Wednesday 10 March 2010

Retreat, Earthmen! Horror awaits you!


The most accurate account of a First Contact scenario ever made.

4 comments:

jayessell said...

David...

You'll have to take Dr. Sheldon Cooper's on-line re-certification for this.


By the way, in my humble opinion...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJa4S9TTdBU

Best of the series

Neil Russell said...

That Shatner-reax shot at around 2:31 is priceless.

Unrelated, but at the end of that clip I couldn't get over the quality of the images that are apparently available on the DVDs of the show. I guess I never saw anything but the old 16mm prints on tv.

jayessell said...

Neil...

Is there an 'Uncanny Valley' where the quality of the video reveals it's a 1960s TV show?

Visible mattes, plywood sets, ect?

Was it restored and touched up?

Neil Russell said...

JSL, when I bought the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea DVDs I was at once impressed with the rich quality from the 35mm prints and taken aback by the crappy quality of the props and sets that were all too visible.

In a lot of scenes it's pretty easy to spot the plywood scenery and paper tubes used for ducts and piping.
Seeing the marks on the set floors where they rolled the props around from scene to scene is a bonus!

I don't know if there's been some touch up work done, perhaps more time and money was spent bringing the Star Trek series to DVD, but I am guessing that FOX didn't spend much on Voyage or any of the Irwin Allen shows they put out on those awful double sided discs.

I'm thinking the model work was just that good. Guys like L B Abbot and the Lydecker brothers (see the ongoing "Radar Men" serial for some of their work) had all come from the movies and took their craft seriously. It's doubly amazing that such quality was present given what a cheapskate Irwin was.

Considering the producers probably didn't expect the shows to be available for minute scrutiny several decades after the fact, they didn't do too badly at all.