Next week Simon & Schuster releases its big trade paperback "Star Trek Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor’s Wing." This book should be of interest to both fans of Enterprise, as well as those who want to learn more about a conflict we first heard about during The Original Series. Today we have an an early review which is extensive, befitting this extra-long trade paperback.
[This article cross-posted here and at Digital Bits] As reported on Thursday at Digital Bits, select release details and cover art images of Star Trek sets on Blu-ray have leaked from European studio sources, but there’s been conflicting information as to what exactly the release will entail here in the USA. We’ve checked in repeatedly with Digital Bits and TrekMovie industry sources and we’re now able to bring you accurate, updated details.
Captain Jonathan Archer and the crew of the NX-01 may have cut their TV adventures short, but they continue in print. This week’s Library Computer takes a look at the Star Trek Enterprise releaunch including an exclusive sneak peek at the next fall’s "Kobayashi Maru," written by Andy Mangels and Michael A. Martin, as well as a tease on next year’s Romulan War books.
It seems strange now to think that Star Trek: The Next Generation first debuted some 20 years ago, but there it is – there’s no denying it. I was in college at Wisconsin when the first episode, "Encounter at Farpoint," appeared on the air. I’d been watching reruns of The Original Series for as long as I could remember, so at the time it was a thrill just to have Trek back on the air. The sets, the ships, the technology – it all seemed so sleek and futuristic back in 1987. So it’s somewhat shocking, all these years later, to realize just how dated The Next Generation seems today. Unfortunately, of all the Trek TV series – including The Original Series – this is the one that’s suffered most the passage of time.
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.