ST:TNG or just TNG if you were in the know was a huge
hit. Seven seasons and four films; there’s no denying it was popular. So
where have all the Trekkies gone? Have we all outgrown it? Lots of my
friends used to be Trekkies but now they just wave that off. They do,
however, salivate at the mere mention of Game of Thrones season 2. Well
all this might be about to change because TNG is about to get a new
lease on life. Via Blu-ray
One of the most expensive series at the time, TNG
cost more than a million dollars an episode in a time where that sounded
like a lot of money. It was also filmed and then transferred to video
for transmission. It is this strange way of doing things that means that
there will be no up scaling to bring TNG into High Definition, so
restorers have gone back into the archive and painstakingly gone through
film stock for the Blu-ray transfer, cleaned the negatives and
transferred them to Digital. So what you are seeing is how the series
was filmed. The optical effects have also been recomposited meaning that
they have been rebuilt basically from the ground up from original
elements. The sound has been re-done as well in DTS Master Audio 7.1.
All in all this is an impressive boost for a series that has been
looking a bit long in the tooth for a while now.
Paramount have released a sampler Blu-ray to drum up
support and whet our appetites. It contains 3 episodes. The first
episode of the first series “Encounter at Farpoint” presented in its two
hour telemovie format, the season 2 episode “Sins of the Farther” and
the award winning “The Inner Light”.
And they look stunning. The detail is incredible and
it makes watching TNG a truly different experience from the DVD, but
this is also a reminder that HD is not always your friend. More detail
reveals more mistakes and the blurriness you got from watching the show
on and old CRT off video tape often hides a multitude of sins, mostly to
do with makeup. Whilst Worf and Data come off ok, other Klingons don’t
fair so well. “Kurn” from “Sins of the Father” particularly looks like
he’s going to Trick or Treat as a Klingon rather than being part of a
proud and noble race.
Also the episodes here don’t represent the best of
the series. “Encounter at Farpoint” in particularly is terrible. Only
“The Inner Light” stands up as a great episode. Still I suppose if we’d
been given “Best of Both Worlds” or “Chain of Command” they’d be
frightened that we wouldn’t by the series. Nonsense of course, but here
we are.
Audio: The DTS mix is a little odd, I have a good
5.1 set-up, admittedly not 7.1 but even so music sounded disjointed
(particularly the theme) and dialogue sounded thin. Original stereo mix
sounds fine.
Video: Terrible as “Encounter at Farpoint” was, I
watched it in rapture simply for the impressive visuals. Incredible.
Special Features: An ad for the first season (as if
you weren’t going to buy it once you had this) and a trailer for the
featurette on how the remastering was done.
This blu-ray taster will be available in Australia
next month for around $40 however you can pick it up on Amazon region
free for $9 bucks right now.
