I have the 2015 CBS remaster boxed set, but I’m only through season 1. I don’t find the spacecraft scenes jarring but I also never saw any other version. The 3D rendering of the Gemini Galileo shuttlecraft was a bit jarring since I could not believe they had that technology in the '60s - it broke my immersion for a moment - I assume it was part of the remastered “visual effects”.
ETA: And here is a side by side comparison.
~Max
If I remember correctly, the original Blu-rays would have both versions: the original film footage that was rescanned in HD, as well as the updated versions. This wasn’t like TNG, where the effects were done on video and thus had to be remade. They chose to remake them.
I personally see situations where the original looks better and where the new stuff look better. The planets always look better, for example. The ships can look better in some cases, but can also look worse, depending on which effects group handled it. The “fixed” Bussard collectors, however, always hurt it, and I don’t know why they insisted on it. Generally speaking, I’d say the other ships tend to look like upgrades. And it’s great that they could actually show the sun and have us feel the danger.
The updated mattes often look better, but sometimes seem to be too much, especially when they have to throw them in to cover up for an effect in the original.
I think the worst of it, however, is just the mismatch between the effects. The older effects just blended better with lower budget practical effects. They really should have attempted to have the CGI models look like they could have been cobbled together practically.
They do a much better job updating the effects for TNG. They stuck closer to the originals.
AFAIK, they never did 16:9 on either one. The series just were not filmed with that in mind, and it wasn’t practical.
So phaser me. I happen to like the CGI stuff!
When TNG premiered, I refused to watch it. It broke my heart that the interiors and graphics from the first episode probably cost more than what was spent for the entire three years of TOS.
It took a few years, and I finally would watch and enjoy TNG, too. The snazzy everything was still just an accompaniment to the characters and the story, just as the cheezy sfx of TOS didn’t detract from the characters and the story.
Whether or not you like or loathe the CGI remastered versions of TOS, remember this: it’s really all about the characters and the story.
~VOW
Yeah, I watched all the TOS BluRays recently and both were available. I picked up the first season kind of on a whim, I was never a big Trekker growing up, but I found an inexpensive set of BRs used and we were probably heading back into lockdown. And it rekindled interest in the show for me. I have a pile of BR sets now, but I’m kind of sad that, AFAIK, neither DS9 nor Voyager will be appearing on the format. I read somewhere that sales of TNG on BluRay were so middling that Paramount didn’t want to flush good money after bad remastering two more entire series.
There are some slight indulgences. Some episodes have shots from different angles that weren’t there originally, but aren’t really distracting unless you know them by heart (and don’t we all?) or have the Big E and another ship/planet in the shot at the same time where they couldn’t before. And the Return to Tomorrow is Yesterday’s Enterprise episode where the Big E gets scoped by the F104 is a lot better. Not only does the Enterprise not look like a two dimensional slide filmed in front of a photo of a cloud, but you get shots through the 104 canopy.
But nostalgia only goes so far. Even as a kid in the early 70s I balked at the not-so-special space effects of the original show. Alien ships that looked like twinkling blobs of light, photon torpedoes and phaser effects being used interchangeably at random, planets that looked like amateurishly-painted beach balls or planets that looked exactly like earth but with no clouds at all
I accepted the effects because I liked the characters and the stories, and still do. But they were poor to fair even when they were new.
Well, let’s hope you are a Trekkie for some time to come. Consider Prospering.
“Live Long and Hang In There?”
~VOW
Keep on trekkin"
The starry backdrops were better done in TOS than TNG, even if you are talking about the original TOS footage. I still cringe whenever I see the latter’s backdrops, which a 3rd grader could have improved on. Blurry non-point yellow light sources, all the same magnitude, no Milky Way or nebulas to be seen anywhere. Made it seem like they were in a cramped soundstage universe, which they were. At least TOS had supergiants of various colors.
The SF show with the best skies was Space-1999 of all things, which used actual astronomy photos I believe. Gave you the impression of utter vastness.
I liked the twinkling blob ships most of the time, as they were usually used for very alien ships with unknown propulsion technology. It thought it made them look mysterious, like they were somehow different. That’s not to say I never liked the CGI replacements, but there were times when I thought keeping it a colored blob made sense.
I agree that fixing the wrong effects is an improvement: make it be phasers (from the right part of the ship) when it is phasers. And, like I said, the CGI planets always look better–though, to be fair, they are all just matte paintings that could have been done that way at the time (save for the more accurate versions of Earth, as the footage just didn’t exist).
I don’t agree that the different of the ship shots aren’t distracting, though, even if you don’t know the originals by heart. There are just certain angles that clearly look like showing off the CGI, with sweeps that would be difficult practically, and which call attention to themselves. The CGI quality is passable, but they failed at the mottling, where you give small imperfections and details that sell the size and reality of the subject. That’s almost certainly what gives the “cartoonish” look people are describing. (Well, that and the aforementioned Bussard collectors with their unrealistically bright and perfect reddish color. It looked better when the lights just weren’t visible.)
They also couldn’t agree on making the stars look right, sometimes making them so small that you could barely see them, and other times making them not fuzzy at all, like little balls. I can’t say I consciously noticed while watching the remastered versions, but it’s plain as day on the stills. And often whether something looks real to you is based on things you don’t quite consciously notice.
That is due in no small part to the fact that TOS was made before we really knew what planets looked like from space/orbit. The original effects were a guess, the new effects look more like what our probes and robots actually show us when they orbit another planet.
Reminds me how the BBC Doctor Who DVDs (pre-reboot) often featured new CGI to replace some of the truly atrocious original series effects. (E.g., a shot from “The Time Warrior” of a distant spaceship crashing was done with a light bulb against a dark cloth.) Sometimes the result was a little jarring, but for the most part, they did a good job of keeping within the spirit of the original show.
It actually makes sense to have alien ships appear as blobs of light when you consider how vast the distances are. Even with magnification, you probably would have a hard time making out another vessel’s configuration or markings.
One change they made in the remastered episodes had me laughing. The original Morg ship in “Spock’s Brain” was the same one that was used in an episode of The Time Tunnel. It had multiple globes held in a lattice structure and sprouting antennas The revised version looked like a hockey puck propelled along its z-axis
Hey, the Gorn blinks now, so I forgive anything else.
I had that experience more than 30 years ago. In the late 1980s I worked in the IMAX theater at the National Air and Space Museum, and for a science fiction film festival we obtained 35mm prints of some TOS episodes from Paramount. The image didn’t fill the height of the 55-foot-tall screen, but it was pretty damn big.
Seeing the episodes that big, in full 35mm resolution (better than HD), was really amazing, until a fight sequence started. Then the entire audience started laughing, because the shots with the stunt doubles were painfully obvious.
If its the same effects when they were on Netflix, Im fine with them. I was also fine with the old ones.
Pity they didn’t give him a reptilian eye too. 
I’m not a fan of the new stuff either. I also feel badly for the original effects people (if they are still around) or their kids/grandkids. They used to be able to point to the spaceship models as something they were connected to, but not anymore.