'Star Trek: The Next Generation' season 1 coming to Blu-ray: Details on the release
When Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted on Sept. 28, 1987, it was one of the most ambitious first episodes of television ever produced. No matter how popular the feature films had been with the original cast, bringing Gene Roddenberry’s optimistic sci-fi vision of our future back to TV with an all-new cast and U.S.S. Enterprise was far from a slam dunk. And then there was the scale of the two-hour pilot, “Encounter at Farpoint,†with roughly 200 feature-film-level visual effects.
That ambition, however, was worth it. ST:TNG debuted to nearly 27 million viewers, and the show ran for a robust 178 episodes over seven seasons. And now, to celebrate its 25th anniversary, the series is being remastered for a high-definition re-release on Blu-ray that is, fittingly, just about as ambitious an undertaking as that fateful debut episode.
EW can now reveal exclusively that the full first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation will be available on Blu-ray on July 24. (Three episodes from the series were released on a special preview Blu-ray edition last January.) It is the culmination of over a year’s worth of painstaking work. While the show was shot on 35mm motion picture film, an inherently high-definition format, it was scanned into standard-definition video before any editing or visual effects work was completed.
“This was bleeding-edge back in the day,†says Michael Okuda, a scenic designer and technical advisor on ST:TNG who is overseeing the high-def transfer process as a consultant with his wife, Denise. “[The standard-def process] made it possible to do Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was a far more ambitious series from a technical point of view than the original [Trek] series. But the downside of that is, a quarter-century later, all you have is standard definition.â€
To get the show converted for high def Blu-ray, every frame of the original camera negatives had to be rescanned, and each episode has been reconstructed using archived script and editors notes from 25 years ago.
