In the middle of last year NBC announced that it was finally owning up in a small way to a mistake of historical proportions. And to be fair, it only took four decades: Compared to how long Galileo had to wait for a Pope to act, this was quick redemption indeed. Yes, for the first time since Star Trek was the future, NBC was going to have something to do with it. They were going to clean up the original masters and it was going to be special!
The announcement served NBC well for some headline publicity, then we waited. Several cable networks added original ST episodes to their lineups in the months that followed, were these the cleaned up versions? They looked, just like I remembered them. They could not compare to the job the Deep Space 9 team did with a gorgeous external shot of the original Enterprise that they spliced into one of their episodes. It was cleaned up and shown in detail that had never been broadcast before.
NBC must be using Romulan cloaking technology. After the big announcement they waited much longer than they led us to believe would be the case, then secretly started airing these episodes Mondays at 3 AM. (If you’re setting your Tivo, that means have it ready Sunday night!) The results are amazing. They not only cleaned things up, it looks like the elves added some CGI magic. Now this has caused controversy with purists when it was done to some newer movies that had stunning effects to begin with, and people may not like it on older movies that they feel need to look a certain, grainy, way. However, with Star Trek this is just right. They were the beginning of trying to show things clearly, but the very, shoestring budget, beginning. Watching the Enterprise battle a doomsday device that has texture and presence is worth seeing it for the thousandth time. It’s no longer a Thanksgiving style horn-of-plenty eating planets, it’s a genuine mother-of-all-Deathstars doomsday device.
Believe me, this makes the Professor chuckle. When these were new he might have repeated, “I never think about the future, it comes soon enough.” However, by that he really meant that he wouldn’t waste time worrying about what he can’t control. He certainly was an advocate of thinking about and preparing for what we can control. I’d like to think he’d agree that celebrating the wonder of the possibilities of the future is worth a bit of one’s time, it can fuel the inspiration that is so crucial to the type discovery to which he dedicated his life. He’d love the view of a future in which petty differences between peoples had been resolved. He’d wholeheartedly back a Federation obsessed with peaceful exploration. He advocated one world government, albeit as the least of all governmental evils, how outstanding would it be to have one galactic government, especially if it was well intentioned due to being run and populated by more civilized beings. He’d prefer an unarmed future, but he came to understand the importance of having the strength to stand up to evil forces, and the strength to protect and aid others. He’d love the episodes where they’d find what seems to be a monster and wind up reasoning with it instead of shooting. (I asked him to leave things like Faster Than Light travel for another discussion)
When these were new and they were the future, it was all that simple. Today, looking back at what the future used to be tells us a lot about the past. For a brief period people were more optimistic–tailfins on your car, anyone? You never know if it will be retrofitted with Jet engines in a couple years! Perhaps the popular ideals were more altruistic, or at least more secure and less defensive. Oh, and ideals were actually idealistic. Of course, all of this was happening at the same time as the Cold War, the Viet Nam War, civil unrest and… But we can look back, clean up the tapes, put in detail and special effects that were never there. We can even make a show about an Enterprise before the first Enterprise.
This last part is fascinating: The show that invented continuity and that in turn incubated fanatic followings that started the practice of obsessing over every detail tried to appeal to a new audience by rewriting or ignoring every scrap of its own history. Now history is always written by the victors, which in this case means a production team, and rewritten by the next set of anarchists, (again, productions teams) but alienating your own following by training them to be historians and then pulling the rug out from under that history is, not logical to say the least.
Einstein once said, “Children don’t heed the life experiences of their parents, and nations ignore history, Bad lessons always have to be learned anew.” So the producers ignored the lessons and repeated NBCs mistakes with the franchise. And presidents, Prime Ministers, Kings and Dictators, all ignore history except to rewrite it to support what they’re going to do anyway.
So now we have the originals to look at with rose colored glasses. The past of the future and the future of the past never looked so good. Illusion, reality, it’s all what we make it, as Albert said, “Reality is an illusion, albeit a persistant one.” To paraphrase Star Trek, “They have their illusion, and you have your reality. May you find your way as pleasant.”
