A couple weeks ago, The Girlfriend and I, along with several of our friends from the subgroup I like to think of as “The Usual Suspects,”*attended something rather unusual: a one-time-only theatrical screening of “The Menagerie,” an episode of the original Star Trek television series. The screening was essentially a promotional gimmick for the release of the series on the HD-DVD format, so naturally what we were seeing was the “remastered” version of the episode — that is, the one with all the new digital “enhancements.” Not that anyone except me seemed to mind. We shared a sold-out house with several hundred enthusiastic members of the uniform-wearing faithful (there was even a guy there in full-blown Andorian make-up, complete with antennae!), and there was much ooh-ing and aah-ing over the digital recreations of scenes we’ve all seen a thousand times. Even I have to grudgingly admit that whoever is behind the CG tinkering is doing a very nice job of it. The new footage is very faithful to the look of the original series — the Enterprise isn’t suddenly an unnaturally manuverable cartoon — and there has been no “Greedo shoots first” revisionism to any of the stories that I have seen. I will even concede that some of what’s been done is an improvement. (Click here for a gallery of screencaps and judge for yourselves; my thanks to Mike G for sending me the link.) Nevertheless, as my Three Loyal Readers can probably predict, I remain opposed to the updates on basic principle.

My stubbornness on this point led to a pretty interesting conversation following the screening, which in turn led me to a whole new understanding of my own thoughts on this matter of updating old movies and TV properties, and which types of changes bother me and which types don’t.

Basically, The Usual Suspects were gushing with approval of the changes and teasing me about being such an irrational contrarian, and I was trying gamely to defend my luddite’s minority opinion, when The Girlfriend asked a very incisive question: why did I have no problem with the tinkering that was done on Blade Runner: The Final Cut — which we’d seen a few days prior, and which I was entirely pleased with — but I had my panties in a bunch over “them” tampering with Star Trek? I didn’t have a terribly articulate response at the time — I just stammered something about the Blade Runner changes being good, followed by a “screw you, I liked Darkman!” — and that was the end of it for the evening. (I don’t think I’ve ever blogged my Darkman story… if you don’t know what I’m talking about, trust me, that was an excellent — and hilarious! — way to evade a difficult question.)

The next day, however, Cranky Robert posed pretty much the same question during an email exchange, and I started thinking that perhaps it was about time I clearly articulated my position, rather than just continuing to bleat on about “the principle.” So, here’s a slightly tweaked version of what I ended up sending back to him, which I think is as good a manifesto on this subject as I’m likely to come up with:

Removing something that’s in the shot but shouldn’t have been — like a cable (in the case of the “spinner” flying cars in Blade Runner), or an errant boom mike, or a garbage matte like the ones that plague many older science-fiction movies — doesn’t bug me. Repairing age-related film damage like scratches and dust, color-correction and matching, and generally “polishing” the look of the film obviously doesn’t bug me. These things are simple maintenance issues in my mind, like repainting a car when it gets sun-faded.

 

However, digitally inserting something into a shot that wasn’t there to begin with — like those dinosaurs that now walk the streets of Mos Eisley in the Special Edition of Star Wars — bothers me. (I’m ambivalent on adding scenes that were filmed back in the day but not used; depends on what they are, what they bring to the film, etc. In general, though, I don’t like them because they usually aren’t necessary, or are just plain bad and should’ve been left on the cutting room floor. For example, the much-ballyhooed scene in which Jabba the Hutt comes to Docking Bay 94 to talk to Han Solo is bad in many ways, in my opinion, not least of which is that it rehashes all the same info Greedo just conveyed in an earlier scene. It’s redundant and it slows the overall plot. Plus Jabba looks funny, and Boba Fett’s breaking of the fourth wall is just lame. On the other hand, I kind of like the scene with Biggs meeting Luke in the Rebel hanger, but that’s just because I’m a sentimental slob. I like it, but it still wasn’t necessary to put back. Bottom line: director’s cuts are generally pretty lame.)

 

Finally, ripping out scenes that were done as well as they could be done at the time and replacing them with all-new “reinterpretations” of those scenes bugs me, especially in the case of Star Wars — which had much of the final space battle replaced with a CG recreation for the ’97 Special Edition — because “the best that could be done at the time” was ground-breaking and award-winning in its day and should be respected, even if it no longer looks realistic to modern audiences.

There is also the matter of the original versions almost always being suppressed in favor of the rejiggered ones — i.e., once the “special, remastered, director’s cut, extended, unrated, supercalifragilistic edition” comes out, it becomes very difficult, if not impossible, to buy an official copy of the original theatrical or as-aired version — but that’s a somewhat different issue that I’ve ranted about many times before.

The “ripping out perfectly good, if dated, scenes” is what bothers me about “Star Trek Remastered.” The show is 40 years old… what’s wrong with just acknowledging that and loving it for what it is? I highly doubt that any amount of digital tweaking is going to generate any more Trekkies than already exist. That’s what the upcoming feature-film reboot is all about, isn’t it? Kids aren’t suddenly going to notice this ancient show because some new shots of the Enterprise have been dropped in. Besides, you may have photo-realistic exteriors, but when you come inside the ship, it’s still very obviously the same old painted canvas and plywood set that it’s always been, with the same broad acting style and Kennedy-era attitudes that have always been there. No amount of digital monkeying about will change any of that, and you’re either willing to live with those elements or you’re not. So why are the F/X any different? I simply don’t see the point of this kind of “restoration.” Sure, clean up the image, remove scratches and dirt, brighten the colors. I got no problem with that. But adding things that weren’t originally there or substituting modern footage for the original? That makes my blood boil…

Incidentally, I really didn’t have a bad time at that screening of “The Menagerie,” even with my anti-CG hang-ups. The audience was lively and, as I said, the digital changes aren’t too egregious. I definitely had a better time than this guy, who apparently saw it in a really lousy theater and also didn’t get the memo that, digital remastering or not, the episode was still just a segment of a TV show, and not an all-new feature film spectacle. Whatever, dude… everybody at my screening had a good time…

* Not to brag or anything, but I have quite a few friends, whom I tend to mentally group together based on their interests and the context in which I met them. The groups never interact and probably wouldn’t get along terribly well if they tried. They each fulfill a different social need for me, I guess. The primary groupings are The High-School Gang (my old buddies from Bingham High, obviously), The Dudes (my former co-workers from my days at the multiplex), and The Usual Suspects (my geeky fanboy — and girl — friends, formed around a core of co-workers from the period I spent as a technical writer). In addition there are a number of random outliers who don’t really fall into those categories. You know who you are…