Thursday, August 30, 2007

Star Trek

Staring: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, Walter Koenig

In March I posted on the remastering of Star Trek to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the series.

To put it bluntly, Star Trek was a pioneer of television, and at the very least was the forerunner to what modern sci-fi became. Sure Star Wars really pushed this forward in 1977, but without Trek, Wars - and most of the science fiction that followed would be nowhere.

Sure the series is riddled with some cheap sets - none more obvious than "Spectre of the Gun", in which the crew finds themselves in the wild west... where all the buildings are made up of one singular wall, and the rest being a quite minimalist set. It was done on purpose - and written as such.

Some find old effects "quaint", I don't. I don't want to blast the episodes that my roommate owns, but frankly after seeing what they can do with the remastered footage, it's hard to watch the equivalent "original" series effect shots. They're riddled with see-through Enterprise shots where the stars pass the ship, and apparently right through it too.

The interaction between characters was fantastic. The camaraderie between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy can barely be beat.

What the show really did well was tell a story. This is not to say that all 79 episodes were in any way, shape, or form fantastic, but that when they did the series right it was brilliant. More often than not the series was spot on in its delivery, which might be why even 40 years later so many people are turned onto the series even today.

****½/*****

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