January 2007



William Shatner: The Ballet…Not Kidding

TV Star, Movie Star, Singer, Pitchman, and now inspiration for Ballet…William Shatner does it all. The Milwaukee Ballet has announced it will premiere "Common People" a ballet choreographed to the Shatner’s recent album ‘Has Been’. The dance will be one of three parts of “Premieres of Passionate Dance" being performed this Valentines Day weekend (February 15–18). In a WKTI radio interview Shatner was quite enthusiastic about the event, saying "I have a life long devotion – more than an interest, less than an obsession, with the ballet and to have this happen to me is so exciting." Shatner said that he would try to make it to Milwaukee to see the ballet if he can fit it between shootings of his show Boston Legal.



Takei Feels ‘Hot’…Wants In On Star Trek XI

George Takei seems to be getting more and more work lately; tonight he will be guest starring in NBC Heroes. This bit of stunt casting is getting the show and Takei a lot of publicity. In a TV Guide Interview Takei talked about what it was like to be in demand again Oooooh, and it’s sooooo wonderful!  Who knew this would be happening 40 years after Star Trek? It’s good to feel hot. In another interview with the Philadelphia Daily News Takei was asked about Star Trek XI, and he responded in classic fashion:




Star Trek Auction Update: Week 6

The sixth week of the Star Trek auctions on eBay from It’s a Wrap Hollywoodended with 92 of the 99 lots selling for a total of $68,883.85, the secondhighest total for these auctions since they began and the the highest sellthrough Better selection, fewer unreasonable reserves. The top item of the week was the Admiral Janeway costume seen being worn by the former Voyager Captain in both Star Trek: Nemesis and the Star Trek Experience Borg Invasion show. A beautiful piece, it sold for $5,100, the most yet for a Star trek item in these auctions.[Editor’s Note: congratulations on winning this item Alec] The  Satan’s Robot costume sold for $4,628, which was the second highest price paid for an item so far. The robot featured in the Captain Proton holodeck scenes, this was also a rare and dynamite piece.23 items sold for over $1,000, which is second only behind the first week. If you ignore the first week as an aberration, because everyone was feeling out the auctions, then this past week was significant.


Remastered “For The World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” Airs Today

The Enterprise finds a giant asteroid generation ship headed towards a planet…and McCoy finds a girlfriend. Preview | Ep. Info | Show times This McCoy centric 3rd Season episode is probably not Trek’s best effort, but it does have the longest title. For the Remastered team there isn’t a lot to work with, but you can look forward to… New missiles A big new Yonada Asteroid Various shots of the Enterprise, including one firing phasers Possibly some new effects for the Oracle Zap


Trek Remastered on DVD Update: Season 1 on Combo Disk By Q4

TrekMovie.com has finally got a copy of the offiical release for TOS-R coming to HD DVD, announced recently at CES. It states that season one of the ‘Remastered’ Star Trek: The Original Series will be released on combo DVD/HD-DVD disks by the fourth quarter of 2007 in the USA and Japan. Note that this is the actual 29 episodes of the first season of TOS and not the first season of Trek Remastered in syndication which is airing out of order. This release is sooner than originally planned and TrekMovie.com has been told that CBS are ‘accelerating’ their production schedule to ensure they have completed all of season 1 this year. However even though they will be producing these extra season one shows this year, the 2007 syndicated airing schedule will remain unchanged. In the official release Ken Ross, EVP of CBS Home Entertainment states "as we take this initial step into the high definition DVD market, it is only fitting that Star Trek is the first property that we chose to release.”


Shatner: Including Old Cast In Trek XI Will Bring Audience ‘In Droves’

While the brain trust behind Trek XI remain mum, William Shatner keeps on talking. This week The Shat talks to Time magazine, where he reveals a tiny bit more about his thoughts on Star Trek XI. Time: Lost producer J.J. Abrams is working on a Star Trek movie for 2008 about a young Kirk and Spock, and there are rumors you will make an appearance. Shatner: I did have a talk with J.J., and he outlined what he wanted to do. Getting a character who is supposed to be dead to talk to his younger self is a storytelling problem. But if you want to guarantee the audience will come in droves, one of the things you might do is include some members of the old cast.


Dochterman To Complete His “Enhanced Doomsday Machine”

Daren Dochterman, the Visual Effects Supervisor on the Directors’ Edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, has been working on a CGI-enhanced version of "The Doomsday Machine" for many years. He even presented a version of his work to Paramount TV over 2 years before they decided to give Star Trek Remastered the go ahead. That version has been available at his site (TrekEnhanced.com) and on YouTube for over a year, but Dochterman has been quietly working on a ‘final version’ which he announced at his site today.  




Grunberg Wants To Be Vulcan – Says Trek XI Script Almost Done

Greg Grunberg (the only semi-confirmed cast member for Star Trek XI) has decided what kind of alien he would like to play in his best friend’s new Trek feature. "I’d love to be a Vulcan, it’d be great. That would be incredible," Grunberg tells Rotten Tomatoes. This may be due to his repeated concerns about sitting in a make-up chair for too long, assuming ears are easy to do. More interestingly Grunberg reveals that the script for Trek XI is almost complete, saying: He [JJ Abrams] is finalizing the script right now so I just talked to him today and he said, ‘I’ll send it to you as soon as it’s done’ so hopefully it’ll be very soon.



Review of “Where No Man Has Gone Before” Remastered

“If I Ruled The World…”The Enterprise, leaving the galaxy, discovers the scarred and blasted recorder marker of the only other ship to do so, the Valiant.  Upon reviewing the Valiant’s tapes, Spock discovers that the ship hit some kind of “unknown force” and as a consequence of some (inaudible) events involving (tape damaged) and ESP and such that ship’s captain ordered his vessel destroyed. Captain Kirk decides to forge on ahead, reasoning that since other ships will someday explore this region it’s important for the Enterprise to leave behind its own scarred and blasted recorder marker to warn them off. Turns out there’s a big Energy Wall around our galaxy, despite the fact that the only thing more scientifically ridiculous would be a big Energy Wall around the heart of our galaxy imprisoning a demon that claims to be God.  The barrier (now given the full CGI treatment) zaps a number of Kirk’s crew, most notably his pal Gary Mitchell and Dr. Elizabeth “Hotlips” Dehner.



Another Rumor: James McAvoy To Be New Scotty?

Here is yet another recasting rumor for you to mull over, this time for Scotty. The Scottish tabloid The Sunday Mail is reporting that Last King Of Scotland star James McAvoy is the leading candidate to play the iconic engineer in Star Trek XI. The paper cites a ‘studio insider’ saying that "the producers are keen to have a Scot play Scotty." It is hard to judge the validity of this report, but it isn’t a good sign that the paper takes it as a given that Matt Damon has been signed on to play Kirk, quoting their source as saying "they (the producers) think he could form a brilliant double act with Matt (Damon)". For the record, Matt Damon has previously stated that he has yet to be approached by the studio. In addition, negotiations for any roles will not happen until after Trek XI gets an approved budget (with the possible exception of the leads and possibly Shatner and Nimoy).



Perpetual Launch Teaser Site For Star Trek Online

Well it is almost a year late, but Perpatual have finally launched the official site for their MMORPG Star Trek Online. StarTrekOnline.com does not have a lot of content (in fact it has less content then the subsite that was previously hosted a Perpetual.com), but it is sporting a whole new Starfleet emblem. Although games may not count as ‘canon’, the game is set a couple decades after Star Trek Nemesis so changes in uniforms and the emblem are to be expected. Although there isnt much to look at on the site, Executive Producer Daron Stinnett talked to WarCry Network this week and answered some questions about STO.


Remastered “Where No Man Has Gone Before” Airs Today

The Enterprise is endangered by Captain Kirk’s best friend when he is turned into a powerful being…and you know what they say about power corrupting. PreviewLocal Station & ShowtimesMore at Memory Alpha This is Star Trek’s second pilot (after the Cage) and the one that convinced NBC to pick up the show. This is the reason there are some differences between this episode and the rest of the series (both visually and with the cast). There are a number of effect shots for CBS to update with CGI…


Spiner On Nemesis Failure: The fans were done with us

In the latest issue of Star Trek Magazine, Brent Spiner (Data) talks about the last Trek movie, Star Trek Nemesis. Not only did Spiner star in Nemesis, but he co-wrote the story (along with screenwriter John Logan). Spiner on why the film failed We worked on the story with the intention of making it for the fans. With every Star Trek movie prior to that we tried to find a way to bridge the gap between the fans and the general public. Even reading the latest quotes from J.J. Abrams about the next movie, it makes sense for the movie to be as inclusive as possible. With Nemesis we said, ‘Forget that! Lets make a movie for the fans, because that’s the people who actually go to see the films.’ And what happened? They didn’t go! Usually the films opened big, even if they had a lot of competition, but Nemesis didn’t even do that. This was a message from the fans that they were done with us.


Star Trek Auction Update: Week 5

Week Five of the Star Trek auctions on eBay from It’s a Wrap Hollywood ended today with 82 of the 100 lots selling for a total of $45,918. It was a good week as there were many interesting items up this week, including costumes from Star Trek: The Motion Picture and a slew of cadet uniforms from the movies, Next Generation and Voyager. The top item of the week was the Seven of Nine Jumpsuit which was bid up to $5,032.99, but still didn’t hit reserve! This was just another example of over-estimation of the potential price by It’s a Wrap.Plus the costume was imcomplete (didn’t include the inner corset or the shoes).This is the second week in a row where a costume was bid up to over $5,000 without being sold, perhaps It’s a Warp will realize the rich people who were bidding at Christie’s are not bidding on eBay.



Trek Remastered and Trek Movies Coming To HD DVD (and Blu-ray) [UPDATED]

It looks like 2007 may be the year we start seeing Star Trek on High Definition media. Both The Hollywood Reporter and Home Media Retailing quote CBS Home Entertainment head Ken Ross as saying that Star Trek: The Original Series is going to be released on DVD/HD-DVD Combo format at the end of 2007. "The reason we chose to do that is to give us the ability to make high-definition transfers of the show available to people who don’t yet have high-definition players," Ross says in the interview. However the same piece also notes that while a Blu-ray Disc release hasn’t yet been scheduled, CBS will support both formats like Paramount does. So, to cut through all the hype, this likely means that while the HD-DVD camp can probably accurately say that The Original Series will be an HD-DVD exclusive in 2007, the release almost certainly won’t happen until the very end of the year (simply due to the fact that it’s going to take that long to finish at least a season’s worth of remastered episodes) and a Blu-ray Disc release probably won’t be far behind. There is also movement on the movie side as well. Exepct to see at least one of the Trek films on HD-DVD by the end of the year, with Blu-ray likely to follow.


Review of “Wink of an Eye” Remastered

Imagine a race of aliens on a distant planet who exist in an accelerated state of being, moving so quickly in time that they are imperceptible to the ordinary world except for the insect-like buzzing of their sped-up voices. It’s an intriguing sci-fi concept with all sorts of dramatic and narrative possibilities, but the “Wink of an Eye” in this week’s Star Trek episode is from the writers to the audience telling them, “Yeah, we know this story makes no logical sense whatsoever but just ignore that and watch Captain Kirk bag another alien space babe."


Star Trek Auction Update: Weeks 3 & 4

Due to technical difficulties with the site, we weren’t able to post the Week 3 results from the eBay It’s a Wrap Star Trek auctions, so this will cover the last two weeks Week 3 of Star Trek auctions on eBay from It’s a Wrap Hollywood ended with 84 of the 99 lots selling for a total of $45,921. This included several items from the first week that did not sell because they did not hit reserve were re-listed without a reserve this time. Unfortunately Its A Wrap have not learned their lesson as the listing for week 4 listings came out with more reserves than ever. This issue of high reserve prices is a real source of discontent with the collector community. The fact that two Klingon masks, one of which was listed week one with a starting price of $2,000, sold for just under $600 each, shows that It’s a Wrap greatly over-estimate’s the value of some of the items it puts reserves and high starting bids on.



Trek XI Release Still (Probably) Winter 2008

On Monday we ran a story from iF Magazine seemingly quoting Trek XI producer Damon Lindelof revealing an ‘official’ release date of July 2, 2008 for Star Trek XI. This was surprising as our Paramount sources have been telling us (off the record) that the date had moved from the summer to a winter release. We have reconfirmed that it still appears to be winter, but that officially Paramount are still not being more specific than ‘2008’. We contacted iF Magazine and apparently the release date in their article was not actually from Lindelof; they have now removed the date. So it was a false alarm, not the first related to Trek XI (remember the Tom Cruise thing) and we do not expect it to be the last.