Star Trek: The Next Generation In High-Def
2 min readJust in time for its twenty-fifth anniversary, Star Trek: The Next Generation will be released in high-def Blu-ray.
For fans of The Next Generation, 2012 will be a good year, with the release of the first season towards the end of the year. But fans will get a taste of what to expect with a sampler to be released January 21, 2012.
“All 178 episodes from seven seasons will be transferred to true high-definition 1080p for release on Blu-ray and eventual runs on television and digital platforms both domestically and internationally,” said the CBS Home Entertainment press release.
“Fans have been clamoring for a high-definition release of Star Trek: The Next Generation for years,” said Ken Ross, Executive Vice President and General Manager of CBS Home Entertainment. “Transferring the series to high-definition presented difficult technical challenges, but our team has come up with a process to create true 1080p HD masters with true HD visual effects. We can’t wait to show fans how pristine the series looks and sounds with our upcoming Blu-ray releases.”
The first full season won’t be available until late in 2012, but a sampler disc, Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Next Level, will release next month. The Next Level will include the pilot episode, Encounter at Farpoint, as well as Sins of the Father (S3) and fan-favorite The Inner Light (S5).
“One of the most popular series in the Star Trek franchise, Star Trek: The Next Generation celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2012. It premiered in first-run syndication during the week of September 28, 1987 and ran through 1994.
“Star Trek: The Next Generation won numerous accolades, including 18 Emmy awards, and was the first – and only – syndicated television show to be nominated for the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series for its seventh season. It was also ranked #46 on TV Guide’s 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time list in 2002.”
Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Next Level can be pre-ordered here.
About The Author
I was expecting updates FX of the kind we can see in the remastered TOS. Apparently the approach is much more conservative here – read rigourously faithfull to what was originally designed -. The FX will be top notch, but an exact reproduction of the original… A lot of battles in TNG were very static, slow and not very exciting… Much has changed in 25 years of TV and perhaps a faster pace for the space battles would have been a needed improvement (after all, in the TNG movies ships move quicker, turn tighter, fire at a more rapid pace, so why not adjusting the series to the rhythm of the movies? I was looking forward to this kind of improvement but we will only get visual enhancements, nothing else.. That’s a turn off – even for the purist that I think I am!
Ah… So your ilk is why we got Special Editions of Star Wars. Noted. Personally, I enjoyed them the way they were, so I’m pretty happy they’re staying fundamentally the same.
“If it’s not broken, why fix it?”… I’m not sure enhancing Star Wars was an improvement… Then again, who would have moaned if Jar Jar Binks had vanished… Don’t jump to conclusions, I have never mentioned Star Wars! But I think some sequences of TNG are lacking – and if the original scenarios called for more than what financial resources allowed back then, then by all means make TNG look like what it was designed to be with today’s technology. That’s a hypothesis, I’ve never seen the scripts… But that’s what they’ve done -overdone perhaps – with TOS remastered -. I don’t mind, and that’s precedent: others will expect some kind of significant visual overhaul… One example: the battle of Wolf 359 could not be seen because it must have been too costly, but a few years after, DS9 showed us StarFleet’s armada combatting the Dominion in sequences that put anything TNG had done visually to shame… Make it glorious, as Worf would say… Make it so…