New TOS - Should we?

[uniderth]

About 20 years ago, I told a friend who designed computer chips that it wouldn't be too long before computer animation would allow us to create new episodes of TOS with Shatner, Nimoy et al., which looked like original episodes with new, original performances. At the time, I put a 15 year figure on when I thought that would happen. He told me it could never happen. As a side note, I described a quantum computer, which he also told me could never happen. Such is the difference between technicians and visionaries :-)

Now that we're within spitting distance of being able to make such a project reality, my question, though, is this: should we?

For most of my life, I thought more Trek is always a good thing. Ii thought that when TMP premiered. I thought that when Voyager premiered, and then Enterprise, and then Insurrection and Nemesis. As I've gotten older and, debatably, wiser, I've come to the conclusion that more Trek is not necessarily better, and that the confluence of the people who made TOS was a one-time thing that was gone forever. And then I thought that Star Trek Continues and Star Trek New Voyages did a pretty good job of creating new TOS. And THEN I thought that Discovery, while palatable, stray so far from the TOS vibe that for me it wouldn't count.

My ultimate thought is that the effort would take a lot of time and money, that because of that (and other reasons) it would be studio-financed, and that the studios cannot be counted on to make a true TOS. It probably would not behoove them to do so.

So, having gone through all that, who do you think? Assuming that we get to a point where we can, should we make new TOS episodes?

I initially thought you would be saying remake and replace the original episodes. But as for making new episodes I say YES! I would love to see Pike's ten years and Kirk's five years filled out on screen.

The caveat is that it would have to be done to match the '60s aesthetic, acting, writing styles, lighting, camera work, etc. as exactly as possible.

It should be like these were lost episodes pulled from a vault rather than made new in the modern era. You should be able to watch all the episodes and have them seamlessly fit with the original content.

So that means, Yes, you would occasionally get stuff that what we today would consider cringy, or sexist. But I doubt anyone today would have the guts or passion to take on such a project.

 

[Pauln6]

I don't think digital avatars will be viable or convincing for many years. Grand Moff Tarkin, while seriously impressive, still looked wrong enough that I wished his appearances had been on a viewscreen rather than in person.

That said, I would love to see a short Trek animation to see what it looks like and what synthesised voices sound like. It might be fun to watch versions of STP2 or STNV with digital avatars although on balance, I'd probably prefer a proper animated series over a digitally recreated one.

I'm trying a face swap experiment in a small scene in Star Trek TMP to see if I can import Grace Lee Whitney into the second half of the movie (replacing the face of Terrence O'connor). My laptop is crazy slow and if the results so far are anything to go by, it will look terrible, but it's a fun experiment. I think the technology works better for small experiments like this.

 

[ChallengerHK]

Interested in seeing your results.

 

[Delta Vega]

STNV = Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II (Fan-based new TOS episodes)
STC = Star Trek Continues (another Fan-based new TOS episodes)

Thank you

 

[Pauln6]

Interested in seeing your results.

Apparently the images from which the training program works are reduced in size so they are quite fuzzy when scaled up and they would not look good enough for a close up. It remains to be seen how good it will look from a distance. My problem is that it would take a fraction of the time to train if I had a graphics card but I'm between PCs so I'm a week in and still nowhere near completed.

It's part of a little project I've been toying with for my 40th Anniversary homage to TMP (there is a thread in the movie forum) which includes taking some of Grace's dialogue from other sources to give her a (fractionally) higher profile in the movie. I've experimented with manual editing, which I think is problematic without more professional software. She has very little on screen dialogue to work with and over-exaggerates her dialogue so any effort to tweak her lip movements for other phrasing looks really over done. One possibility is to Deepfake her face with her own face to try and smooth it out (someone tried this with footage from a New Hope and the digital avatar in Rogue One).

One possible spin off is to Deepfake Grace as a background character in seasons two and three of TOS. The blonde extra Jeannie Malone often sits at the engineering station plus she gives Kirk his coffee in Wink of an Eye and attends his memorial in the Tholian Web. It might even be possible to splice close ups from other episodes to give her a presence on the bridge looking worried say in Arena or the Gamesters of Triskeleon, possibly even using her exclamation from Miri to call out when he's about to get nobbled.

The pinnacle would be digital avatars for small extra scenes. My choices would be Rand beaming down in costume as a gangster's moll in a Piece of the Action (using footage from Irma la Douche) maybe throwing an insult from the Man Trap at one of the gangsters; one or two scenes in This Side of Paradise such as Kirk confronting Rand in the corridor with the other crew, using dialogue from her Outer Limits appearance and a scene later on of her getting angry on the planet, and a scene in Turnabout Intruder based around her meeting by the Turbolift from the Enemy Within where Lester-Kirk calls her by the name of one of the other yeomen that came after as an in-joke, since both characters share the same name, to which, after he leaves, she comments to herself, "Suppose he's going space happy or something?" The problem I identified there is that Kirk was wearing his green wrap-around in the Enemy Within.

I could also think about Deepfake effects on the blonde replacement yeomen Teresa Ross and Doris Atkins but that would be a massive undertaking with dubious results.

I sound crazy and I'm not saying I will attempt this but I had the project in mind during a rewatch and made some notes as I went. Since Rand has little dialogue in her 8 episodes, it was easy to sift through it for something useful. Maybe I can turn it into a retirement project in 20 years time.

 

[ChallengerHK]

Small steps :-)

BTW, I think I disagree with your assessment about how difficult or easy avatars will be to make believable. I agree that it will be tough, but in my opinion we almost have the technical ability now. The problem will be finding one or more people who combine technical expertise with artistic ability and sensitivity to the nuances of the performance. Admittedly, those will be rare individuals, but they will exist.

 

[uniderth]

Small steps :-)

BTW, I think I disagree with your assessment about how difficult or easy avatars will be to make believable. I agree that it will be tough, but in my opinion we almost have the technical ability now. The problem will be finding one or more people who combine technical expertise with artistic ability and sensitivity to the nuances of the performance. Admittedly, those will be rare individuals, but they will exist.

I think the key is to have as much be real as possible. If you can find someone who sounds like Shatner,etc. with similar body shape then you're pretty close already. You just then need to limit your recreation to the face which is admittedly very difficult and the most important part. But if you can get the body, mannerisms, and voice all there in real life, then you've reduced the complexity by a lot.

Here's a good example of what could be done:

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We're not quite there yet to make a full recreation of fifteen years worth of episodic TV. But it's getting closer.

 

[BillJ]

The performances and story types in STC and STNV are close enough that they satisfy my sweet tooth for TOS.

The original Star Trek was lightening in a bottle. Even the fan films that try to portray that era come off as awkward and cartoonish (with the exception of Starship Exeter, who had the good sense to create new characters).

New adventures of Kirk and Spock shouldn’t be hamstrung by some folks inability to let go of the past.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

Interesting question, and one I was mulling the other day (hey, I think about Star Trek a lot).

I don't want an Uncanny Valley series, I don't believe. It would be interesting, but ultimately there would be flaws. What I also absolutely do not want is some Discovery-ized reboot with lens flares, fungal drives, total murdering of canon, etc.

Agreed. Paramount/CBS and associated companies I will not name have proven they cannot capture the heart, lore and image of TOS, or are interested in ridiculous revisions no one demanded.

But as you pointed out, STC (which was a favorite of mine) and STNV showed that even without a profit motive, you can recreate Star Trek.

Yep, and for those who think that it "doesn't work 'cause of.." DS9's "Trials and Tribble-ations" and ENT's "In a Mirror, Darkly" proved that the TOS look could work in then-contemporary productions wthout anyone questioning it.

…then, there was....

and I want the sets to be re-creations. The bridge needs to like THE BRIDGE, not an Apple store, not a dentist's office (sorry, TNG, I love ya in so many ways but that was just such a bummer), not stuffed with "updated" displays, and not someone's 2019+ reimagining of what the bridge should look like

Agree with everything you said, and the official productions mentioned above prove that it works, contrary to the YouTube channel Trekyards, where its hosts--Stuart Foley and Samuel Cockings have complained more than few times about "updating" the TOS bridge consoles with everything from holographic touch screens to the kind of crap that you see in DISC and the JJ movies.

Its funny--the technology evolution from TOS through TAS, the TOS movies and into the TNG era made perfect sense, and no one complained, but it seems some are incapable of seeing the strength of the design sense of TOS, ad how it naturally flowed onto/influenced everything to follow. Instead, some are simply conditioned to ignore that in favor of the kind of glossy mess dumped from the JJ and DISC productions.

 

[ChallengerHK]

I'll add one thing: calling them Kirk and Spock doesn't make them Kirk and Spock. Those are names, not characters.

 

[BillJ]

I'll add one thing: calling them Kirk and Spock doesn't make them Kirk and Spock. Those are names, not.characters.

I thought Kirk and Spock were very much in character in the Abrams’ films, and Spock as well in Discovery.

 

[Commishsleer]

I thought Kirk and Spock were very much in character in the Abrams’ films, and Spock as well in Discovery.

I don't agree about the Kelvin films but given the different life path, the emergency situation it could be a different version of the same guys. To me Spock is a much more confident guy in Kelvin - perhaps rocking a cool girlfriend does that to you. And Pine Kirk is much less charismatic than Shatner Kirk. But they have to be different (up-to-date) to appeal to a modern audience. Do the millennial generation want to see a Kirk who actually spent years earning his commission rather than a Kirk who got his captaincy based on a field commision?

 

[ChallengerHK]

I had a wide range of responses to the Kelvin films. For the first one, I thought it was fun, and I could see glimmers of the characters in the performance. I thought the goofiness was over the top, but in the interest of making a fun film I overlooked most of it.

The Khan reboot just failed on almost every level, and Kirk and Spock were definitely out of character. The Fast and the Trekious was just embarrassingly bad. My daughter hates sf in general and Trek in particular, and I had talked her into going to see it. I had to apologize profusely later. (That being said, I do think there are TOS episodes that border on being as bad as TFatT.)

So, as I've said before, I don't think of them as TOS, or part of TOS. TOS adjacent, TOS lite, either one I'd agree to. Elsewhere I've commented about the Ed Miarecki restoration of the 11 foot model, and how, having talked to him, I believe that a big part of the problem was that Miarecki approached the job as an artist, wanting to leave his personal mark on it, instead of as a conservator, restoring it and protecting it for future generations. Abrams, I think, has the same attitude, starting with the name Star Trek, the names of the characters, the name of the ship, and then just going crazy with it. I would rather have seen him approach the job as having a mandate to protect the legacy, having the original characters grow instead of presenting new characters with the same names.

 

[BillJ]

So, as I've said before, I don't think of them as TOS, or part of TOS.

They aren’t TOS, they can’t be. For good and ill, TOS is a beast of the 1960’s that can’t be replicated. The people and society that created it are long gone.

 

[fireproof78]

They aren’t TOS, they can’t be. For good and ill, TOS is a beast of the 1960’s that can’t be replicated. The people and society that created it are long gone.

I heard a friend of mine describe it is like a band and trying to create their original sound from their first album. He said its basically impossible because the first album is full of mistakes and inexperience that will be learned and moved on from by the next album.

Star Trek is the same way. It started out as highly experimental (Shatner admits as much, noting the differences between Season 1 and Season 2 and their performances). So, recreating that exact feel is highly difficult, specifically around lore and performances. They are, as one might expect, unique.

 

[Phaser Two]

Sure. But as STC and the DS9 and ENT writers proved, there's a way to recapture the same charm and yet be "modern." STC even added holodecks and a counselor. It's not impossible. The JJ movies were fun to watch once each but ultimately about as lasting as a bucket of moo shu.

 

[Pauln6]

I had a wide range of responses to the Kelvin films. For the first one, I thought it was fun, and I could see glimmers of the characters in the performance. I thought the goofiness was over the top, but in the interest of making a fun film I overlooked most of it.

The Khan reboot just failed on almost every level, and Kirk and Spock were definitely out of character. The Fast and the Trekious was just embarrassingly bad. My daughter hates sf in general and Trek in particular, and I had talked her into going to see it. I had to apologize profusely later. (That being said, I do think there are TOS episodes that border on being as bad as TFatT.)

So, as I've said before, I don't think of them as TOS, or part of TOS. TOS adjacent, TOS lite, either one I'd agree to. Elsewhere I've commented about the Ed Miarecki restoration of the 11 foot model, and how, having talked to him, I believe that a big part of the problem was that Miarecki approached the job as an artist, wanting to leave his personal mark on it, instead of as a conservator, restoring it and protecting it for future generations. Abrams, I think, has the same attitude, starting with the name Star Trek, the names of the characters, the name of the ship, and then just going crazy with it. I would rather have seen him approach the job as having a mandate to protect the legacy, having the original characters grow instead of presenting new characters with the same names.

I agree with your assessment of the Kelvin movies. I thought the soft reboot was a clever way to inject life into the franchise but they blew it by failing to understand the essence of the characters or the nature Federation. I was fine with Kirk's arc but less fine with the way his behaviour was treated and rewarded. I felt Scotty's characterisation as a mad genius was terrible and Pegg knows the source material; Scotty can be serious, funny, and competent without hollowing out his whole personality. I still think Paul McGillion from Stargate Atlantis could have done a much better job.

Most of all, I was disappointed that considering that they were written in the 21st century, they were as sexist as the sixties (and therefore more sexist - Trek was pushing the envelope with female officers whereas in Kelvin they removed both Pike's first officer and the Vulcan leader from the story - we really should know better now).

That said, there were flashes of genius, moments where the leads were brilliantly channelling the original performances and they were a fun roller-coaster ride. I just wish they'd had greater faith in the original concept and they'd let a couple of TOS fans go through the script and drag it back more into line.

I think the actors in the fan created episodes are fans of the originals so they try harder to channel the original actors, and that shows. However, these are incredible achievements by amateurs and hugely popular in their own echo chamber but not necessarily popular with the wider public. They do have more of a TNG vibe as well, although Phase II would have been headed that way too I guess.

I favour full on animation because it's easier to accept the variance in performance by the actors in a different format.

 

[fireproof78]

Sure. But as STC and the DS9 and ENT writers proved, there's a way to recapture the same charm and yet be "modern." STC even added holodecks and a counselor. It's not impossible. The JJ movies were fun to watch once each but ultimately about as lasting as a bucket of moo shu.

Give me Kelvin over STC.

 

[BillJ]

Give me Kelvin over STC.

I'll actually take the Abrams films over Continues, New Voyages, Enterprise and Deep Space Nine.

 

[ChallengerHK]

Here's the question, for both if you. Understood that you prefer the kelvinverse, but do you think it's more like TOS than STC or STNV are?