Star Trek heads back to TV with digital makeover

LOS ANGELES - Four decades after Captain Kirk and crew zoomed off at warp speed to "the final frontier," the iconic sci-fi series Star Trek returns to broadcast television this week with an extensive digital face-lift.

CBS Paramount Domestic Television, a unit of CBS Corp, is digitally remastering all 79 episodes of the original series to enhance the show's 1960s-era visual effects with 21st-century computer-generated graphics.

Digitally created images will replace the miniature-scale models used for exterior shots of the various spacecraft on the show, including Kirk's Starship Enterprise and the enemy war vessels of the alien Klingons and Romulans.

Shots of distant galaxies and planets also will be touched up with computer graphics to give them greater depth. The flat matte paintings used as backdrops on the surface of the strange new worlds visited by the Enterprise crew will be digitally enhanced to add texture, atmosphere and lighting.

Moreover, the music and sound for the show's opening sequence have been rerecorded in state-of-the-art digital stereo, and William Shatner's classic 38-word introduction, beginning with "Space, the final frontier," has been digitally remastered.

"Nothing really has changed except for the fact that it's just prettier to look at," said John Nogawski, president of CBS Paramount Domestic Television, in a recent conference call with reporters. "Right down to placement of stars, it is being re-simulated to be exactly what was there in the first place."

Visual effects producer David Rossi said one subtle change avid fans may notice in the opening sequence was in the flight of the Enterprise, recreated as a computer-generated graphic with measurements taken from the original model of the craft now on display at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

"We smoothed out the motion of the Enterprise. It flies more dynamically now," Rossi said. "It occupies real space. It doesn't look like a model anymore."

In honour of the series' 40th anniversary, the remastered episodes will begin airing on Saturday in the US on more than 200 TV stations across the country.

It will mark the first time in 16 years the original series will be seen in US broadcast syndication, although it currently airs on a cable network.

Conceived by author Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek debuted on September 8, 1966, introducing TV viewers to a 23rd-century team of space explorers led by Shatner as Captain James T Kirk, the Enterprise commander and an interstellar Lothario.

The series co-starred Leonard Nimoy as his stoically logical first officer, the half-human, half-Vulcan Mr Spock.

Running on NBC for three seasons, Star Trek was cancelled in 1969 due to poor ratings. But it developed a strong cult following in reruns that helped establish the show as a pop culture staple.

Shatner and Nimoy insist the series endures because its visual effects were secondary to transcendent themes dealing with social justice, race relations and even Cold War tensions.

"Shows about explosions and special effects, go away," Nimoy said in a recent interview.

"We didn't have a lot of production values. It all had to get into your head somehow and resonate somewhere. And I think that's why it survives."

Shatner, who jokes he doesn't watch Star Trek reruns anymore because "the aging process is so painful," added that fans saw past "the cheesy costumes, and the bad sets and the ill-gotten special effects" because of the show's substance.

"It's almost like theatre of the mind."

- REUTERS