:: theLogBook.com DVD Reviews ::

How many times can Paramount go to the classic Trek well on DVD? Appropriately enough for a SF series, the answer would seem to be an impossibly infinite number. This pricey box set gathers the full first season in its newly “remastered” form - in other words, all of the exterior space, planet and spaceship scenes have been replaced with CGI, and a select handful of effects on the show’s live action footage have gotten a makeover as well. Most of the live action is left completely untouched, with even 1960s hand phasers left intact for the most part. The transporter effect is unchanged, as are the sound effects. Compared to, say, the special editions of the three original Star Wars films, these changes are relatively small potatoes. But do they help? (more…)

At the moment that I’m writing this review, the writing is on the wall for America’s dwindling fleet of space shuttles, which were mooted in the early ’70s as the great white-and-partially-black hope of the U.S. space program. A new workhorse spacecraft is on the drawing board (but not even in the testing stages) which will supposedly pick up where the shuttle left off, and apparently before that first launch date the new vehicle will have the good graces to hurry up and be finished and perfected. And if the new vehicle isn’t ready? Oops.

Before embarking on the Apollo program, NASA knew it’d have to develop certain key abilities in the relative safety of Earth orbit. Dusting off plans for a two-man “Mercury Mark II” capsule, the space agency went from Mercury to Gemini, an intermediate series of flights designed to test those abilities. Since Gemini came after the first-men-into-space Mercury flights, and before the first-men-on-the-moon Apollo flights, it’s often consigned to the “also-ran” category of history, or the memory of space geeks like myself. This 3-DVD set from Spacecraft Films preserves the existing footage and adds a documentary that puts it all in context for those who have forgotten. (more…)