The striking color effects, BTW, were one of the things NBC (“the first all-color network”) relied on to promote the show.
**[nerd hat firmly on]
**
I agree about the Gorn eyes. I felt that the blinking eyelids just brought unnecessary attention to them. Plus when Enterprise previously showed a full-CGI Gorn they did give him reptilian, slit eyes.
And for those who don’t know, Enterprise also established a canonical reason for the ‘fu-man-chu’ looking Klingons of TOS (Enterprise was a prequel, but the Klingons in it initially had ridges). The Klingons found out about the human ‘augments’ program (Khan from Space Seed) and developed their own, but using human DNA. Consequently a whole generation of Klingons wound up looking more like humans (no head ridges, lighter skin etc.) As someone above quoted Worf from DS9, because of the shame of the whole incident they simply, “…do not speak of it with outsiders…”
.
Except, of course, for the fact, that the same individuals show up both ways.
Kang, Koloth, and Kor come to mind, immediately. (All of them were much less obnoxious once they got their ridges back.)
My point is, they could have avoided the whole silly ridge issue by invoking Occam’s Razor. No need to give anyone back anything, or to come up with a very contrived explanation for something that was blatantly obvious.
By the way, I intensely disliked the way the Klingons and Vulcans were portrayed in later years. The former went from being the personification of evil to somewhat dim, poorly understood, equal-opportunity noble warriors. The latter, with few exceptions, ceased to be coolly logical and displayed emotion almost as openly as humans.
Klingons have Rrrrrrrrrridges!
(No one under 40 will get that)
You’re going to ruffle someone with that comment… 
That explains it, both ways. Thanks.
I have these on DVD, and agree with the general consensus here; they didn’t do a bad job. While the updates don’t increase my enjoyment, they don’t detract either.
There are a few moments when the new effects/CGI are jarring (the aforementioned Amok Time for one, and a few shots where they added the warp nacels outside of the ship’s windows). And, every time they cut from an exterior Enterprise shot to the inside of the bridge, it’s a little amusing to see the lo-fi control panels and lights after just watching a much higher-resolution level of tech.
“the” Star Trek?
The only enhancements I’ve noticed that annoyed me are in the episode Doomsday Machine.
They fixed a lot of stuff - fixing the relative sizes of star ships, shuttlecraft, and the “planet killer”, but the planet killer still looks like a spray painted Bugle corn chip.
That would even be fine, but with the doomsday device looking like ass they *added *FX footage, and removed on-ship dialog to make the episode still fit the time constraint!
They removed Decker and Spock’s “Vulcans never bluff.” “No, I don’t suppose that they do…” scene! The power struggle and military politics are what make the episode! It’s not the stupid first-grade cornucopia Thanksgiving project with no visible propulsion or navigation mechanism.
Allergic reaction to tribbles.
Sacrilege! KA-BOOM!!! :mad:
I’m glad I’ve yet to see the remastered episode. I’d’ve gone WHAT THE RAT F*CK?!? :eek:
I remember reading somewhere that one distinct thing about being on the STAR TREK set was the perpetual odor of burning gels (those lamps were freakin’ HOT!!!), and they were constantly being replaced as shooting progressed. Some of the stagehands actually got sick inhaling the fumes!
…but comely.
(Which may be the most obscure ST:TOS reference my jammed Trekkie brain can pull forth…)
“She’s black! She’s BLACK!!!” :eek:
I’ve only seen a few of the remastered episodes and I found them to be quite well done. Very restrained.
By god, she is. It was twenty years and more before I found out what they were referencing… which made it funny all over again.
An example of Robot Arm’s Law of the Emasculated Sci-Fi Badass. There is no canonical statement of this law, yet, but to summarize, sci-fi movies and television create great villains, who then become popular, and are then turned into heroes in the sequel (or even the same movie) to cash in on their popularity. Examples include:
Klingons
Darth Vader
the shark in Jaws
HAL-9000
the T. Rex in Jurassic Park
the Terminator
and probably more. I keep meaning to start a thread to get a more complete list.
Is that what you think happened with Klingons? I acknowledge that your law exists, and maybe we should blame it on wrestling but I don’t see with Klingons.
Obviously, we got a more nuanced and respectable view of them in TNG and later, but it seems to me the cause was that they were based on Russians, the US view of which also changed in the 1980’s and beyond.
There’s always an in-continuity reason for the change. The Law works outside of that. For Klingons it happened between the original series and next-gen. There was no particular requirement that ST:TNG had to have a Klingon in the main cast. But after the original series, Klingons were cool. The producers of TNG would want a cool, popular character in their show. It’s easier to capitalize on existing coolness than try to create it from scratch. Then they just needed a reason to have a Klingon around all the time.
TNG created their own badasses with the Borg. By the end of Voyager, miss badass Borg was running around in a silver catsuit.
Except it never completely works. Very few shows are about villains. And when you make the cool villain a hero, you take away some of his coolness. TOS Klingons were badasses (to the extent allowed by '60s television). Worf was brooding, conflicted, and got beat up more often than Tonto.