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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."
"Where will it end?"
The moon, Alice.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Luckily if you actually read the official site (startrek.com though the site seems to be down so I can't give you the actual part concerning this show). They state that they are making extra careful attention to not change the plot or feel at all. Mainly they are cleaning up the grainy film and turning it into HD, and taking the models and redoing them to look exactly the same. Several mentions on their site on how they actually had to cut back the effects to match the old style as to not make the changes obvious.
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.
Breakfast served all day!
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.)