In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the original Star Trek, CBS is upgrading the special effects in the original episodes:
LOS ANGELES — Four decades after Capt. 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, 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.
CBS Paramount says the make-over is intended to enhance the show’s visual appeal while staying true to the original look and feel of the series.
The upgraded episodes begin running tonight in syndication, though apparently not in the Washington, D.C. area.
