All Star Trek TV Coming To Netflix 272
tekgoblin writes "This is great news for all the Star Trek fans out there. Starting in July, every episode from every Star Trek series will be available for Instant Watch over Netflix. Right now Star Trek TOS is available for Instant Watch, and the movies, but that's all. Soon it will all be here for our viewing pleasure."
Re:In my daughter's word(s) (Score:2, Informative)
Awesome!!
I share her sentiment. I'm especially looking forward to Deep Space Nine being available - we already own TOS, so having it on Netflix is of less importance to us.
It's a good day for nerd-dom.
If you haven't seen DS9 yet, don't. It's by far the worst Star Trek series. And trust me, I've seen them all.
Re:Simply (Score:5, Informative)
No ST cartoon.
It depends on what you want from your TV (Score:3, Informative)
TOS is a series that was originally meant to be more like the Twilight Zone, different characters each episode. It still keeps the characters from having a ongoing story. There is no story arc spanning episodes although the book versions do tie the episodes together. The stories themselves are close to Sci-Fi in that they explore the now by just slightly changing the now to make us re-examine the facts. Simple example: Rather then examine black vs white race issues, the race issue is shown by two people who are both black and white, just different sides. To "us" there is no difference to them there is. This shows just how silly race differences are.
TNG most hated change was the kid. For some reason TV must have a kid in it and people hate kids and Wheaton was the most hated of them all. Wonder what ever happened to him. The characters also become more like the crew of the Love Boat, in that they had from the beginning long established relationships, parent-child, ex-lovers. The difference is clear in that TOS never had an episode aimed purely at introducing the cast. TNG did it and needed two episodes.
It also did something else, the most powerful most capable characters, were white humans. Spock from TOS was gone, replaced why a white android and various white male humans. It lacked the edge. Maybe that was a good thing, maybe a token black woman on the bridge was no longer needed to show a society that had moved beyond racism. Maybe.
Finally, the approaches of the crew were stellar opposites. TNG was all about endless meetings. Crisis, Enterprise about to be blown up in ten seconds, MEETING time! Kirk would bust some balls, Picard would listen to suggestions. It seemed all a bit eighties to me.
DS9 was a radical departure, first off, the kid again, two this time... don't they learn? They ditched the enterprise and sayed a big Hello to story arcs... it was a soap in space. And where as Kirk always tried to do the right thing, DS9 firmly brought in politics especially US politics of screwing your allies any time you can. They didn't think anything of betraying their allies if it suited them at that moment only to suck up to them next time. This wasn't the brave new world, it wasn't Kirk either kicking ass OR accepting that humans didn't always get it right BUT willing to learn. This was Senate Hill in space.
Voyager went back into space but dumped all sense of ethics at the spaceport. Kirk would never have stood for it. Janeway did anything to get home, including mass genocide. Star Trek, how far can you fall.
Enterprise... well that answered that question didn't it. The opening trailer showed only US spacecraft. TOS had russians, blacks, aliens in the same crew. Enterprise, USA all the way.
Perhaps it is important to remember that each series reflected its time. TOS was a by product of the hippy era and Gene Roddenberry had created a story where the future was bright. Racism, hunger, war. These things had been overcome and now we could get on with the fun stuff. Exploring new worlds.
The other series were as much a product of their time. The "management is everything" culture of the eighties. The "US is right and we don't need the rest of the world" of later years.
Each series stand on its own and frankly I don't think any true fan of one can possibly like all the others. Personally, my favorite is still TOS (although to be honest, more the books then the TV show) I can stomach some TNG (the ones without wesley) and the rest. Just no thanks. Didn't bother with the reboot. It might be good, it might not be but I think it is not... the ones I heard whosaid they liked it also seem to like the later tv-shows. Fine for them but then it ain't aimed at me.
One franchise, so many different audiences. Kind of amazing if you think about it.
Re:It depends on what you want from your TV (Score:4, Informative)
Wonder what ever happened to him.
Oddly enough, you'll occasionally find Wil Wheaton posting on Slashdot. Or at least he used to (Slashdot username: CleverNickName). I think he still does some acting gigs here and there though I haven't seen him in anything in a while now.
Re:Simply (Score:2, Informative)
Re:I wonder how they will do it. (Score:4, Informative)
I wonder if we are in store for HD versions of the episodes? I've heard that atleast with TNG the scenes with cgi were rendered in standard def. 35mm for the character scenes which is do-able.
No, AFAIK the special effects on TNG were mastered on video. The majority of the show was shot on film, but transferred to video for editing and the addition of most special effects.
This means that even if the original high-resolution source film remains intact, any "HD" transfer of TNG would still have to redo the effects since even the "originals" only ever existed as SD video- AFAIK there aren't (and never were) any higher quality versions.
Given the craptastic quality of 80s NTSC video, there's no way you could "clean" or upscale them so that they looked like anything approaching HD- they even looked crap at SD (*)- and more importantly so that they didn't stand out like a sore thumb against the higher quality rescanned film footage.
I'd think that most of these scenes the effects could be redone by someone in their basement compared to 1987. It is star trek they should let the fans add the effects back in. They would do it for free to get their name in the credits.
That sounds nice, and I'm sure that there are many skilled fans who'd do it for free. However, I suspect it's not as simple or "free lunch" for the studios as that.
For one, there's coordinating such efforts, ensuring that (e.g.) the style of effects being done by different teams have a consistent (and not jarringly different) style.
And if people are working for free, how far will they accept being told what and how to do things by the studio? What if their personal fanboy view of how things should be done or what should be concentrated on disagrees with that of the studio? (No, what hardcore fanboys want and think should be done with a show isn't always the best from a general audience point of view- indeed, pandering to the self-indulgences of obsessives can sometimes damage the general appeal of a show and destroy what made it great in the first place).
And will such people be working in their spare time? What if the studio needs X done for release in 18 months time, but some guy working in a particular area can't spare the time from work? Of course, they could pay him... which starts to blur the line between employees and free contributions anyway.
So it's not as simple as you might think.
(*) I always used to wonder why the likes of TNG looked so "soft" and generally bad- the same problems that I could see with US-based video shows- when earlier US film-based shows looked okay. Turns out that the older shows were shot and edited on film, but that at some point during the 80s there was a trend towards shooting on film but transferring to video for editing. Apparently, the BBC etc. used their own film-based prints of older shows, which obviously wouldn't have suffered from NTSC video's defects, but they clearly couldn't do this with video-edited shows. And believe me, even watching TNG on a bog-standard moderately-sized colour television set in the UK, the difference in quality was obvious.
Re:In related news... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:In my daughter's word(s) (Score:2, Informative)
Re:In related news... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Simply (Score:4, Informative)
No ST cartoon.
True, but you can already watch that here [startrek.com]. Brief ads, but no Netflix subscription needed.