Ged Maheux, of the Icon Factory and Gedblog, joins Scott to discuss Voyager’s “11:59“. Why does everyone in the Year 2000 drive cars from the 1970’s? Will they or won’t they? Do we care?
Email everyone in a 100 mile radius because this episode of Voyager is perplexing.
Watch this episode via:
In response to your comments about the cleaned up digitally remastered TOS with new effects: I agree with you that, in general they look awesome. Especially the planets, which no longer look like painted beachballs. And you are now treated to the landscape around Spock’s ancestral land in “Amok Time” – which now looks a lot like the Vulcan landscape in Star Trek III. But one thing that really bothered me is that they changed the designs of the ships. Instead of just adding detail to the physical models (like they did to the Enterprise or the Klingon D7 battle cruiser) they totally changed them. In “The Enterprise Incident”, the ship crosses into Romulan space and is immediately surrounded by 3 Romulan ships. In the origin origin series episode, the Romulan ships are now Klingon battle cruisers. Spock says, oh, Romulans must be using Klingon ships now. Which, being translated, means that they couldn’t find the old Romulan bird of prey model. And then suddenly in the new digital version, one – but just one – of the Romulan ships has morphed back into the bird of prey. Weird. And in “The Way to Eden” the space hippies fly a ship which is the same model as the Tholian ship but with Federation starship engines added. In the digital version it’s a totally different design. I don’t like it bc I don’t like change. As a spaceship nut, it’s as an aggregious a change as if George Lucas had swapped out Luke’s X-wing with the Eagle Transporter from Space:1999.
Well, I can understand where you’re coming from but I think the digital team replaced those models with what the producers would have used in TOS if they could have. There are a couple of other places where they correct mistakes in the Original with updated special effects.
Of course on the Blurays you can switch back and forth between the enhanced and the original, so you can see those old models if you like. 🙂
Mistakes in the originals corrected? Huh. Interesting. I will have to look that up.
One thing that I thought the digital versions did very well is the phaser effects. When the Enterprise fires, the phaser light illuminates the bottom of the saucer section. It’s not just a line superimposed on the model like the original. I think the guys who did the effects in the Iron Man movies could learn from this – when IM blasts light out of his palm it’s just layered on top of the real footage – there is no extra light splashing on his arm or face, as there would be if he were really firing a laser. Digital Trek gets this right.