With the new Star Trek getting raves and generating box office, the old Star Treks are going hi- tech. Despite fan squabbling over double-dipping, disc prices and digital enhancements, the results are absolutely dazzling. You get warp speed bang for your outer space bucks.
We are talking Blu-ray here — a radical transformation of the original TV series as well as improvements to the six Star Trek movies. Meanwhile, there are also new-old collections of favoured TV episodes on standard DVD. One covers the original series and the other The Next Generation.
Those collections, on DVD this week, are minor one-disc releases. Most Trekkers already have everything so these are strictly highlight packages.
The Best of Star Trek: The Original Series contains The City on the Edge of Forever, The Trouble With Tribbles, Balance of Terror and Amok Time, all from 1967-67. City on the Edge is cited as the best episode ever, even though it has a curious history before broadcast on April 6, 1967. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and writer Harlan Ellison squabbled bitterly, with the curmudgeonly writer objecting to Roddenberry’s censorship (Ellison told Sun Media last year his hatred never waned, not even with Roddenberry’s death). South Park famously spoofed this time-travel saga.
The Best of Star Trek: The Next Generation contains The Best of Both Worlds: Parts I & II, Yesterday’s Enterprise and The Measure of a Man, all from 1989-90. Again, it is just a teaser.
On Blu-ray, the Enterprise boldly goes forward. On April 28, Paramount launched Star Trek: The Original Series with Season 1. This week, two new Blu-ray sets followed. One is the movie mothership, a seven-disc set called Star Trek: Original Motion Picture Collection. The other, Star Trek: Motion Picture Trilogy, contains three of the same movies: The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock and The Voyage Home. They are grouped because of storyline. Obviously, if you buy the seven-disc set, you do not need the Trilogy because the discs are exactly the same (and both sets contain new as well as recycled extras). The Trilogy is also released on standard DVD.
Let’s go back to the Blu-ray launch of the original series. The episodes had already been restored for Paramount’s futile HD DVD experiment and are presented close to their pristine glory (meaning they are wonderfully cheesy).
Separately, digital artists enhanced those clumsy special effects, as well as the sound. What you see and hear now is so gorgeous, and presented with such clarity and detail, that viewers are astounded. Unlike George Lucas, when he first digitally diddled his Star Wars trilogy, Paramount gives us the choice of which version to watch right from the get-go. You can also toggle between them. In one example of enhancement, Planet Earth transforms from a murky ball into the Blue Planet, with continents and oceans visible. Mind-blowing!
The six Star Trek movies look good in the Original Motion Picture Collection, too. Less restoration work was done to improve these theatrical cuts, except for Wrath of Khan, which underwent a full restoration from original elements. But there is aother intense debate among Trekkies and techies because five movies were simply processed to make them look cleaner. While “video noise reduction” removes signs of deterioration, it also reduces detail.
Overall, however, Star Trek blasts into a new universe in terms of home viewing. And the Collection adds a seventh disc with The Captains’ Summit. Whoopi Goldberg, a Star Trek freak and former cast member, hosts a folksy, 70-minute jam session with William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes, all eager to please.
They get silly and they get serious. In one significant passage, Shatner explains how the franchise boosted real-life space exploration. “Science in this country, to a large degree, has been inextricably linked to Star Trek.”
bruce.kirkland@sunmedia.ca
