One of the great joys of my childhood in the early 1970s was Star Trek. My sister and I were transfixed by the mystery of each episode, of the fantastical future in which aliens mingled with humans, people spoke through small wireless handsets, computers analysed things so quickly and efficiently, food was cooked in an instant and the adorable tribles lived (we even adopted one at Trek convention in Slough). This was a time when science was going to answer all the big questions (and many of the small ones too), a time when I could walk home from school, look up at the moon in the winter sky and know that two men were walking around on that distant satellite.
No matter how good Jean-Luc was or how terrific Enterprise looked they could never better those Monday eveings watching Kirk, Spock and the rest solve everything and get over the loss of another crew member all in the space of about 50 minutes. I have bought the odd video and subsequently the odd DVD of later versions of Star Trek but when I got my HD-DVD player and saw that series 1 of the original Star Trek had been cleaned up and re-mastered for the new format I knew it would be one of my first purchases.
So here I am just before Christmas, staying with my parents (both rather long in the tooth), visiting my sister and my two adorable nephews watching the original Star Trek over evening tea, just as we did over 30 years ago. The difference being the picture is beautiful, full of colour as anything from the 60’s should be and the only things they have really changed are the old special effects such as the Enterprise flying round a planet, which have been replaced by modern day CGI. It is unobtrusive enough not to spoil the original look and feel but elps the modern mind believe in the story in the way the old effects could not. Admittedly the wobbly sets and planet exteriors clearly shot on an LA soundstage do stop me from suspending my sense of disbelief but there is enough magic still in this programme to allow me to forgive all that, heavens I can even forgive the bloke in a cartoon crocodile suit that Kirk apparently find terrifying before defeating in a fight.
A glorious restoration that rather like repairing and rebuilding a grand stately home gives us an idea of the original brilliance of the future as seen by Gene Roddenberry over 40 years ago. Read more about it here:
And you can read about the original series at Wikipedia here:
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