Star Trek: The Original Series - Season Two [Blu-ray], starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan: DVDNear.com

Star Trek: The Original Series - Season Two [Blu-ray]

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DVD Cover Information

Actor: DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner
Brand: Par
Blu-ray: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); Portuguese (Subtitled); English (Original Language); Spanish (Original Language); French (Original Language); French (Dubbed); Spanish (Dubbed)
Format: AC-3, Box set, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 1270 minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: 2009-09-22
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Paramount

Movie Reviews of Star Trek: The Original Series - Season Two [Blu-ray]

Movie Review: Star Trek never looked this good before
Summary: 5 Stars

Star Trek fans can be a picky bunch, and I reference the mixed reaction to the reboot film as an example. However, I can't imagine that any fan would approach this Blu-ray set with anything but enthusiasm and grateful anticipation. As I said in my title, the shows have never looked better, including in their original broadcasts on NBC. The restoration process for this presentation was performed with reverence from the original film negatives. Defects in the picture due to tears, stains, and other causes were painstaking cleaned up after the scan to digital files. Colors and contrasts were adjusted correctly. Even the famous theme music was rerecorded using the original arrangement and an orchestra of the correct size and mix of instruments.

I like to let people know in my reviews of Star Trek products that I watched, with eagerness, the first episode broadcast. Back in those days networks sometimes did what they called a "sneak preview" week. Each fall the premier week for new series was more of a big deal than it is today, because you only had three networks and limited choices. For a kid, in particular, it was always an exciting time of promise and adventure. I never felt that more than in 1966 when I saw the lead up commercials for Star Trek. The "Sneak Preview" week was just a tactic to try to get in ahead of the other networks, but they were all three quickly doing it. I had just started to become interested in science fiction, having recently read my first science fiction book (Robert Heinlein's "The Star Beast"). When I finally saw the Star Trek's 'sneak preview' episode, "The Man Trap", at first it was a bit disorienting for a 9 year old. I thought maybe the bridge was the only working area of the space ship, for example. LOL As the series progressed, though, I quickly caught on. I loved every minute of Star Trek I could watch, and that has pretty much remained true now for 44 years.

In making a Blu-ray presentation of the Star Trek series, the producers of this product knew they had an issue to resolve. Although the resolution of the live action scenes was more than sufficient to create high definition images, the special effects shots just were not on the same scale. So they took the amazing action of recreating the effects shots. I'll have to say, they did a great job of it too. For purists, the original effects shots are also included ... in fact you can skip back and forth between the two sets of shots 'on the fly' as you watch an episode! However, a lot of thought went into the creation of the new effects. They are a distinct improvement over what the original production crew was able to do with the limited budget and technology available during the show's production. I only wish Roddenberry could have seen the results of this work. It is precisely what he would have done in the 1960s had he the means to do so.

Season Two continued the great writing and ground breaking stories that marked many Season One episodes. Show for show, it may well be the strongest of the three years. A few highlights:

* Amok Time: gives us our first real look at Vulcan culture outside of Spock's (almost) stoic demeanor. We learn about Pon-far.

* The Changeling: Mostly notable as the show that Alan Dean Foster stole his ideas for when he authored the story for the first motion picture.

* Mirror, Mirror: an extremely interesting episode where Kirk, Uhura, and Scotty are transposed with their evil counterparts from an alternate universe. This show was the inspiration for several DS9 episodes and a truly fun two-parter near the end of the "Enterprise" run.

* The Doomsday Machine: One of the infrequent looks at another Constitution class starship. It introduces (and bids farewell to) Commodore Decker, father of the new Enterprise Captain in the first movie.

* Catspaw: a spooky and fun Halloween episode (broadcast on October 27).

* I, Mudd: Very amusing episode where Harry Mudd and a planet full of androids plot to take over the Enterprise.

* Journey to Babel: Here we meet Tellurites and Andorians, and Spock's parents! Sarek would become a famous character despite only appearing in this one episode (until Next Generation, that is).

* Wolf in the Fold: Scotty is accused of murder when a murderous entity possesses him, and others.

* The Trouble with Tribbles: One of the funniest of the Star Trek comedies, and possibly the most famous episode at this point in time. This set takes that extraordinary step of including the animated series sequel to this episode, and also the DS9 tribute episode that brilliantly puts DS9 cast right into the middle of the 1967 show. Fantastic stuff!!!

* A Piece of the Action: Another comedy as Kirk and Spock go gangster.

* Bread and Circuses: A fun take on a planet with parallel development to our own ... at least until the Roman Empire stayed on for good.

* Assignment Earth: This was a pilot episode wedged into a Star Trek Episode. Robert Lansing and Terri Garr make this one fun to watch.

I tried to be at least a little picky here, and I was tempted to list many other episodes from this season. There were 26, and great entertainment one and all.

If you're a Star Trek fan still without a Blu-ray player ... well ... this gives you a great excuse to get into Blu-ray and hi-def. Luckily the road is paved and Blu-ray players now cost what had at one time become common (and low) prices for DVD players. Even HD TVs are a fraction of what they once cost. The "early adopter" period is long passed, and prices are good on these wonderful viewing technologies. There is no better way to enjoy hi-def programming than by viewing an outstanding transfer of a long beloved series of programs like this.

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Summary of Star Trek: The Original Series - Season Two [Blu-ray]

Space. The Final Frontier. The U.S.S. Enterprise embarks on a five year mission to explore the galaxy. The Enterprise is under the command of Captain James T. Kirk. The First Officer is Mr. Spock, from the planet Vulcan. The Chief Medical Officer is Dr. Leonard 'Bones' McCoy. With a determined crew, the Enterprise encounters Klingons, Romulans, time paradoxes, tribbles and genetic supermen lead by Khan Noonian Singh. Their mission is to explore strange new worlds, to seek new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

The most famous episode in franchise history, "The Trouble with Tribbles," is one of the highlights of the second season of Star Trek: The Original Series. A deserved classic, the humorous story centers on an ever-expanding mass of furry creatures that memorably rain themselves down on top of Captain Kirk (William Shatner) and into the middle of a Federation-Klingon showdown. It inspired one of the most memorable episodes in the spin-off series Deep Space Nine, "Trial and Tribble-ations." Also in the second season, the Vulcan culture of Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) is fleshed out in "Amok Time" (in which Spock is faced with the possibility of killing his captain and friend) and "Journey to Babel" (introducing Spock's father, played by Mark Sarek, in what would turn out to be a long-recurring role). A new character, navigator Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig), was introduced; his Monkees haircut was intended to appeal to the younger audience, but he was also a Russian, which at the height of the cold war reflected Gene Roddenberry's optimistic vision of a more enlightened future. Other social-commentary opportunities presented themselves in "The Omega Glory," "The Doomsday Machine," and "Assignment: Earth," the last also one of those periodic opportunities to scrimp on the budget by time-traveling to an earlier version of Earth. Another example was "A Piece of the Action," a comic episode set in the Roaring Twenties and memorable for, among other things, Kirk's teaching a made-up card game called Fizzbin. In other significant episodes, "I, Mudd" saw the return of the bounder from season 1, "The Changeling" was the original inspiration for the first Trek feature film a decade later, "Wolf in the Fold" (penned by the author of Psycho) provides an example of the series' great writing, and "Mirror, Mirror" introduced the concept of the parallel universe inhabited by vicious, amoral counterparts of the regular crew, another theme later borrowed (more than once, and to good emotional effect) by DS9.

On the DVD
The remastered episodes are the highlight of the 2008 second-season release; like in season one, the reworked visual effects might irk purists but are an improvement overall, and some of the space exteriors are very exciting. It's not in high definition, however; season one was released in 2007 on two-sided combination HD DVD and standard DVD discs, which are now obsolete. Season two mimics the packaging, but is only standard-definition DVD, not Blu-ray. The picture, while obviously not high-definition quality, is still much improved over the 2004 DVD release. Special features here mostly mirror that 2004 set: 80 minutes of featurettes ("To Boldly Go" season recap, " Kirk, Spock & Bones: The Great Trio," "Star Trek's Divine Diva," "Designing the Final Frontier," and "Writer's Notebook: D.C. Fontana"), though missing from this set are the text commentaries on two episodes, the Red Shirt Logs, the production art, and the photo gallery. There are two new featurettes: "Star Trek's Favorite Moments," in which cast members of later Trek franchises and fans recall certain episodes, and "Billy Blackburn's Treasure Chest, part 2," in which a Trek extra tells stories and shows some of his on-set home movies. And because season 2 includes "The Trouble with Tribbles," the set includes two bonus episodes: "More Tribbles, More Troubles" from the Animated Series and "Trials and Tribble-ations" from Deep Space Nine. Conveniently, all three Tribble-centric episodes are on the same disc, and include the bonus features from the earlier DVD releases (the commentary by writer David Gerrold on "More Troubles" and the two featurettes--"Uniting Two Legends" and "An Historic Endeavor"--from "Tribble-ations"). The bonus episodes were not remastered, and you can tell the difference when comparing the original Tribble episode on this set with the grainier footage that was used in the DS9 episode. A minor annoyance is that the discs are one-sided but appear to be two-sided, as if they had been designed for combo HD DVD again before a late change. That means the info on the disc is restricted to a ring around the middle, rather than a full label that could have listed the episodes on each disc; as is, they're only listed on the glossy "collector's data cards." And once again, the plastic shell is clunky and the disc spindles are way too tight. All in all, it's a nice package, especially if one doesn't already have the other Tribble episodes, but it feels like it's floating in a standard-definition limbo, stuck in the transition between HD DVD and Blu-ray. --David Horiuchi

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Star Trek: The Original Series - Season Two [Blu-ray]