It appears that Star Trek is going to be given the “Special Edition” treatment.
While it does sound cool at some level, what’s the point? And changing the music, noises, and SFX shots to be more modern? Won’t that create horrible mismatches with the rest of the footage?
The cynical part of me wonders if this isn’t a ploy on the part of the studios to push fans (who have seen the atrocities Lucas has committed on the original Star Wars films) to start buying DVDs now, so they can have the originals before they go out of print.
Could it be that they were looking ahead to the release of hi-def Blue-Ray DVDs and realized that some of the sets and probably all of the effects would look like crap? I know someone who was interviewed on TV in the 80s and he said he was stunned at what cheap, shoddy & even filthy sets they could get away with using, since the tech didn’t let the viewers see detail well enough to tell. I mean, what good is a hi-def view of the actors and the room they’re in, if the background outside the window has visible brush strokes on it, etc?
So, although I hope they’ll always have the un-improved originals available to those who want them, I’m thinking it could be cool. I’m also thinking of how odd it seemed in the first star wars trilogy that there was supposedly this big empire falling, and we never really saw more than 20 people – something they improved on in later ones (and didn’t Lucas insert some scenes of celebration on various planets later?). Anyway, more evidence of the civilzation in ST would be interesting to see, if only in the background.