Science Forums 2

[CraigD]

I recall about a year ago adds for a series called “Star Trek 1.1” (or similar), that combined STTOS episodes with popup and/or splitscreen of fan data and comments. It seemed short lived, however, and I never managed to catch an episode of it.

I’m netflixing the remaster episodes. As a science fiction lover born in 1960, these shows were a major formative influence on me. I’ll gleefully consume practically any new content of or about them.

That said, I’m a little wary of substantial revisions of the old video screwing it up. Part of that made the TOS episodes the influential fiction phenomena I consider them to have been was that they were technically imperfect. For example, I recall discussing the “Tomorrow is Yesterday” scenes Janus describe with friends when they originally aired. Even though we were but 6 and 7 years old, the “how can the Enterprise be shooshing past stars on a trip between the Earth and the Sun?!” Appreciating the show without abandoning the science we were learning in school required us to “reshoot” scenes in our minds and conversation to fix such absurdities. Had the series had diligent science advisors and flawless special effects, we’d have had less to criticize and correct. Not only would we have thought less, but our sense that we were substantially better educated and more on-the-ball than the adults making the series – IMHO an important and beneficial conceit - would have been diminished.

I’m seeing and hearing with my inner eyes and ears the flashing lights and claxons of a “Red Alert: STrek fan posting technical critiques of imaginary technology on the internet”, but will press on to voice one more dire fears: The remastering better not mess with the original Matt Jeffries design of the Enterprise!

Sharing, pershaps Infi’s blasphemy, I personally feel that STTNG was, on the whole, better written and acted than STTOS. However, despite its next-generational and better budget improvement in special effects, I consider the TNG ship designs, and those of every ST series and most of the movies since, markedly inferior.

The great beauty of TOS’s Enterprise is that it’s spindly and fragile looking, requiring any viewer with both real engineering sensibilities and an appropriate artistic suspension of disbelief to conclude that something other than 20th century technology and ordinary matter is holding the ship together. Later Enterprises are sturdier and more streamlined. Although no more physically feasible, their extraordinary, albeit fictional, technological nature, is less obvious, tempting the view to think of them as basically just really big, sturdy, powerful rocket ships. IMHO, the whole STrek franchise would have been enhanced had its modelers and designers shaken off the influence of the WWII-imitating Star Wars special effects and made TNG’s Enterprise even more spindly-looking than TOS’s

With the studio-owned franchise practically extinct, I look forward to a multitude of alternative interpretations of STrek. So, any creative folk out there, take note – I’ll pay for reinterpretation, and I’m not, I think, unusual.