Tonight I watched the 1975 feature film, Framed, starring Joe Don Baker. It wasn't too bad. After it ended, I decided to look it up on the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) as part of my insatiable thirst for knowledge. (Useless knowledge? Watch your tongue, my dear boy.)On the main page for the imdb was a news headline about Paramount Pictures releasing theatrically, for one night only on November 13th, the Star Trek episode, The Menagerie. Recently, Paramount made transfers from the original camera negatives for the first time. This is the new version with CG effects replacing the original model work. Considering I'm an old Trekker, I don't have any strong feeling about the 'upgrades'... whatever turns Paramount on and a potential new audience. (The miniature flyby stuff for the first pilot is, admittedly, a little on the rough side as it was also experimental in nature. No tv show up to that point had tried such elaborate effects.)
The Menagerie is a good choice for release as it has a movie quality to it; in running time and scope. This original two-parter incorporated the first pilot episode, The Cage. The ST series producers wanted to use it as it was a very expensive pilot, and having a $616,000 negative sitting idle in cans was considered a waste. The writers creatively (brilliantly) wrote an 'envelope' show in order to use the Cage footage effectively without resorting to; "Gee, Mr. Spock, what was it like to work with Captain Pike?" This additional footage was shot and the pilot was used as a sort of flashback. The Cage became The Menagerie.
The news headline mentions that this release will happen in about 300 theatres. Maybe Toronto will be one of them, and maybe I will go... maybe I'll be careful next time about admitting such a thing. Gee whiz, where did I put my Spock ears?...
1 comment:
Well this is an interesting proposition. An ironic counterpoint to plummeting ticket sales because everyone's home watching their boxed sets of "24". Yes, there was some television out there that was worthy of theatrical release.
Yet, is this an interesting way of luring people from their small screens to a big one, or is this yet another last gasp at wringing some more money out of the Star Trek franchise until they come out with the TV mini-series featuring Kirk and Spock as young academy college roommates with all the expected homoeroticism intact? I'm presuming the latter, and yet, if they ever came out with "Trouble With Tribbles: The Stage Musical" I probably would pay eighty bucks to see the goddamn thing. (Hey kids, do the "Denebian Slime Devil" twist!)
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