Bug-Man’s Blog

If you weren’t aware already, the episodes of the original ‘Star Trek’ series are being digitally remastered and enhanced, with new CGI special effects and things like that. They’re not going overboard like George Lucas, but they’re bringing the show into the 2000′s by updating it.

I haven’t really been keeping up with this but run into stories about it from time to time when a newly remastered episode comes out. This weekend they are airing the remastered ‘By Any Other Name‘.

Due to budget constraints on Star Trek they could only ever put together a couple of sound stages for any beam down to a planet and the rest had to be done by transposing the filmed image onto a matte painting to give some idea of the scale of the area. In this episode they have taken a scene where the crew beamed down to the planet, shrunk it, and neatly embedded it in a brand new and brilliant looking matte painting. Here’s a comparison:

The original beam-down sequence (click the images for a larger version):

The enhanced version:

The crew materialised on the planet’s surface, giving you a much more imaginative idea of the planet’s surface. Sure, in the original series’ time you would have stretched your mind and imagined what else was out there, but because many sound stage settings were so similar you ended up with no sense of identity of any one planet to the next. I think this is great, because it gives this planet it’s very own identity and when you see the crew materialise and look around them, now you know exactly what they’re seeing before their eyes.

I must say these remastered episodes are getting better each time!