star trek the cage remastered

‘The Cage’ re-gilded: ‘Star Trek’ pilot episode remastered

Something the two productions have in common: no William Shatner as Capt. Kirk to be seen anywhere.

“The Cage,” stars Jeffrey Hunter as USS Enterprise Capt. Christopher Pike, Leonard Nimoy as science officer Mr. Spock and Majel Barrett as the ship’s unnamed first officer, referred to only as “Number One.”

The episode will air noon Sunday, May 3, on KASW, the Valley’s CW affiliate (Channel 6 for Cox Cable subscribers).

For many years, the 1964 pilot, rejected by NBC, was a “lost” episode in Trek history — it didn’t air on television in its proper form until 1988, instead being chopped up and repurposed as part of the 1966 original series episode “The Menagerie.” That story uses the events of “The Cage” as a backdrop for the court martial of Mr. Spock after he abducts his former captain Pike and whisks him and Kirk’s Enterprise away to the forbidden world of Talos IV for mysterious reasons he is reluctant to discuss.

I recently chatted with Michael Okuda, one of the creative producers for the remastered episodes, whom I met briefly in November at the opening of Star Trek: The Exhibition at the Arizona Science Center . (That exhibit, by the way, ends Sunday. )

“All of the remastered episodes were done on an incredibly tight schedule, and all three of us are impressed with the dedication and hard work that Niel Wray and his team at CBS Digital poured into this project,” Okuda said. “In the case of ‘The Cage,’ the most difficult challenge was the opening shot in which the camera dives into the bridge. Niel’s team did this shot for (the remastered version of) ‘The Menagerie,’ but had to rework it for ‘The Cage.’ This was the single most difficult shot in the entire series.”

Okuda, a graphic designer, created the animated computer displays for the Enterprise bridge in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, leading to a staff position as a scenic artist on Star Trek: The Next Generation . He and Denise have also worked extensively in preserving, cataloging and recording the history of the franchise.

“The remastered Star Trek episodes were particularly fulfilling from a creative standpoint, mainly because all three of us (along with a lot of the gang at CBS Digital) have such a love of the original series,” Okuda said. “That said, we’d love to work on a remastered version of Star Trek: The Next Generation, if CBS ever decides to do so.

“The best challenge is always the next one,” he said.

Spoken like one who believes in the true spirit of Star Trek.

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Where can I purchase a copy of the pilot?

Okuda said in the article that it will be included in the third-season boxed set of DVDs. Try here for starters: http://bit.ly/8S3kGf

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Star Trek: The Original Series - Seasons 1-3 Remastered

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The Star Trek: The Original Series – Seasons 1-3 Remastered DVD collection is a box set containing all three seasons of the remastered Star Trek: The Original Series . Released simultaneously with the last individual, Season 3 DVD set, this collection was in essence nothing more than a simple bundled shrink wrapped repackaging of this and the previous two individual season releases for Region 1.

Compared to the later released Region 2 and 4 counterparts this release contained two extra discs, which however did not constitute extra content; it was due to the fact that Region 1 had the disc contents for Season 1 differently arranged, whereas the other regions followed the more compact arrangement as utilized on their later "slimline" releases.

Contents [ ]

The episodes on the discs, and their arrangement among them, are identical to the individual Original Series Region 1 season sets. Please refer to the following entries for the discs' episode and special features arrangement,

• TOS-R Season 1 DVD
• TOS-R Season 2 DVD
• TOS-R Season 3 DVD

Still missing though, remain the "Red Shirt Logs" hidden mini-featurettes, and Mike and Denise Okuda 's episode text commentaries , not ported over from the original DVD releases.

Episodes in production order [ ]

Since episodes on the discs are in the order in which they aired, and episodes are listed on Memory Alpha in production order, here is a handy guide to watching TOS-R in production order:

• ↑ "The Cage" is on Disc 7 of the Season 3 boxset
• 3 Erigah (episode)

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Star Trek: The Complete Original Series DVD (Seasons 1-3)

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Product Description

"Space...The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship, Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before !" The series is set in the 23rd century where Earth has survived World War III then moved on to explore the stars. Brought to you in a brilliant remastered edition….this is Star Trek like you’ve never seen it before!

The first-season DVD set is supplemented by 80 minutes of featurettes incorporating 2003-04 interviews with Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, other cast members, and producers, and some 1988 footage of Gene Roddenberry. The longest (24 minutes) featurette, "The Birth of a Timeless Legacy," examines the two pilot episodes and the development of the crew. Slightly shorter are "To Boldly Go... Season One," which highlights key episodes, and "Sci-Fi Visionaries," which discusses the series' great science fiction writers (most famously in "The City of the Edge of Forever"). Shatner shows off his love of horses in "Life Beyond Trek ," and, more interestingly, Nimoy debunks various rumors in "Reflections of Spock." As they've done for many of the feature-film special editions , Michael Okuda and Denise Okuda provide a pop-up text commentary on four of the episodes filled with history, trivia, and dry wit. It's the first commentary of any kind for a Star Trek TV show, but an audio commentary is still overdue. The technical specs are mostly the same as other Trek TV series--Dolby 5.1, English subtitles--but with the welcome addition of the episode trailers. The plastic case is an attempt to replicate some of the fun packaging of the series' European DVD releases, but it's a bit clunky, and the paper sleeve around the disc case seems awkward and crude. Still, the set is a vast improvement both in terms of shelf space and bonus features compared to the old two-episode discs , which were released before full-season boxed sets became the model for television DVDs. --David Horiuchi

On the DVD The remastered episodes are the highlight of the 2008 second-season release; like in season one, the reworked visual effects might irk purists but are an improvement overall, and some of the space exteriors are very exciting. It's not in high definition, however; season one was released in 2007 on two-sided combination HD DVD and standard DVD discs, which are now obsolete. Season two mimics the packaging, but is only standard-definition DVD, not Blu-ray. The picture, while obviously not high-definition quality, is still much improved over the 2004 DVD release. Special features here mostly mirror that 2004 set: 80 minutes of featurettes ("To Boldly Go" season recap, " Kirk, Spock & Bones: The Great Trio," "Star Trek's Divine Diva," "Designing the Final Frontier," and "Writer's Notebook: D.C. Fontana"), though missing from this set are the text commentaries on two episodes, the Red Shirt Logs, the production art, and the photo gallery. There are two new featurettes: " Star Trek 's Favorite Moments," in which cast members of later Trek franchises and fans recall certain episodes, and "Billy Blackburn's Treasure Chest, part 2," in which a Trek extra tells stories and shows some of his on-set home movies. And because season 2 includes "The Trouble with Tribbles," the set includes two bonus episodes: "More Tribbles, More Troubles" from the Animated Series and "Trials and Tribble-ations" from Deep Space Nine . Conveniently, all three Tribble-centric episodes are on the same disc, and include the bonus features from the earlier DVD releases (the commentary by writer David Gerrold on "More Troubles" and the two featurettes--"Uniting Two Legends" and "An Historic Endeavor"--from "Tribble-ations"). The bonus episodes were not remastered, and you can tell the difference when comparing the original Tribble episode on this set with the grainier footage that was used in the DS9 episode. A minor annoyance is that the discs are one-sided but appear to be two-sided, as if they had been designed for combo HD DVD again before a late change. That means the info on the disc is restricted to a ring around the middle, rather than a full label that could have listed the episodes on each disc; as is, they're only listed on the glossy "collector's data cards." And once again, the plastic shell is clunky and the disc spindles are way too tight. All in all, it's a nice package, especially if one doesn't already have the other Tribble episodes, but it feels like it's floating in a standard-definition limbo, stuck in the transition between HD DVD and Blu-ray. --David Horiuchi

Season Three

Saved from the brink of cancellation by its loyal fanbase, Star Trek 's third and final season rewarded them with a number of memorable episodes. Tight budgets and slipping creative control, however, made it the series' most uneven season, though it did have some of the coolest episode titles ("For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky," "Is There in Truth No Beauty," "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield"). Some of the best moments involved a gunfight at the OK Corral ("Spectre of the Gun"), a knock-down drag-out sword battle with the Klingons aboard the Enterprise ("Day of the Dove"), the ship getting caught in an ever-tightening spacial net ("The Tholian Web"), TV's first interracial kiss ("Plato's Stepchildren," and it should be easy to guess who participated), Sulu taking command ("The Savage Curtain"), and Kirk's switching bodies with an ex-love interest ("Turnabout Intruder").

The 2008 DVD set benefits from the same remastering given to the other two seasons, though only the first was released in high definition (the now-defunct HD DVD format). Still, the episodes are substantially cleaned up to the point where they look quite good, rather than jarringly fuzzy to the modern viewer. And there are some new visual effects that are well-done, and obtrusive only to the strictest fans. Compare, for example, the dramatic close-up of the green-glowing U.S.S. Defiant in "The Tholian Web" with the original effect, which had the ship floating in a green haze. New bonus features are 11 more minutes of rare footage from extra Billy Blackburn; "Collectible Trek ," a 14-minute discussion of rare Trek items, filmed in 2004 with the rest of the bonus content but not included on the previous DVD set; and the newly filmed "Captain's Log: Bob Justman," an affectionate nine-minute tribute to the series producer. Otherwise, the set retains almost all the special features from the 2004 set, including the features on Walter Koenig, George Takei, and James Doohan (who died the following year), plus the two versions of the series pilot, "The Cage," a restored color version and the original, never-aired version that alternates between color and black and white. Starring Jeffery Hunter as Captain Pike, Leonard Nimoy as a relatively emotional Spock, and Majel Barrett (the future Nurse Chapel and Mrs. Gene Roddenberry) as a frosty Number One, this pilot was rejected, but a second was commissioned, "Where No Man Has Gone Before," now considered the "official" beginning of the series. But "The Cage" is very recognizably Star Trek with its far-out concepts (telepathic aliens collecting species samples), sexy humanoid women, character development, and of course cheesy costumes and special effects. Footage was later reused in the season 1 two-parter, "The Menagerie." --David Horiuchi

Product details

• Is Discontinued By Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ No
• MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ Unrated (Not Rated)
• Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.8 x 6.9 x 5.5 inches; 4 ounces
• Director ‏ : ‎ Anton Leader, David Alexander, Don McDougall, Gene Nelson, Gerd Oswald
• Media Format ‏ : ‎ NTSC, Box set, Color, Original recording remastered, Full Screen, Multiple Formats
• Run time ‏ : ‎ 68 hours and 41 minutes
• Release date ‏ : ‎ November 18, 2008
• Actors ‏ : ‎ William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Katherine Woodville, James Doohan
• Studio ‏ : ‎ Paramount
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B001DHXT6G
• Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 25
• #2,100 in Science Fiction DVDs

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Crowdfunded ‘Space Command: Redemption’ Released, Features Star Trek’s Doug Jones, Robert Picardo & More

| May 7, 2024 | By: Anthony Pascale 12 comments so far

A dozen years after its first crowdfunding campaign , the first installment of Marc Scott Zicree’s Space Command has been released, with several Star Trek actors in the cast. “Space Command: Redemption” is out now on Tubi, VOD, and physical media, with more installments from the series in the works.

Space Command finally arrives

Space Command is a sci-fi series inspired by Star Trek. The ensemble cast for “Space Command: Redemption” features Star Trek: Discovery’s Doug Jones in a leading role. Other franchise stars include Robert Picardo ( Voyager ), Armin Shimerman ( Deep Space Nine ), Faran Tahir (J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek ), and the late Nichelle Nichols (TOS). The cast also includes several Babylon 5 stars including Bill Mumy,  Bruce Boxleitner, and the late Mira Furlan.

Check out the release trailer…

Here is the official synopsis for “Space Command: Redemption”…

Captain Kemmer rescues xeno-archeologist Vonn O’Dara high above Mars, setting into motion a revolution that changes galactic history. The thrilling new space-set film follow the bold adventures in space of the United Planet’s Space Command, a dedicated group of scientists, soldiers and adventurers exploring and taming the vast expanse of our solar system for human colonization.

Here is how Doug Jones described his role in Space Command in a 2018 interview with TrekMovie :

Dorn Neven is an android in Space Command . I loved his character so much. He is much like other characters I have played, in that he is tall and lanky, but very poised and very mannered. He is an android that served as a servant for rich people in this future setting, but he ended up getting a heart and soul of his own, getting more human characteristics and asking questions he wasn’t supposed to ask. So, they end up demoting him and putting him in the salt mines, and that is how you meet him in the beginning of  Space Command .

Doug Jones with Robert Picardo, Jelena Mrdja, and Mira Furlan in Space Command

Space Command was written, directed, and produced by Marc Scott Zicree, who worked on shows like Sliders and Babylon 5 , as well as authoring the influential book The Twilight Zone Companion . Zicree has also been involved in Star Trek, writing the stories for the Next Generation episode “First Contact” and DS9’s “Far Beyond the Stars.” He also wrote and directed the 2007 Star Trek Phase II fan film “World Enough and Time,” starring George Takei. His concept for Space Command was to make something more like Star Trek, in reaction to the dark and dystopic sci-fi of the early 2000s.

“Our idea was an uplifting show like the original Star Trek , which came out when I was 10, blew my mind, and inspired my lifetime fascination for this whole realm. Star Trek was truly revolutionary,” says Zicree in a statement. “Like Star Trek , the stories we present in Space Command are hopeful, taking on various challenges that show we can make a future worth living and not just passively accept defeat. The whole philosophy of the film is that we can achieve all of this through empathy, compassion, and inclusivity. We want to change millions of lives for the better.”

The initial crowdfunding campaign brought in $221,000 in 2012, which helped launch the independent Space Command Studio based in Los Angeles, California. Over the past decade, Zicree has raised $4 million between crowdfunding and selling investment shares. Filming and post-production work on the Space Command series has been ongoing over the last decade with work recently completed on the 2-part pilot, which is the newly released “Space Command: Redemption” movie. Zicree has planned out a 12-part “season” for Space Command with filming for part 6 recently completed and parts 7 and 8 already begun.

For more about the development of Space Command , check out TrekMovie’s 2018 interview with Marc Zicree .

You can watch “Space Command: Redemption” now for free on the ad-supported streaming service Tubi . You can also rent or buy it at Amazon and Google Play . There is also a DVD and Blu-ray release with special features and director’s commentary available at the official site  spacecommand-theseries.com .

Keep up with more Trek-adjacent Sci-Fi news here at TrekMovie.com

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This looks like a slice of classic 80s Sci-Fi cheesiness. Hope it’s enjoyable in that way.

Looks like something I would have rented from Hollywood Video in 2001… So yep, I’ll watch it!

This has been out for years. Not sure what this is about.

Yeah, I wondered this as well when I saw it posted up on YouTube as if it was a new thing. Marc Zicree, bless him, can sometimes be a bit over the top with ‘marketing’. As in, reposting, clipping, whatever. Amusing that such a repost has made its way here as a story though. I guess a correction is in order!

I’ve never heard of this but I’m curious now. I am definitely interested in watching anything that has the classic Star Trek spirit of optimism and hope.

Mira Furlan passed away a couple years ago. A damn shame, she was an underrated actress, and her personal story was equally compelling.

Nichelle Nichols has been gone almost two years now as well…

How is this different from Space Command 2020? It’s on youtube as Space Command Streaming Series (10 parts). Very poor Imdb reviews, two fake 10*s. Space Command Redemption is also on Imdb, no reviews, incomplete cast list. Some poor acting in the trailer.

I watched the original version of “Space Command” some time ago and was not too impressed. Nevertheless, I wish Zicree nothing but the best in this project, and will hopefully get around to checking it out myself eventually. I met him many years ago at the Director’s Guild in Los Angeles for a screening of the Trek pilots which also included his excellent “World Enough and Time,” and he seemed like a very nice guy.

He’s a cool dude, for sure. And Space Command (2020-2022) is packed with cool people. I’m not sure what happened. Perhaps an avalanche of issues. Or maybe it’s just not for me – which is, you know, fine.

But I didn’t so much watch that production as I endured it!

Watching it myself, I went with the second possibility. And you’re correct; that’s fine. If I were 14 and had just finished reading my first Heinlein juvenile, where the characters tended to say things like “gadzooks!,” I probably would have loved it.

A dozen years??? I had thought that the Axanar crowd were the world – class slackers! LMAO.