Stardate Infinity
What, like I'm going to miss STAR TREK's 60th?
At this point I don’t think I need to establish my Trekker credentials. Hell, the fact that I say “Trekker" rather than “Trekkie” is enough old-school cred right there on its own. Last month, I turned 58; today, Star Trek is sixty. I’ve never known a time when it wasn’t in my life.
I grew up on the original series and the animated spinoff, and while I was only 11 when the first movie came out I still kinda knew it fell short of the mark. (The Director’s Edition is glorious, though.) But then The Wrath of Khan arrived and reinvigorated the franchise, and 44 years after that, there’s still so much life left in Gene Roddenberry’s earnest little sci-fi premise that it’s shocking to realize there is no new Trek currently in production.
The recent cancellation of Starfleet Academy – following what sure felt like the premature wrapping up of Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds – does put something of a pall on the 60th anniversary celebrations. John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein have a new feature in development, and it sounds really intriguing, but projects get scuttled all the time. And Star Trek takes pitches all the time; Quentin Tarantino had one not that long ago. Unless Paramount has a surprise announcement planned for later today, the future is unknown.
But Paramount never misses a chance to market Trek on home video, so today the studio is dropping Star Trek: The Original Series Collection, a twenty-disc set with 60th anniversary branding. It’s also being released in the US in an exclusive Amazon edition in a bespoke box and some fun extras.
If I didn’t already own these discs, I’d really want that. But this is the eternal question for Trek fans: Is there anyone left who doesn’t already own the original series on Blu-ray? Like, with all the various releases and re-releases – including that epic 50th anniversary omnibus set collecting all the Classic Trek TV shows and movies – is there anyone still waiting for the right version?
That said, he sighed, if you are looking to snag the original series on Blu-ray, these discs are pretty great. Containing both the episodes as originally aired and the souped-up versions with “enhanced visual effects” and new DTS-HD 7.1 soundtracks, they’re superlative presentations of the show. – Restored in 2K from the original elements, with cleaned-up monaural mixes, the broadcast versions look and sound better than they ever could have when they went out in the late ’60s, and while I have no intention of ever bothering with the reworked episodes, they’re there if you’re curious. (Like Ted Turner’s colorization of feature films in the ’80s, they’re the cultural cost of getting the originals properly cleaned up.)
And while no new supplements have been produced for this anniversary, these discs were already packed with featurettes and text, commentary tracks for select episodes, the Tribble episode of the animated series and two versions of the show’s original pilot, “The Cage,” which starred Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Pike and became the first-season two-parter “The Menagerie.” There are also Easter eggs aplenty, because nerds like to click around on menus.
Really, this is as good as it’s likely to get for the original run of Star Trek; if Paramount didn’t release the show on 4K for its 60th anniversary, I can’t imagine they’re holding it back for the 75th.
Star Trek: The Original Series Collection is now available on Blu-ray from Paramount Home Entertainment. It’s in a DVD-sized multicase rather than one scaled for Blu-rays, which bothers me a great deal but might be less of an annoyance to you.
Up next: A lot of new releases hit the shelves this week, and if any of them show up I will write about them!