm and upstage the episodes. The real test will be if the episodes look better, but someone has to point out the changes.
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Anyone who saw these episodes when they originally appeared (I was 10 at the time - I got a special dispensation from my parents to see the third season even though it was past my bedtime) knows they came out on NBC. How did CBS get to show them, much less get permission to tart them up?
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TOS is still available via DVD, it will be rebroadcast in its original form on TV LAND... there's just no comparison to Lucas' repeated muddling of the Star Wars plot and effects. The only reason Lucas has decided to sell the original unmodified trilogy is because so many people downloaded or bought used laserdisc copies, rather than buy his recent updated box set.
I mean, I grew up with TOS and think it's kinda cool CBS will rebroadcast it in HD - but I'm not clamoring for it either. I just think the comparison between Paramount's changes tp TOS vs. what Lucas did to the original Star Wars is just plain unfair.
*shrug*
I think the bigger news is that they're finally releasing the animated series on DVD. I have good memories of these cartoons from when I was a kid, but I never had a chance to watch more than one or two. I'm looking forward to renting them - it's almost like having new episodes of the original series to watch.
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I think the interview I saw with Shatner and Nemoy was the best perspective I've seen on any of this entertainment news.
If you ask them what still gets them fired up about the late producer Gene Roddenberry's creation after all these years, you get an answer that -- underneath the glibness -- is very telling:
SHATNER: Money.
NIMOY: Yeah. The big, the big bucks.
SHATNER: Money. The money gets you fired up.
TOGETHER: The biiiig bucks.
Seriously?
SHATNER: Yes, that was serious. We were very serious about that.
NIMOY: Yeah. But seriously, folks.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
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Of course, your comment will sound better when Paul Anka's singing it.
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Are they ... going to ... fix up ... the choppy audio ... coming from ... Shatner's ... microphone?
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So... now that, for the first time since 1987, there's no commercial Star Trek shows in production, they've to "bring back" the classics? I'm not actually upset by them retouching the backgrounds, etc. so much as that after the fiasco of Enterprise, I was hoping for something more progressive, rather than going back and retouching footage from my parents' generation.
On the other hand, one could argue that, at the very least since DS9, Trek has gone downhill with every successive series. Maybe they think they just need to get back to their roots? If they can combine the original story with enough modern SFX to keep viewers happy, this re-run might even beat out the original showing for ratings.That would certainly be good news for trek fans; if the show still has following, we're a lot less likely to go through a repeat of the '69 to '87 dark age.
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Does this mean they ride in the short Enterprise?
I hear this argument about Doctor Who all the time and I call bullshit either way.
You like to think that you like Star Trek (or Doctor Who) because of the cheese, but you didn't. If you saw these shows as a kid, you fell in love with them because of the memorable characters, engaging plots, the strong moral messages, and (yes) a sense of wonder at the imaginative settings, creatures, and situations. Seriously. You fell in love with these shows because you liked them -- don't try to intellectualize your way out of it now that you're all growed up.
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It's time for another good idea/bad idea.
Good idea: Remastering old video and shows to a modern digital standard.
Bad idea: Mixing old video and new video while violating Roddenberry's standards.
(I have some old home movies of me as a child naked, perhaps I can digitally enhance certain elements of my naked body as a 2 year old. I just didn't have the capabilities back then to express my, uh, manhood and now that I do, let's DESTROY the old memory and create a new one!)
I'm all for them doing a slight overhaul on TOS. As long as its only the ships/planets/space scenes, then I call it an alternative improvement. As long as they keep the originals and have them available as well, theres no harm done. Now, if they start adding creatures running around in the background of planets, Kirk shooting second, or changing the way characters looked (Klingons for example), then I'll probably still watch, but with a bad taste in my mouth. Of course, I'd not mind if they change the viewscreen to make it look less like a crappy splice job. Heck, maybe they can even tweak phaser shots to look like they were actually pointed at the spot where the beam hits, instead of the beam magically changing direction right out of the phasers tip. I know a lot of people don't want these things changed, because it's the cheesiness that gave the show much of its charm. But think of the people who will be introduced to the show for the first time. They will be much more likely to watch the show and become fans if the show is a bit less cheesy feeling. This in turn will hopefully lead to a stronger Trek following, which in turn will hopefully lead to a new series or movies with better writing and so forth. I'm looking at the positive side of this, and hoping for a better future for the Trek franchise.
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Okay, wise guy. Just relax and take it easy. Paramount is not "raping your childhood", or even improving the effects. (Much.) All they're doing is resampling the film for HD broadcasts. Unfortunately, a lot of the effects shots and audio will stand out as REALLY bad in High Definition, so they're recreating much of it.
What do I mean by "recreating"? I mean that they're matching the original shots (from what I've seen, mistakes and all) so that the jump to HD doesn't make them look like cheap models with sparklers on them. The theme song is being re-recorded to match the original exactly, but using modern sound capture technologies. The sound effects will be redubbed over the audio of the characters, again to take advantage of modern sound systems.
The result is that it will look like Star Trek, feel like Star Trek, and be like Star Trek. It will just look a little better on HD, while SD viewers will notice that the picture is a little cleaner and the audio a bit crisper. Go see for yourself.
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Okay, wise guy. Just relax and take it easy. Paramount is not "raping your childhood", or even improving the effects. (Much.) All they're doing is resampling the film for HD broadcasts.
They're doing a bit more than that.
But unlike with Star Wars, I'm all for this. There's one crucial difference: the original version is still available, and always will be. Nobody's suddenly denying the existence of the original model-based Star Trek, or telling anyone they "lost" the original negatives, or calling the new version "the Star Trek we had always meant to make".
There's another big difference: the dramatic content was not changed. Only the FX shots have been changed/cleaned up. I wouldn't have had such a problem with the Star Wars Lucas treatment if he hadn't also gone and made it so Greedo shot first, or Hayden Christensen appeared at the end of Jedi (a face Luke wouldn't even recognize!), or whatever.
I don't mind updating films and TV shows provided the original is preserved for archival purposes and made available in some form to the public. And I don't mind the updates themselves provided it only applies to the technical aspects of the film rather than the content.
It sounds to me like this is a worthwhile update to the original Trek, and I'll be watching. (I'll also be buying once it's inevitably released on an HD video format.)
Let's give the mona lisa more modern clothing and make her thinner.
This time around, they aren't pulling a Lucas:
From what I've seen, this is more like repairing all those cracks in the varnish and bringing back the original colors through the years of fading. Technical enhancement, nothing done to the subject of the work.
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or calling the new version "the Star Trek we had always meant to make".
I remember Roddenberry's original explanation for the new look of Klingons in the movies was that Klingons were always intended to look this new way; they just didn't have the budget to do them right in the original series.
Or afford to pay for artists of sufficient skill capable of doing them that way for the animated series either, apparently.
("Heart rate too high, internal organs all wrong, pronounced ridges on the cranium-- Jim, this man's a Klingon!")
If it weren't for the retconning of DS9 and Enterprise, then I'd expect that in this remastered version, not only the Klingons, but also the R-r-r-omulans would have r-r-r-idges on their foreheads if these were "the Star Trek we had always meant to make".
Will they be fixing the flying pizza bats in "Operation: Annihilate!" as well?
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Here is the trailer (QuickTime and Windows Media formats) for the remastered version.
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they can't actually do it without breaking canon.
You mean the revised canon.
Roddenberry always said since the first movie with Klingons in it, they always looked like that, he just didn't have the budget to do them right back then. He also retconned all the books out of the official history and all of the animated series except some elements of the backstory of Spock's childhood. (Animated Klingons also looked human.)
That was the official canon until the DS9 episode, after Gene had no more say (being dead does that), and they found they still couldn't afford to CGI the Klingons.
And how can you watch "Mirror, Mirror" now knowing that despite Mirror-Spock reforming the Terran Empire, the human race ends up subjugated by an alliance of Klingons, Cardassians, and Bajorans?
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Trekkens?
Could you be more lame.
It was trekkies in the 60, it was trekkies in the 70s, and it will always be trekkies.
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