This sort of revisionist cluelessness is always irritating. TOS’s effects were, for the time, state-of-the-art for a television show. Average episode production cost was around $190K, which adjusting for inflation is about the same as it cost to produce an episode of TNG. It was not an inexpensive show.
There’s nothing revisionist about it. That was my opinion when the show was in its first run and it hasn’t changed in 50 years. Whatever the production costs were, there was a lot about it that looked low budget. Yeah, the transporter and phaser effects looked pretty cool, but, all too often, the ships looked like toys hanging on wires and the costuming and makeup, well, I already mentioned the Gorn and the Klingons looked like a bunch of guys who spent too much time in a tanning bed with fake beards glued on top of it. Sorry I irritated you.
This is the greatest thing I’ve seen all day.
Ah, so you just had ridiculous standards for a late-60s television show. What were you expecting, 2001-grade model effects and Planet of the Apes-level makeup on a television budget? Sheesh, broadcast scifi must have been brutal for you until the 90s rolled around.
Jason, which TV show of the era do you think had significantly better effects than TOS? I can’t recall anything other than maybe the original BSG, but they were less wide-ranging in their effects use, so I think that allowed them to focus more on a few key things (e.g., the look of the centurions, vipers, and raiders).
Wow, you are an incredible ass, aren’t you? No, I wasn’t expecting the show to equal movies that hadn’t yet appeared. I wasn’t expecting anything. I merely recognized things for what they were.
BSG was post-Star Wars and had the advantage of computer-generated effects. The curse of pre-Star Wars TV scifi like TOS was that a lot of it just didn’t look all that convincing. The good shows made up for it with good stories: TOS in seasons one and two, the Twilight Zone for most of its run and the Outer Limits.
But don’t you think the audience of 20 years from now will look at today’s shows and say that they also looked bad? It seems like judging things like past SFX outside the context of their time is always going to result in a conclusion of “it sucked”, when looking backwards.
I guess your point is that they shouldn’t have had the audacity to try something like TOS at the time? I, for one, was glad they did.
After all of the talk about Borg in this thread, I couldn’t resist going back and watching a few episodes. “Q Who” is one of my favorites not just for the Borg, but for the way the writer (Maurice Hurley) speaks through Q to tear into the naive optimism of the show in its early years. Watching it again at the same time as the Vietnam War documentary and knowing that Maurice Hurley was a Vietnam vet, I’d guess there was a difference between him and Roddenberry because his generation had to accept defeat. Having all those writers with wildly different ideas may have made the early seasons a mess, but eventually the show evolved into something more than the vision of one person could produce.
No, you guys are missing my point, or more probably I’m not being clear. divedivedive’s original post was that he was sorry he missed out on TOS when it originally aired. My reply was that having the advantage of being able to be selective in viewing it in reruns was a good thing, because not all of TOS, especially the third season, was all that great. What forms part of my opinion is that, even by late 60’s TV standards, some of the effects, costumes, etc. looked cheesy. This does NOT mean a lot of wasn’t great by any means. When it was great, it wasn’t because of the special effects, it was because of the stories and its vision of the future. Arena was simply a great story rubber lizard suit notwithstanding.
As to the special effects in particular, I think you youngins (by which I mean practically everyone who visits QT3 but me) can’t really appreciate what a watershed moment in scifi Kubrick’s 2001 was. Before that film, we just expected and accepted a certain amount of cheese in scifi. We appreciated the state of the art in films like Forbidden Planet and the George Pal stuff, but we never thought that any of it looked real. If it was a good story, like Forbidden Planet, we accepted the cheese for what it was and sometimes we enjoyed the cheese for its own sake.
So, when I see reference to TOS and, as happens so often, I see in that reference “state of the art special effects for the time,” I say yeah, some of it, but definitely not all of it. Does that mean I think they shouldn’t have made Star Trek? Hell no!
BSG didn’t have computer effects, it was all practical. We didn’t see a CGI spaceship until The Last Starfighter in 1984.
Jason’s basically saying that effects weren’t good enough for him to suspend disbelief in the 1960s. No, there was nothing better at the time – Star Trek’s contemporaries were Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, both cheesy as heck. Even Space: 1999, which came 9 years after Trek, was cheesy too. (Plus, terrible writing! But man, those Eagles were awesome.)
Me, I grew up on Trek re-runs (TNG premiered when I was in college), so I was looking at the Enterprise and styrofoam planets before I could judge, and it all seemed real to me because from a young age, that’s what Starships looked like, and nothing better from an effects and sets standpoint came about until Star Wars hit.
This isn’t TV, but it’s from the TOS era, I find that Ray Harryhausen’s stuff still looks pretty good. It doesn’t look real — something about the scaling and textures I think. But it still holds up pretty well. These are from Jason and the Argonauts (1963):
I still kinda prefer really good puppetry/makeup/practical effects for most purposes. e.g., LotR trilogy versus The Hobbit. Applies thus far in ST, too; the shuttle bay scene in ep 3 looked so fake, and it made me sad :(
If you want to weigh the merits of practical effects and CGI, just look at horror films. You don’t see stuff like Cronenberg’s The Fly or Carpenter’s The Thing anymore. Maybe for makeup effects on stuff like The Walking Dead.
That’s were CGI goes wrong. Using it when good makeup effects, or prosthetics can do the job.
This weekend I watched “Q Who”, S2 Ep16 I believe.
Some observations:
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I hadn’t remembered at all that this episode started with introducing us a new member of the Engineering team: Ensign Gomez. She is a huge part of this episode. Re-watching this, I thought for sure that they were introducing her so we would care about her by the time she got killed by the Borg, but no, she’s never in any real danger, and her large role in this episode feels a little weird. Not weird in a bad way, mind you. I just forgot that even though this is the episode that introduced the Borg, it’s also the episode that introduced us to Ensign Gomez, whoever she is. Clearly she left a deep impression on me despite having seen the series multiple times.
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The lighting in this episode is so dark. I don’t know if this was on purpose or if they were having budgetary issues because of the strike, but it works brilliantly here given the subject matter. There’s a scene later in the episode where Q is trying to scare the shit out of the enterprise crew and us, the viewers, and there’s a light on him, but there’s no light in the rest of the room behind him, and it’s just a dark conference room. It just really goes well with the dark nature of the episode to have so many scenes that are lit in a non-traditional way.
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The soundtrack: I thought I remembered all TNG episodes having this classical orchestra soundtrack, but this episode is full of little electronic flourishes. Clearly a synthesizer was used heavily in this episode. Again, I don’t know if this is because of the budgetary issues or the strike, but damn, it works. It feels different from what the series turned into later. The unique lighting and soundtrack really make this episode feel unique and sort of a perfect introduction to the Borg.
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Watching Q and Guinan and the Enterprise Away team introduce us to the nature of the Borg, and telling us that the borg are a collective and have no leader really started pissing me off again about Star Trek: First Contact. What this retroactively means, I guess is that Q knew the Borg had a Borg Queen, but he purposely lied to the Enterprise crew. Guinan was lying about the Borg too, but that could be explained as her just not having enough knowledge of the Borg. You can’t claim that about Q though. He would have known, but lied on purpose? Anyway, I can’t express enough how much I hate Star Trek First Contact. The best way to view this excellent episode is to just put that horrible movie out of your mind while watching.
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I love how clueless Picard and the Enterprise crew is. How much they approach the Borg with open arms, trying the “we come in peace” message. As someone who knows who the Borg are from later encounters, this is especially thrilling when you go back to view this episode.
It’s funny to think that First Contact is a huge retcon in the same kind of way that Aliens was, just not nearly as cool.
It’s also kind of funny to think how highly regarded First Contact was, my opinion of the movie isn’t too favorable either. Picard as PTSD action hero is kind of silly, and while I liked Zefram Cochran in this movie, man did Riker, Troi and Laforge have nothing at all to do.
Fun fact: She’s played by Lycia Naff, who’s probably best known for her part in the 1990 Total Recall as a three-boobed mutant.
Apparently, Gomez was originally written as a recurring character that was supposed to be a love interest for Geordi.
Me too. I thought she had as much chance of surviving till the end as Dead Meat in Hot Shots.
I like First Contact but I have to keep it in its own separate compartment in my mind and pretend it’s not connected to the series. The Borg queen is… ugh. And Picard as PTSD action hero might have worked but only if there had been some hint of that over the last 4 years of the show.
I guess they must have just forgotten about her because of all the chaos going on with writers getting fired? It’s too bad.
There. Are. Four. Lights!