Previews of Superbly Remastered Star Trek: The Original Series
by Pravin on September 5th, 2007 in movies.
The 40th anniversary of Star Trek is upon us, and Star Trek: The Original Series – The Complete First Season is coming only on HD DVD this November. CBS has been busy releasing previews of the great work they’ve done on this 10-disc set.
I heard about these videos from a couple of HD-oriented websites like High-Def Digest and Format War Central, but visiting YouTube turned up many more clips. A lot of those clips are actually the smaller parts of this longer one that gives a little glimpse into all the many ways they’ve respectfully enhanced and fixed the original footage, music, and effects:
click here if the video does not appear above
You can get even more information at Trekkie heaven: StarTrek.com
The disc will retail for about $200, but that’s just the list price. You can pre-order Star Trek: The Original Series at Amazon right now for about $60 less than that.
We’ll definitely be talking more about this disc set as the release date approaches.
September 5th, 2007 at 6:07 am
Whenever Paramount wants to generate revenue they invariably look to the Star Trek franchise for a shot in the arm. Trek is actually a money maker of well over a billion dollars for Paramount which is why they never abandon new Trek for long (a new feature film is slated for next year). I have seen some of the remastered episodes and both Star Trek fans and HD afficianados are in for a treat. Forgetting for a moment, the new CGI effects, the prints themselves have been cleaned up and look spectacular. They used the original shooting negatives for the clean up process and the images really pop. The original Star Trek leaned very heavily on primary colors and in fact was a driving force in the purchase of color television sets in the mid to late 60’s. The restored episodes look as close to Technicolor as a NON Technicolor film can. Now to the CGI. The original exterior effects (planets, ships etc ) have all been replaced with state of the art CGI and it is almost like seeing the show for the first time. There are going to be tons of HD extras and an interactive component that allows you to “fly” a shuttle around the exterior of the Enterprise. Needless to say I am looking forward to this release and it would not surprise me to see this set sell in excess of 200,00 units. I have seen it advertised at as low as $135 which is very reasonable for a 10 disc set.