Star Trek: The Menagerie (in theaters)

Yesterday I had the pleasure of going to one of my local movie theaters and actually viewing two episodes of Star Trek the original series on a large movie screen.

For those of you who do not watch a lot of Star Trek or have not seen the Menagerie yet, it was absoultely amazing. Non-scifi fans probably should stay away, for obvious reasons.

Anyway, onto the technical aspects. The colors have never been as vibrant, and the image quality was almost as good as any film I've seen on a big screen and far better looking than any film I've seen that is at least as old as this is - 40+ years to be more exact. There were no scratches, no washed out colors, and nothing that you'd expect from the standard broadcast image that fans have known for the last few decades. It is much better looking than both varieties of the DVDs that they've sold as well. Compared to this, they're absolute crap.

The new graphics were great. Captain Pike actually looked like he was on Earth, and the added shuttle effects and additional people to the Starbase at the start of the story were a nice touch. The only thing I was disappointed with was that they didn't replace the Talos Star System chart at the start of the “Cage” footage. If they learn anything from this, it would be that the original Enterprise looks amazing just as it is on the big screen (there are rumors that they're drastically changing the look of the ship for Star Trek XI).

There were three times everyone laughed. One was when they discussed how Orion women were irresistible, and then cut to Kirk's intense close-up reaction shot. Priceless. Other moments were when Spock has (I guess) a momentary lapse of his Vulcan-ness and yells "THE WOMEN!!!" all shocked looking on the transporter pad, and when Vina yells "No! Let me finish!" when Number One and Yeoman Colt are beamed down and Pike. A few chuckles when Spock yet again let his Vulcan-ness lapse when he smiled early on in the story with the odd plants and when the Keeper made reference to Colt realizing she might a chance (*wink* *wink*) with the captain. Apparently seeing paper come out of the Enterprise ’s computer was funny as well to many. So much for the “paperless” society in the far future.

The only real downside was that while the ticket receipt and e-mail confirmation said 7:30pm for a starting time, the actual event began at 7:00 pm where I was seeing it. Thank goodness we discovered this at around 7:35 so we were able to get there just after 7:00. We just missed some of the behind the scenes feature. There were people still coming in at 7:30, about 5-10 minutes after the actual episode began. I'd be really ticked off, especially at $12.50 a ticket.