Post #355731 by Cammo on Fri, Jan 18, 2008 7:27 AM

Kate, Kate, Kate. TBird, TBird, TBird.

It constantly amazes. Despite TC being a forum whose sole purpose is to promote retro entertainment, people keep posting that they in fact do not like retro stuff! And seem to be proud of it!

Get it straight – the reason why retro anything is important is because it was the original creative idea. Everything that followed these original concepts in clothing, movies, engineering & products are neither original nor creative; they are by definition pale copies. The originals in any field took brilliant vision, luck, and a lot of work. They were usually the result of many years of experience, boiled down to some simple ideas that were way ahead of their time. Trader Vic, Roddenberry, Edison, the inventors in any field were all the same; they were driven by great ideas that they knew had to get done.

The later versions of Star Trek were made because the original was good, not bad. Obviously.

And here’s how good the original FX for Star Trek were; they invented the idea of using stationary models bluescreened for drop-out mattes with motion controlled moving cameras. They invented the modern era of rotoscoped FX, in fact almost every type of shot used by ILM in the pre-digital era. It was the same guys who worked on the original Star Trek who formed the core of the FX department for the original Star Wars movie.

One shot in "The Cage", Star Trek's pilot episode, has two people stepping on to a transporter, but only one being beamed up. The remaining person looks over and goes, "Huh?" This shot literally took weeks in an optical printer, and involved burned-in FX, matching a split screen, freeze-frames exposed at the same rate as running footage, holy cripes! The final shot is seamless. At 35mm. film resolution it is still 4 times higher quality than current high-def digital video.

The cheesy effects for Next Generation were done in video editing. They simply don’t compare.

And if you want to know who was responsible for Star Trek’s original look and camera effects, there were two guys. Bob Justman and Byron Haskin. Byron was a certified genius, whose career went back to the silent days. He directed “War of the Worlds” among other things....