Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I have been a fan of Star Trek since I was a small boy in the 1970s, when the original series WAS Star Trek – all of Star Trek. The original series is still my favorite, and it’s not just nostalgia for the days of my youth that makes this so. I think the show the show was simply better in concept than its successor. I liked TNG overall, but I always thought it was a little too touchy-feely. I hated the idea of children on a vessel which was sent on dangerous exploratory missions, and which also had to be the Federation’s first line of defense against hostile attack. I purely loathed the overreliance on technobabble that we saw in The Next Generation. TNG suffered badly its first two seasons by Roddenberry restricting conflict between the characters, as he felt that humanity would have “moved beyond” that sort of thing. It’s why TNG didn’t really get good till the 3rd season, when Roddenberry’s ill health forced him to step away and hand creative control over to someone else. The problem here, and the reason why TOS did not suffer from these same ills, is that Gene Roddenberry had spent the entirety of the 1970s attending conventions where adoring fans would tell him at every opportunity how great he was, and what a visionary he was, with such a stunning conception of humanity’s future. Frankly, it went to his head and he started believing it a little too much. TOS came before all that, and it’s a little grittier and more down to earth as a result. It still presents a positive and inspiring vision of humanity’s future, and one where human society is genuinely improved, but without hand-waving away the uglier aspects of human nature or pretending that we in a mere couple of hundred years, will “move beyond” human nature in a way we haven’t so far managed to do in tens of thousands. Indeed, some TOS episodes, such as “Where No Man Has Gone Before” and “Charlie X” are directly about how savage and ugly human nature can be, and how dangerous humans can be if they get too much power. By the 1980s though, Roddenberry had internalized that fan message of what a great and noble moral philosopher he was, and his vision of the future by then was a little too unrealistically utopian, in my view. TNG reflects this, especially in its first two seasons when he was dictating things creatively. This is not to say TNG was bad (as I said, I do enjoy it), or that TOS was all good – it certainly had some terrible clunkers among its episodes (e.g. “Spock’s Brain,” “The Way to Eden” [space hippies!], “The Omega Glory,” “And the Children Shall Lead,” et al.), but at its best, it was a truly great show, with some of the best characters in TV history. The blu ray edition of the series is the one to get. You get the episodes in their original, unedited 50 minute length (in reruns, several minutes are routinely cut these days, since most modern “hour long” shows run only 42 minutes and networks want to put in more commercials. You also get to watch the episodes either with the original, 1960s special effects, or the remastered ones with the modern CGI updates. A lot of fans are down on the CGI remastered version, but I for one love them. The original effects were good for their day, given the constraints of 1960s technology, and a TV show budget. In fact, the show’s creators did a fantastic job within those limitations. It’s usually fans of the old show that denigrate the CGI, but a lot of modern viewers, who are not Star Trek purists, are so used to today’s far superior visual effects, that the old effects just look disappointing and take them out of the story. Apart from making TOS more accessible to a wider audience today, the CGI effects achieve two important goals. The first is to bring the special effects up to par with the live action footage. All the live action scenes were filmed on 35mm film stock, and when cleaned up, this looks great on modern high definition TV screens. This can, occasionally, make some of the cheap set and costume elements noticeable in a way they never were on standard definition TV screens, but overall, the series has never looked better. The problem was, they simply couldn’t make the effects footage look that good. The effects shots were filmed on 16mm film stock, and then on top of that, the process of matting different elements together to form finished shots resulted in a further loss of definition, and the final product simply can’t be shown on modern high definition large screens without the difference in sharpness and picture quality being very apparent – it really is too; the image is noticeably grainy and lower in definition. Updating the FX in modern CGI was the only way to give the series effects footage that was the equal of the live action. The second goal achieved, though perhaps less important to casual viewers, was to finally make the appearance of the Enterprise consistent in each episode. The problem with the original FX footage was, again, budgetary. The eleven foot model of the Enterprise was modified twice after it was built for the original pilot “The Cage.” For the second pilot “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” some internal lights were added, and a little more detail painted on. When the series went into regular production, the model was modified again, much more extensively. The bridge was shortened in height, the deflector dish on the front of the secondary hull was made smaller. The front caps of the engine nacelles, which had been dark red with a brass spike protruding forward were replaced with the translucent ones that had the rotating/blinking lights, and the rear end caps were changed from having a “grill” pattern painted on the end, to having white, hemispherical caps added. Even more internal lighting was added, and this had the effect of making the model filmable from only the starboard side, as all the wires and cables to control the model’s internal lighting were ducted through the port side, and were now visible. Budget constraints made it necessary to reuse a lot of stock footage (the entire 3rd season used ONLY stock footage, with no new scenes with the model being shot), and the result was that scenes of different versions of the model (usually the second pilot and regular series versions) would appear beside each other in every single episode. Even as a kid I noticed this, and it was always a little distracting. The CGI effects finally clean this up, and you only see the pilot versions of the ship in the pilot episodes, and never in the regular series run, where it’s always the third version. Certain episodes, like “The Doomsday Machine,” “The Tholian Web,” “The Ultimate Computer” and others, really allow the new effects to shine. But if you are one of those purists who doesn’t like the upgraded CGI, the blu ray gives you the option of watching the original version, with the original special effects.