Well we now know why Paramount spent all that money to redo the effect scenes in the orignal Star Trek series when they started to play it on TV again. The release once again of the Original Series on DVD. This time how ever this time it’s on HD-DVD/ DVD combo discs. So for all you Star Trek geeks out there who have a HD TV and a HD-DVD player you can now seen Star Trek in high def, but still only in 4:3 aspect ratio. For those of you who invested in Blu-Ray your out of luck.
Nice thing about this release is that the episodes are in broadcast order, so it starts with “Man Trap” then the second pilot “Where No Man Has Gone Before.” Unlike the two episodes DVD disc that Columbia House put out. This first season collection also includes 80 of bonus featurettes, and four of the episodes include pop-up text commentary, kind of like AMC’s DVDtv. It would have been nice to seen some of the episodes get a audio commentary, but I doubt it will ever happen considering the age of the series (and it’s stars.)
While the packaging has a interesting look I doubt it will fit easily on a standard DVD shelf. Also the ’spine’ look to be pretty plane making it hard to select off the shelf. It’s packaging like this that has led to the creation of fan made covers like those over at RixGrafix who has made some of the best spanning-spine sets out there.
