So I agree that the TOS-R effects are a very mixed bag.
There are a few of the new shots I absolutely love, like the shot of the
Botany Bay drifting away from the
Enterprise underneath Kirk's
"They have my ship" log entry. That was poetic and enhanced the story, IMO. And most of the digital versions of the original matte paintings looked very good. I particularly like Flint's planet in "Requiem for Methuselah" and the new look at Stratos in "The Cloud Minders."
And I like the subtler changes they made at the time, like Kyle's agonizer leaving a brief glow behind when Spock removed it from Kyle's chest in "Mirror, Mirror," or when there were some additional moons in the sky when they beamed down in "Bread and Circuses."
And then there are some changes I absolutely loathe, like:
In "The Corbomite Maneuver," they totally fuck up the scale between the
Enterprise and
Fesarius, where Balok's ship was positively dwarfing the
Enterprise to the point it was practically a speck on the screen. They enlarged the
Enterprise in the composition, thus robbing the story of that "Oh SHIT" moment from the original:
In "Wink of an Eye," they inexplicably discard the statue in the middle ground and ditch the original bold blue background, in favor of a generic grey mush.
CBS remastered Star Trek: The Original Series' effects back in 2006, but the mid-oughts CGI upgrades don't hold up as well as the show's originals.
www.cbr.com
I refuse to believe that's respecting the original creative intent. The folks who made TOS knew how colors worked in 1968. They obviously meant the background to be blue. So why overwrite their intent and make it a flat grey?
The change I find the most egregious, however, is in "Amok Time," where they cut out original footage of Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley walking over to the ceremonial grounds just so they could insert a bad CGI landscape that made the Vulcan environment look more like what we saw in STIII. That's stupid fanboy shit. When you're cutting out footage of the original actors to insert your new effects, I think you're officially doing more harm than good.
Comparison: Original Version - Remastered Version
www.movie-censorship.com
And there are other things that consistently bug me, like how they made all planets look much more generic and Earthlike in the establishing shots. I miss the bold colors of the original version. And for some reason the creators of TOS-R were really enamored of super tight closeups of the saucer and nacelles passing by the camera, which looked like crap whenever they did it.
Basically, I hate it whenever they inserted a more modern 2000s aesthetic into the show, because it consistently throws me out of the story.
I was always a little annoyed that they treated TNG-R like the holiest of holies and didn't apply the same reasoning for the TOS-R changes, particularly the bit about "we only changed things to look like what the original TOS producers could have done with more time or money"
Yes. This is my problem with most of the TOS-R effects in a nutshell. TNG was treated as the holy writ where they were duplicating the original effects, designs, and camera angles as closely as possible, and TOS was all too often approached with the attitude of
"Oh look, those poor dumb clods in the 60s didn't know what they were doing. We'll fix it!"
I think the big reason it was done that way is because folks who worked on TNG the first time around, like the Okudas, were part of the remastering process. They knew what they intended to do back in the day, and they were able to keep the new effects on an even keel. There was nobody still around in 2006 who could advocate for the original TOS creators' intent in the same way.
To me, the Gorn looked like it had compound eyes anyway, so why would it blink?
Yes. A perfect example of the limited imagination they often had with the new effects. The Gorn was a reptilian alien, so why should it blink like a human? Like Ian Malcolm says in
Jurassic Park, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should."
Tomorrow is Yesterday. The shots of the Enterprise in the sky are amazing and Christopher's jet is photorealistic.
Agreed! The new Earth shots look great, too.
The finale actually makes sense!
Well, let's not get carried away. That
"We'll beam you into yourself, and you'll instantly forget everything that happened!" bit is still pretty nonsensical. But that's a story/script problem, not an effects problem.
It truly is a shame that they didn't still have all the bluescreen photography. Imagine the original footage composited using modern tech...would have been marvelous.
Yeah, blame Roddenberry for being so greedy and short-sighted in the 70s that he sold off original film clips of TOS to fans.
