Star Trek: The Original Series - Season 1 [Blu-ray]

The first-season DVD set is supplemented by 80 minutes of featurettes incorporating 2003-04 interviews with Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, other cast members, and producers, and some 1988 footage of Gene Roddenberry. The longest (24 minutes) featurette, "The Birth of a Timeless Legacy," examines the two pilot episodes and the development of the crew. Slightly shorter are "To Boldly Go... Season One," which highlights key episodes, and "Sci-Fi Visionaries," which discusses the series' great science fiction writers (most famously in "The City of the Edge of Forever"). Shatner shows off his love of horses in "Life Beyond Trek," and, more interestingly, Nimoy debunks various rumors in "Reflections of Spock." As they've done for many of the feature-film special editions, Michael Okuda and Denise Okuda provide a pop-up text commentary on four of the episodes filled with history, trivia, and dry wit. It's the first commentary of any kind for a Star Trek TV show, but an audio commentary is still overdue. The technical specs are mostly the same as other Trek TV series--Dolby 5.1, English subtitles--but with the welcome addition of the episode trailers. The plastic case is an attempt to replicate some of the fun packaging of the series' European DVD releases, but it's a bit clunky, and the paper sleeve around the disc case seems awkward and crude. Still, the set is a vast improvement both in terms of shelf space and bonus features compared to the old two-episode discs, which were released before full-season boxed sets became the model for television DVDs. --David Horiuchi

Watching The Cage from a 21st Century perspective, one wonders what the NBC suits were in a ringer about. The episode is not appreciably higher in concept than many original series episodes, and the whole affair has an appealing "New Frontier" Kennedy-esque flavor.

Somewhat like an Ed Wood movie, Turnabout Intruder is unintentionally humorous. The story idea is ludicrous, the dialogue cringeworthy, and the acting has to be seen to be believed. William Shatner's realization of Kirk's body under the control of Janice Lester (which includes filing his nails and walking with a mincing gait) is the single most over the top performance in all of Trek. He comes across as Joan Crawford on Psilocybin. How his intensely homoerotic moments with guest actor Harry Landers got past the network censors will forever remain a mystery. This story is the greatest camp masterpiece since Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?.

How does this DVD look? The full color version of The Cage is a true restoration, not merely a remastering. The print has been carefully cleaned and color corrected, and various sound elements (dialogue, music, and sound effects) have been remixed from the original sources. Generally it wears its age well, although portions of the dialogue sound fuzzy. The Black & White/Color amalgamation of The Cage is also included. This version has had no rework done, which makes the restoration of the all-color version all the more stunning. Gene Roddenberry's introduction from 1986 is also included, a nice touch.


THE Sci-fi Anthology of a Lifetime starts right here!   October 10, 2005
OverTheMoon (overthemoonreview@hotmail.com)
27 out of 31 found this review helpful

The Star Trek Collection is a worthy hobby and certainly the largest of the television series DVD Collections (The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise). At around 1400 minutes per box, you are looking at approx 30 boxes with 700 hours of viewing. That is 1 month of non-stop Star Trek. No DVD series comes remotely close to that. Get going collecting right now and build up on each succession over the years. By the end you will have a very serious anthology that defines the word awe. This is the kind of item that requires 1 hour a day of your time for the next few years. It is a cherished memory that served your fathers and will serve your children also. Our very planet, Earth, has advanced because of Gene Roddenberry's admirable concept. Roddenberry nailed the premise of the series when he said that he wanted to create a show with characters that we could look up too. `The Bridge' members are like our family. Watch what they do. Then go and spend your life striving for the same on Earth. What engineer, medic, scientist, teacher, worker can not say that Star Trek has not influenced them? The show is this significant in the development of our species. Even Christians respect and quote its authority and it is not hard to see why. The DVD case is beautiful. Make sure to retain the cardboard holder that it sits into as this helps stability on the shelf (although the box can still stand alone the bottom is a little narrow). The shell cracks open down the centre to reveal a box. Sliding out of the box is a small booklet insert with discs in a well designed plastic holder that flip from disc to disc. There are 4 episodes per disc, and 8 discs in total. However the last disc, disc 8, only has two episodes, for a grand total of 30 episodes. The rest of disc 8 is devoted to Star Trek interviews and trailers with the usual expected extras...and then some more. Several of the shows come with a commentary. All the episodes have been remastered to the point that scratches and artefacts are hardly visible. The special effects have been touched up slightly (no strings), however they still retain an overall early look and feel, especially the initial episodes that have budget restrictions. The episodes are ordered not in the sequence they where filmed, but in the sequence that they aired, however each episode has been numbered according to the order they where filmed in. This means on one disc you have shows 4, 2, 12 and 1, in that order. The sound has also been remastered to 5:1 Dolby Digital! Since the show was shot in full frame, these dimensions are retained.

Star Trek, The Original Series (TOS), Season One, is a fine example of the growing stages of any television series. Viewing the episodes in the order they where filmed shows the vision shaping. Spock is the only character to be retained from the pilot episode `The Cage'. Kirk appears after this one. Chekov does not appear until Season Two. Yeoman Smith appears in quite a number of Season One episodes before retiring from the show. The little known Nurse Chapel also appears here as well as the other series. The Enterprise itself is a mere hunk of plastic that does not improve much until Season Two and is funny to see. There are very little space shots in Season One because of the limitations of visual effects. The main viewer of The Bridge looks like a projector screen and is avoided much of the time. When something does appear there it looks completely phoney... and funny. Spock's makeup design goes through a few changes. However, even though we can laugh at much of Season One now, the series does gel and soon we have some fascinating sci-fi theory and execution, even though what we are watching is the equivalent of a stage play. Nobody can critic the quality of the television acting and not since Flash Gordon had the world seen anything like it before. The stories (mostly by DC Fontana) are slightly narrow in their field of vision, however these where to mature in later seasons. Season One of TOS is mostly about alien illusions, shape shifters, psi-power, viruses, alternative universes, intergalactic slavery, military trials, deities, time travel and close hand to hand combat with aliens. There is also the unforgettable award winning `The City on the Edge of Forever' starring Joan Collins. `Operation: Annihilate!' has the flying face huggers type creatures that the movie `Alien' ripped off. Kahn appears in this series. We have both Klingons and Romulans also. The classic `Devil in the Dark' sees Kirk and Spock fight an underground cave monster. Kirk goes hand to hand with a giant reptile in the episode `Arena'. Surprisingly enough very few episodes actually contain all the characters at one time, including Sulu and Scotty. This does not happen until Season Two and then occurs often in Season Three. In TOS Season One characters are sort of alternated from episode to episode. The bottom line for TOS: Season One is that it is a classic. Although it is not necessarily the best of the Seasons, it works well as a very good foundational study for Trekkies who will absolutely adore seeing the variations in design and theme. All in all this is the funny season for 21st century viewers. You are supposed to laugh at this one more than thinking about its topics. And what a laugh it is! Just watch Kirk roll about the desert scrub with a seven foot man in a rubber reptile costume. How can you not want that!