Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

(xpost to Shakey)

right they'd have to re-edit the entire thing from the original film (assuming they still have it) and then re-do all the effects - an insane amount of time and money and effort

the actual DS9 live footage only exists on videotape and there is no original material on film.

Yeah, but that's exactly what they did with TNG. Which was my point.

(xpost)

TNG had original footage on film though, which made upscaling possible.

or not upscaling but hi-res capture

the actual DS9 live footage only exists on videotape and there is no original material on film.

If this was the case, they could never remaster it on HD. As the guy interviewed in the article says it's possible, only very expensive, they still must have the the (non-effect) shots filmed in storage somewhere.

In storage on film, I mean.

ok, so you're saying they still shot some live aciton for DS9 on film a la TNG but the final edit was just to video, unlike TNG. i can see that.

I think the real headline here is they had to bend over backward to remaster TNG and then priced individual seasons at $118 on release in order to keep their profit margins in line with other releases

Yeah, that seems to be the case.

(xpost)

I like Star Trek but there have to be a handful of people on the planet who'd pay over $100 for a single season on blu-ray disc. And some of those people are also the ones complaining how the crystalline entity doesn't look right now, and probably bought it just so they could make that complaint.

_just_ a handful of people, that is

The TNG Blurays weren't that expensive. They cost something like 40 euros per season, I remember thinking it was fairly cheap for 24 remastered episodes + hours of extra material.

I mean, they cost that when they were originally released. Nowadays they must be even cheaper?

Ok, I checked it, and I paid something between 30 and 55 euros per season for them, and I was buying them as soon as they came out. 55 euros must've been the standard price, but they often had special offers right away.

ty for your support

No prob.

they're also all on netflix ain't they?

ok, so you're saying they still shot some live aciton for DS9 on film a la TNG but the final edit was just to video, unlike TNG. i can see that.

No, the final cut on both was to video - they went back to the uncut film negatives of TNG and remade every episode from the ground up. DS9 would require the same process but with even more CGI work and it's cost-prohibitive since it's even less popular than TNG (which may not have recouped the cost of the remaster) and disc sales have continued to decline over time. All it would take is one crazy billionaire to drop $40 million of his pocket change into sponsoring the project - maybe Peter Thiel could earn back some goodwill?

I'm surprised that TNG was shot on film.

all the '90s trek shows have the filmic look even with the fx

I'm pretty sure that, before digital cameras, most bigger-budget American TV shows were always shot on film? And videotape was mostly used on cheaper productions, like soap operas, talk shows, and lower-budget sitcoms? I don't know so much about technicalities of it, but shows shot on film certainly have a different look on them (especially when it comes to lighting), and you could see that even with old tube televisions. So if they a high enough budget to allow shooting on film, I think most shows opted for that to give them a more classy/cinematic look.

I just wanted to show off my new deep-cut display name.

I'm easily amused:
http://scrolldowntoriker.com/
https://twitter.com/RikerGoogling

And must watch just for Gates McFadden dancing at the beginning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vT5Al3DGLs

wow. i love how they're all seemingly very drunk at these things.
and goddamn, levar burton is old!

not as old (possibly) as rene auberjonois (odo) who I just saw in a film convincingly playing a 76 year old with nascent dementia.

wow. i love how they're all seemingly very drunk at these things.

Yes, these things always seem like such a blast. I don't know if it's in that particular vid (the panel is split into 3 Youtubes), but when the moderator mentions "Yesterday's Enterprise", lolz at the cast members going, "Is that the one with time traveling? Oh, and Tasha Yar's sister!"

I saw this last weekend, it was p great. My favorite piece was the fake cereal box tbh.

http://www.chabotspace.org/startrek

i've been working through DS9 for the first time and just saw "the visitor" for the first time, and holy shit what a gut wrenching episode. i knew the episode was special when it managed to bring me to tears a couple of times.

sure the frame story was a bit cheesy at time, but it's definitely the best episode i've seen by far

Candyman brings it.

the visitor is total classic

Yeah, it's grand. Soon after this first broadcast I stopped regularly watching both then-current series -- my interests were starting to drift elsewhere, in combination with me moving into what was the final phase of my increasingly stress-filled grad school life -- and aside from an idle eye on the movies I've never really 'returned' to Trek in full. But having this as a bit of an unplanned send-off was lovely.

I started (re)watching a few Voyager episodes, and either I've had bad luck picking the episodes or the series was simply terrible. (I'm being rhetorical here.) The forced bonhomie is what bothers me the worst -- you've got Starfleet and former Maquis together on the same ship and marooned light-decades away from home, yet it's a big corny-joke making family.

terrible show

watching a few TOS episodes a week w/my daughter has been a real pleasure

just watch all the bryan fuller-written eps of voyager and you're good

Bashir-Worf Hypothesis: a relationship with the Dax symbiont affects the subject's world view.

The forced bonhomie is what bothers me the worst -- you've got Starfleet and former Maquis together on the same ship and marooned light-decades away from home, yet it's a big corny-joke making family.

It's worth reading the second volume of the recent Trek oral history just to see pretty much every single person who ever worked on the show continually drag Berman & Braga on this very topic. "By the end of the pilot they're all in Starfleet uniforms and reporting to Janeway like it's no big thing, WGAF?" Writers who transitioned from DS9 were especially pissed at setting up this group that was going to be used on Voyager just to see the entire premise instantly pissed away.

Yeah, as a criticism it definitely sticks and the first 2/3 seasons aren't all that...but beyond that I can watch a lot of it compared to NG.

voyager has a bunch of fun high-concept episodes but few good character-based ones

Do you count "Bride of Chaotica" as one of the former? Because I watched it recently and was incredibly bored.

the one where everyone is dying from some incurable disease which leads them to find out they're copies of the real voyager and crew

Living Witness is probably the best example of what I mean

I've been thinking more about Voyager (who knows why) and it's not even the Maquis/Starfleet thing that bugs me -- it's that the writing/dialogue is so artificial and dumb which leads to very little on-screen chemistry between the bridge crew. Basically, any non-holographic/ex-Borg character interacting with any other non-holographic/ex-Borg character is bad -- Janeway is probably the worst of the bunch, even though Mulgrew is perfectly fine as an actor!

It would probably be more interesting to watch 45 minutes of the actors having lunch in full makeup than any given episode of the series.

my daughter and I just got to the Space Seed last week, she was so into it

Not only were the actors boring, they stayed boring for SEVEN WHOLE SEASONS. That's an almost respectable commitment.

wtf is this vic fontaine shit? and apparently he becomes a recurring character?

Vic Fontaine was a bad idea, but the actor/singer playing him is enjoyable, and the episode with him and PTSD Nog is really good, so they kinda manage to salvage that it could've been.

Apparently he was only added to the show because Ira Steven Behr loves '50s crooner music. And they originally intended to cast Frank Sinatra Jr. for the role!