Wow! I had no idea they were that far along with the visuals for Phase II. It sounds like a really cool concept. I miss the pre-cgi days! With regard to the artwork being lost or stolen -- if true, that's too bad and an incalculable loss to the pre-TMP artwork archive! I hope it still turns up some day.
Are these from that promo reel? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6c6oCMN8N5E http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuTc4tsNJqA If so I can't find the air tram shot, but there appears to be one video (#1 of 5) in this user's sequence missing that may have contained it. The second one seems to be from some type of workprint, with production audio, Goldsmith temp score, and few effects (the Vulcan shuttle's there but no wormhole yet -- and no "scene missing" placeholders). So perhaps they were preparing for test screenings that never happened due to time? Seems to me they might have used Abel footage or artwork (however unfinished or otherwise unacceptable for whatever reason) as placeholders until the Trumbull / Dykstra effects came in.
I scanned through bits of them, and the second one is very similar, exactly the same in the parts where they use the BLACK SUNDAY music, and it also has the great unused Apogee asteroid explosion. The narrator on the second one -- the same guy on the longer trailer on the dvd, not Welles -- is the same also. I'm guessing that second one is a big hunk of the reel I have.
The explanation in CINEFEX 2 is that when the debris hit the forcefield around the ship, it just didn't go away convincingly (rotoscope work.) I don't have the issue anymore, but Dykstra said they used about half the electricity in L.A. to get the shot, since it was backlit and shot very high-speed. But geez, there's no forcefield at all in the theatrical cut, and the explosion looks like it comes from another movie! (and the DE messes it all up by putting a fireball in the shot, plus it doesn't correct the impression that the torp MISSES ... it always looks to me like it goes OUT the side of the wormhole instead of reaching the rock.)
Both the torpedo shot and the shot of Spock blasting away from the Enterprise suffer from the object appearing to travel in a curved line. The asteroid debris hitting the shields sounds quite awesome.
Yeah, that would have been cool. With cgi, that would be simple to do. I didn't care for that shot on the YouTube though... But, about that asteroid scene: That, to me, has always been a mess. It just makes no sense as shot and cut into the film. I think what it needed was a shot showing the asteriod being sucked into the warp field along with the Enterprise when the Enterprise jumps into warp. That might have reinforced it a bit...I don't know...just brainstorming here. The whole wormhole/asteroid thing needed reworking in my opinion. It's not very clear what's going on...at least to your average Joe moviegoer... One thing that I think the Abel team was planning on doing was having a POV shot of a photon torpedo going through the tube during firing (the camera flying along with the torpedo). There was a description in a magazine I read when ST:TMP was in production (at the time, I was grabbing up every magazine that had basically the slightest reference to the production of the film -- I was a junkie for what constituted as "spoilers" at that time*) that said one of the things we could look forward to in ST:TMP was a "Hellfire trip through a photon torpedo tube". The article came out when the Abel team was working on the visuals, so I am certain this was their concept -- not Trumbull/Dykstras. I forgot to ask Taylor about this when I interviewed him. But, I always thought that would have been a cool shot. I was disappointed when the film came out and that shot wasn't in the film. The Abel storyboards show more action that what was in the film -- at least the ones in The Art of Star Trek. The first V'Ger blast at the Enterprise shows Kirk ordering evasive maneuvers and the ship moving away at high speed to avoid the blast. In the film they just talk about raising shields and sit there taking hits (not as dynamic in my opinion); testing the shields. I think RAA was going to show a bubble around the ship for the shields. Who knows what else would have been executed differently by the Abel team? The opening titles in the script describe flying through space and then we see a "star" that becomes the V'ger cloud and the three Klingon ships as we get closer to it. As it is in the film, there's just a fade transition from either the black slides (theatrical release) or the starfield (Director's cut). *Imagine having to wait a month for the latest issue of a magazine to get production news on TV series and films! That's how it was back then! Nowadays we are spoiled with all this near instantaneous news.
Part of the problem was Ilia's unintelligible line that said "Another object has been drawn into the wormhole directly ahead of us captain". It really explained what was going on, and you can barely hear it.
Not a correction, just a note on how jarring it is. I actually watched it subtitled a long time ago and she says, "An Unidentified small object has been thrown into the worm hole with us captain, directly ahead."
Ah, yes. I was typing from memory. The line is very difficult to discern. A first-time viewer wouldn't stand a chance.
Hey, I was just a kid who was watching it for the sheer crazy out of control spectacular that it was. One of the silliest moments for me was when Chekov said "Torpedo is away!", I thought he said "make kul free ko go away!"
Certain friends of mine, when I come across them again after several years' absence, invariably wind up pointing at me in recognition and saying "tar-get-ing ass-ter-oid" If you spend almost 5 hrs in line for a movie, you gotta take whatever little pleasures it affords you and milk them for the next few decades.
Similarly, "Phoooooo-tonnnnnnn torrrrrr-peeeeee-does... AWAYYYY!" become a running joke among me and my friends in high school.
Don't feel sad kid, many people swear they saw the words "To Be Continued" at the end of Back to the Future but they weren't there until it came out on video. ST:TMP is 30 years old this year. You cannot be that adamant about something you saw 30 years ago, and admittedly only once. It's a little immature.
You folk are certifiable! I am 46 years old and I know what I saw! I wsh I had never brought it up and just keep it to myself!
ncc-1017-e, let me tell you a story. When The Wizard of Oz first came out on LaserDisc, I went, "MGM cut this version!" After Dorthy kills the Wicked Witch of the West, missing was the reprise of "Ding Dong The Witch is Dead" sung by the witch's guards. The guards, Dorthy, the Tin Woodsman, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and Toto, too, were all marching around the castle walls, singing the song. That scene was absent from the LaserDisc. I called up MGM and, amazingly, got through to the appropriate office. I talked to a nice lady and said, "Remember that scene, the reprise of "Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead" and everyone dancing around? She said yes. Well, it's gone, I told her. We ended up talking a couple of times on the phone. Everyone in her office at MGM also remembered that scene but they also couldn't believe that they would actually cut an official release of The Wizard of Oz. Knowing Hollywood, I wasn't as confident of the studio's integrity, but the woman said she'd do some research and get back to me. A few weeks later I received a letter in the mail. She had two comments. One, in the movie, after the witch was killed, it is a dissolve from the witch's castle back to the wizard's throne room. It isn't a cut. While a dissolve could be done in a later print, it would be tougher to do and indicated that maybe there was no reprise of the song (remember, this was still back in the days of analog film editing). Secondly, her best evidence was that she'd gone back to the sheet music for the original musical score, still on file, and pulled it out. There was no reprise of the song. It was never played by the studio musicians. In other words, all of our memories were wrong. Mine, hers and everyone at MGM's. Actually, I bet the truth was my memory was wrong and through the power of suggestion, I'd convinced them there was a song missing, too. There was no reprise of Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead after the Wicked Witch of the West was killed. I'm ten years older than you, ncc-1017-e, but I'm sure we both grew up watching The Wizard of Oz on TV every Christmas season. I KNOW that movie. To this day, I would swear there was a reprise of the song. But I also know that my memory is faulty and there never was one. Such are the tricks of the mind. But, of course, YMMV.