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Star Trek

Star Trek, the Original Series, Season one on DVD

Fans of the original Star Trek series will probably love this boxed set, but on the other hand chances are they already bought the set when it was released as a series of two episode discs a couple of years back.

How many more times is Paramount going to go back to this well?

Until they stop selling, one supposes.

On the other hand, it’s now cheaper and more “shelf friendly” to have this version – and you also get a bunch of special features that weren’t available the first time around.

The first season was Star Trek’s best, with a few exceptions from this season and the subsequent ones. It’s the purest, the most exciting, and it gives us the best looks inside the Enterprise and its crew.

All 29 first season episodes are crammed onto eight discs. Here are the episodes: The Man Trap, Charlie X, Where No Man Has Gone Before, The Naked Time, The Enemy Within, Mudd's Women, What Are Little Girls Made Of? Miri, Dagger of the Mind, The Corbomite Maneuver, The Menagerie Part I, The Menagerie Part II, The Conscience of the King, Balance of Terror, Shore Leave, The Galileo Seven, The Squire of Gothos, Arena, Tomorrow is Yesterday, Court Martial, The Return of the Archons, Space Seed, A Taste of Armageddon, This Side of Paradise, The Devil in the Dark, Errand of Mercy, The Alternative Factor, The City on the Edge of Forever, Operation: Annihilate!

You also get some 80 minutes worth of extra features, including recent interviews with William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy and others. There’s also some 1988 footage of Gene Roddenberry, the Great Bird of the Galaxy to whom Star Trek’s universe owes its creation. Other featurettes include "The Birth of a Timeless Legacy," "To Boldly Go... Season One," (you figure there’ll be sequels when the next two boxed sets are released?) and "Sci-Fi Visionaries," which talks about some of the series' great writers.

You also get a pop up text commentary on four of the episodes, though there are no audio commentaries.

The DVD’s feature the same terrific full frame video quality of the original DVD release (which we found excellent), as well as Dolby 5.1 surround audio in which they’ve done an excellent job of taking the original mono and morphing it into real surround.

The plastic case is awful. It’s hard to get open, hard to get the disks out and worse to get them back in, but at least it’s brightly colored and fits onto the shelf better than the previous releases.

One quibble is with the chapter stops. Logic would dictate that they put a stop right after the opening titles, so you can skip forward to the beginning of the episode. But twas not to be, and if you try to skip the titles you find yourself whisked forward into the action.

Too bad. On the other hand, the original DVD release was the same in this regard.

 

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