In April CBS & Paramount released the first season of Star Trek: The Original Series on Blu-ray with a note that Seasons 2 & 3 were ‘coming soon’. Now an industry trade magazine has revealed the date for Season 2. We also have news on what what Paramount Home Entertainment has planned for Comic Con.
Season 2 in September + Slave girls at Paramount SDCC booth
Home Media Magazine reports that Star Trek Season Two on Blu-ray will be released September 22nd, for a retail price of $116.99 (bear in mind it will be discounted, Season One has a street price of about half that). Although the remastered Star Trek Season One was previously released on HD-DVD, it was the only season on that format. So the Blu-ray Seasons 2 & 3 will be their first time in HD. Season Two (like Season One) will feature seamless branching between the remastered digital effects and the original effects, and it will include new special features. The set is not yet available for-preorder. As for Season 3, TrekMovie sources indicate that will be out in early 2010.
TrekMovie has previously reported that there are more Star Trek titles coming out this Fall, including a set of all the TNG movies on Blu-ray and, of course, the JJ Abrams Star Trek feature (on standard DVD, and deluxe edition DVD & Blu-ray) [see previous TrekMovie story for more details]. TrekMovie sources confirm that details, images, and dates for all the upcoming Trek titles will be announced at Comic Con in San Diego, the last weekend in July. Apparently, Paramount is actually planning to make Star Trek a big part of their booth, including Trek-themed giveaways and models dressed as Orion slave girls.
TrekMovie will bring more updates on the Star Trek Blu-ray and DVD details as the become available.
Why are Star Trek dvds always so damned expensive? A normal season of a show on blu-ray would be around $70 to $80. Paramount knows how to milk their fans. Has for years.
I’m ready to be milked…. i want….
I guarantee you’ll see these for way less than that on Amazon.com
Wish I could be in San Diego for the announcements. Can’t wait for JJ’s Trek on Blu.
FIRST! I’m STILL NOT Again, Re-buying the entire TOS series on BD!
I will get the new movie on the deluxe ed. I’ve bought it on vhs, standard and HD dvd, and that’s all folks!
The Trek Blu-rays aren’t expensive at all, especially comparing them to previous home video releases of the series. Just going by Season 1, let’s see how it compares. Here’s how much it would cost to get JUST Season 1 in most of the previous releases:
Original VHS Release (1 ep per tape, $20.00 each) – $580.00
Laserdisc release (2 eps per disc, $60.00 each) – $900.00
Original DVD release (single discs, 2 eps per disc – $30.00 each) – $450.00
Original DVD Season set – $160.00, original version only (now sells for around $60.00)
HD-DVD/DVD Combo Season Set – $130.00, remastered version only (now sells for around $85.00)
Blu-ray Season 1 set – $120.00 SRP, usually sold for between $60-90, both original and remastered version in HD.
The Blu-ray set is a freaking BARGAIN, especially given the quality you get AND the fact that you get both versions. It’s totally worth it, and would still be a bargain at twice that price. I did a 3-part series on the subject on The Multimedia Chronicles series I do on YouTube…
what’s the deal with TNG? i think i read that the original film wasn’t saved so high def is out of the question. is that right?
#6 – TNG was filmed on video apparently…..
#6
Out of the question for the show, but this article is talking about the TNG movies, which were shot on film.
I am looking forward to getting Season 2 and TNG movies on blu ray. they will be awesome
I look forward to getting the new movie on blu ray as well
If they only include director cuts of the movies…. then i’ll buy the TNG movies on blu-ray. And also a ton ton more features. Also can’t wait for JJ’s Trek on blu-ray. Thats going to look freaken spectacular on my 50 inch plasma.
TNG was shot on film. But all post processing was done in video. TNG could be remastered, but it would require new SFX for every shot and re-editing every episode.
Take it from me. i had the LASER. All of them from columbia house ..these are not expensive
12 has it right. The video assembly editing makes remastering TNG like 10 times labor intensive and more expensive thatn TOS
BTW, where is the new S1 BD-Live content? The press release was over a week ago!
I waiting on the Blue-Ray edition of “Orion Slave Girls Gone Wild”. I wouldn’t mind paying a few quatloos for that.
Can’t wait for ST09 on dvd. Hopefully, the deleted scenes (which is all I care about on my dvd’s) will be on the DVD editions. Hope they announce the release date soon. As for season 2, I already have the remastered dvd set and an upconverting DVD player I’m set for the time being. Until I start making booko bucks, Blu-Ray is not in my lineup of things to get. Maybe if it becomes the gold standard for home video and my dvd’s wear out I’ll consider upgrading. But for the time being, I’ll be the man still watching my stuff in upconverted HD rather than true HD.
A note to CBS Video (or anyone else reading who has anything to do with this): Can you PLEASE include all of the TOS Blooper Reels on this or the 3rd season release? I can’t imagine it would cost that much to get a decent copy of them and make a clean digital transfer. Don’t let the bloopers exist only as crappy VHS transfers on YouTube!
@1. Michael Longstreet
“Why are Star Trek dvds always so damned expensive?”
Because people will pay it. When the amount of people that will pay it tapers off, they will lower the price for those that will pay the newly adjusted price. When that tapers off, it will be lowered again, and so on and so forth.
#1 – The BluRay of TOS Season 1 sold for around $65 on Amazon right from day one; I would expect Season 2 to be offered at that price as well. That’s actually a pretty reasonable price given the outstanding picture quality, seamless branching of original and CG effects, and all the other extras. Really looking forward to adding Season 2 (and Trek 2009) to my collection.
I hope they do all the Trek Incarnations on Blu rey. Including Trek 1 Directors Edition on Blu Rey. Ill wait a bit as i know the price will come down to about 60$ for the Blu Rey Edition. I know they have the sticker price way up there but with the discounts will be a lot easier. Tng being on Film and video even though it is more time consuming will still make them a nice profit. I just wish they would remaster all the Fx of Tng and Ds9 and Voyager. But would be nice to get industreal light and magic to do it. Wouldn’t that be something.
You can call me a hillbilly who lives on a swamp but i´ll never spent a dime on Blue Ray, i´m not falling for that trick.
The price i paid on the soundtrack CDs years ago still hurts in my pocket.
22 =swamp dweller! ;) just kidding. I love the high def picture all the extras and the ability to watch the eps in either version but i understand your reluctance to accept a new format.
It’s hard to believe they didn’t save the film from TNG. I think they did, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s redone, effects & all. I’ve also read that some episodes (such as “Inner Light”) had footage deleted for “time” during the original run that the producers really didn’t want to delete. I think I read an interview that Inner light was about 12 minutes over before cutting, and they were “hoping not to lose some of the light…” It’s unfortunate there hasn’t been more attention to releasing some special edition episodes….
no one is saying the tng 35mm film isn’t around, it’s just not in any edited form, that’s all.
So, for TNG, we basically will have to wait for the cost of transferring the film to digital, editing the footage to match the existing episodes, adding the SFX, erasing visual bloopers, remastering the sound to 7.1 to a less expensive and time consuming ordeal, and that’s all she wrote.
I bet a group of 20 or 30 people with CGI and digital editing experience could do the whole job, all 7 seasons, in about 2 years. If the average salary of said individuals was approximately, say $75K a year, that would at least cost Paramount/CBS $3,000,000 and as much as $5,000,000 not including overhead of say another million. Double that to add marketing, and we’re looking at $12M to produce and promote TNG: Remastered.
I wonder what the total cost was for TOS.
I could be way off, as I don’t know how the Hollyweird bean counters do their thing.
=A=
I dont understand the packaging…..the first was command with gold and now it blue with command? Shouldn’t the science/medical symbol be up there instead?
They will never remaster TNG, DS9 or Voyager. Not enough people will buy them to offset the cost, where as the original series was a no brainer to remaster.
#28- I wouldn’t quite say that. DS9 or Voyager may not bring in the dough, but TNG has many loyal fans and would be worth the effort. I’d love to see all series in High Def. But if they go through with it, they better master it all in 4K to make it worth the effort and make it future proof- so when we finally have 4K tvs, they can dupe it directly over to the new format.
Keeping in mind that the reason for remastering was to sell DVDs while getting the effects up to a tolerable level for “new” viewers, TNG probably isn’t crappy enough yet to warrent the expense.
Except for The Dauphin.
Combined with the whole potential video-edit problem.
They will all hit Hi-def of one sort or another someday, when the overhead comes down and fx get cheaper and the technology matures.
I mean, after all, they put drek such as The Time Tunnel on regular DVD [I loved it as a kid, but as an adult I always wondered ‘What was I thinking???’]
RE: Comic Con
“including Trek-themed giveaways and models dressed as Orion slave girls.”
Say no more. I am sooo there. ;)
I want Enterprise on BLU …
I still would bet real money that, after we see season3 of tos, that shortly there after we will start seeing enterprise on bluray, and it wont come soon enough.
I still hate that timewarner got rid of HD NET, one of my favorite times of day was the two hours that they had enterprise on in HD.
Orion slave girls. That reminds me of one of the few things in the movie which didn’t work for me. The Orion girl in the movie wasn’t mysterious or sensual at all. Just another bimbo who happened to have green skin (and the wrong shade of skin, to boot!).
I bought HD-DVD Dohh!
I can wait for the Full 3 season Blu-Ray Discount pack I think.
I’m up to 4 versions now. VHS, Single DVD’s, Season Pack DVD’s, Special Edition HD-DVD’s – Blu-Ray will be version 5…..I’m over it!
Well #36 I would like to thank you for your devoted desire to support Paramount and Star Trek. I do have a few episodes of Re-mastered TOS from HD-DVD in 720p format that I found on the Net from Russia. And my friend has HD-DVD in plain DVD format to play on his PS3.
If you love the TOS shows you’ll even love the Blue-Ray 1080p versions it will be like seeing a photo in the newspaper and holding the photograph in your hand. There is much more video content than my old mid 90’s re-mastered DVD’s show, even rescaled to 1080p.
It will be like going to see a movie in the theater or watching on your old tube TV. And if you have old DVD’s try to sell the and upgrade. You may not get much but at least you’ll be like not paying the sales tax.
Getting a Blue Ray system is another side issue.
I bought the TOS season one Blu-ray for 50 quid in the UK (the DVDs were £30): a bargain as far as I’m concerned. Fabulous quality.
I bought season one on DVD for £50 a few years back and was appalled at the quality (and the rubbish packaging) so didn’t buy the rest.
Always wary of upcoming new formats and aware that an HD restoration of TOS was possible, I’m glad I waited!
It’s a shame for TNG-VOY fans that it’ll be such a task to revamp those shows. Essentially you’d have to go back and recut 21 years’ worth of material from scratch to create HD versions. And since you’re doing that, you might as well recut them properly to improve pacing and music as well as special FX – early TNG would certainly benefit!
37. Spockish
Watching Blu-ray on a 1080p TV makes me feel like I’ve been watching TV with my eyes defocused until now!
True but TNG was such a hit and is still the most popular version of Star Trek so regardless of how hard it is to redo all the CG and FX shots it will be done. The first few seasons are the worst the smooth ship, the blurry looking planets, just watching reunification how nice and detailed the big E looked. I just hated when they went to warp, they simply cut and pasted the ship warping from the first season and the rubber band warp effect looks horrible, but you live with it because you love it. I was extremely pleased with TOS season 1 on blu-ray, I cant wait for season 2.
#36 I have TOS episodes on Beta and CED discs as well as VHS, Laserdisc and DVD.
The thing I love about the CED versions is that they look like the beat up 16mm prints we all watched in syndication in the 70’s… everything is scratchy and the image is heavy on the blue side of the color spectrum.
Makes me feel like a 10 year old when I pop one of those in.
It was fun to be at Comic con two years ago and see all the things in the works then. The Billy home movie videos were my favorites. Matt, guess I’ll be contacting you. Gonna have to get the bluray. Is Daren charing a panel this year?
40. Chadwick:
TNG is not the most popular version of Star Trek: that’s a myth put around by the dwindling TNG-only fanbase. After Nemesis, such a belief is nonsensical!
It’s impossible to compare TOS ratings with TNG, anyway, as a different version of the Nielsens were used back when TOS was on, which constantly misrepresented the viewership. Not to mention TOS was network and everything else was syndication and minor networks. If TNG was still so popular, people would still be going to TNG movies or watching Berman TV shows.
TOS remains the version of Trek with the most cultural awareness: go anywhere in the world and ‘He’s dead Jim!’ ‘Fascinating’ and ‘Beam me up, Scotty!’ are what people think of with Star Trek, not ‘Engage!’ ‘Indubitably!’ and ‘Ker-plagh!’ which have an entirely nerd vibe about them.
TNG ***was*** popular and, for a brief time, was probably culturally bigger than TOS (face it in the 90s with shows like BH90210, Quantum Leap and Baywatch on the air, who can blame ’em!) but nearly quarter of a century after its debut, it’s no more than schedule filler, rendered culturally irrelevant by a series of mostly appalling movies and TV spin-offs, followed by the huge success of a film based on TOS.
Realistically, given the huge amount of work that would have to go into revamping TNG – which would entail re-running an entire seven years worth of television post-production from scratch – the cost would be so vast as to make it silly.
Face it: would CBS/Paramount/Viacom/whatever they become next really want to stump up the funds for a seven-season ‘reconstruction’ in the knowledge that it can’t be a prime-time hit? The huge amount of money could be spent making a new non-Trek series in HD now with the possibility that it will be a hit today.
TOS being a low-budget show cut on film made it a no-brainer to restore. It could be accomplished by a small, dedicated team on a tight budget. A TNG revamp, by contrast, would have to be exactly the same as a modern TV show’s, only not aimed at primetime and without a chance of making network advertising profits.
The best thing they could do is cherry pick some good episodes, probably some of the two-parters, and release them as Blu-ray movies, maybe bulked up with some new scenes previously cut for time and so on.
Cold Day In Hell when I spend that kind of coin on a DVD.
No….stinkin….way.
stop bad mouthing TNG
TNG is a great show
45. captain_neill
Um, if that’s me you’re talking to, I’m not bad-mouthing it. I’ve said on numerous occasions when people kneejerk react to anything that could seem vaguely critical of of TNG that its ultimate critical, cultural and box-office failure doesn’t deny that there were some very hours of television put out under the name before its fall (I count VOY and ENT within the context of TNG a lot of the time because they are all effectively the same show rebranded!)
Even though I don’t think TNG was necessarily a particularly good Star Trek show a lot of the time, I still think it was often a very good TV show! Stories like The Inner Light bear comparison with City on the Edge of Forever for me.
And, as someone who works in post-production, I know the enormity of the work involved in doing an HD overhaul of the show. As I said above, it effectively means running the post-production of seven seasons of televison all over again. Anyone can see that doing that for an archive series that will, at best, end up on hardcore TNG fans’ shelves and as small-time schedule filler on minor networks, would be financial lunacy!
Why spend all that money re-transferring and regrading all that film stock, reconforming by eye, replacing large numbers of FX and generally upgrading audio and other visual material, when you could make a new show for probably less money that could potentially be a hit on network TV?
I have to agree it would be unrealistic and probably unprofitable to remaster all TNG to HD from the unedited neg, what a headache!
BUT there’s got to be a strong case for “the best of TNG” remastered such as the 2 parters and highlights like “innerlight” “Family” etc. Much less work, more feasable and far more profitable.
If only CBS would work with Sci-Fi (oh sorry, I mean SyFy) to get the rights to the extras from their initial run on the network. That would be an extra worth picking up.
Awesome. I love my Season 1 set, and can’t wait for Season 2 so I can host another Trek fest for my friends. Amok Time, Doomsday Machine, Mirror Mirror…bring ’em on!
#46 & #43 – initially yes.
However, no one has said exactly what condition the original elements are in or how well they are catalogued. Aside from re-editing the original negatives to conform to the final video edits, this project is no different than the TOS Remaster. When I was working in post production in those days detailed EDLs were kept referencing the original film stock, just as it has always been done. If those elements are equally well catalogued, then it’s just a matter of having an editor re-conform each episode based on notes, only slightly more work. If TNG failed to keep detailed notes or they have been lost, then the project is only slightly more complex, but everything could be shipped to India or China and a low cost workforce could cull through the footage matching the film to video. Then the project is more or less the same once new EDLs have been constructed. There are all kinds of ways to make this happen on a budget.
While I agree CBS could start the project by taking select episodes and two parters to create movie packages. However, eventually, if CBS wants to continue to broadcast the series, they will have to upgrade it to true HD, not just upres the existing low-grade NTSC SD conversions.
Here are a few more facts, the TNG films grossed more internationally than TOS films did. This indicates that TNG was a bigger money maker internationally than TOS. 3 of the TNG films grossed over half as much as the current film at the box office and ranked in the top 6 films including ST09. TNG clearly has a large number of fans and the potential for attracting more. Nostalgia is a huge factor in exploiting a film catalogue. TNG will have its day.
Ultimately, whatever CBS does in the next 5 years, they will not simply throw over 500 hours of popular science fiction into the waste bin, once the world fully transitions to HD in the next 10 years. It will become harder and harder to sell SD only content as the demand for HD content rises. Yes Paramount has made a ton of money off TNG, which is all the more reason to re-invest those profits back into its historical and popular franchise catalogues. It will happen as #31 aptly observed “when the overhead comes down and fx get cheaper and the technology matures.” And that will happen sooner than anyone thinks.