One possible reason Star Trek The Motion Picture Directors Cut is not on blu ray?

I'm not into over-the-air broadcasting any more. The commercials ate away at me for 50 years and I have no appetite for them anymore.

We've thought about it, but we're leaving the system as-is for now. I think we've subscribed to 6 streaming services and several dozen satellite pay TV channels, and that's enough for now. When there's a broadcast show we need to watch, we either see it via Apple TV or Hulu without commercials or promos.

As for Star Trek, I think Paramount/Viacom needs to get their act together and figure out how to make their vast libraries available. CBS All-Access only has an infinitesimally-tiny piece of what they have in the vaults.

 

I DVR everything and run-through the commercials

 

I agree completely but have come to really love and appreciate the LD format and especially just how much of the groundwork it laid for everything that followed. Sure it may have its own inherent issues (I think the worst thing overall is warped discs) but if they had been somehow able to lower the prices and manufacturing costs it could have achieved a greater market share...then again most likely not!

I just found it amazing MUSE as a system actually worked and was possible in 1991. Of course having some sort of hd display back then was not really feasible.
Collecting them is out of the question. Hundreds of dollars per disc and then finding the rare players and decoders and bringing them back into useable service...I know some who have done this and I don’t see how they managed to pull it all off besides haunting Japanese auction sites.

 

It was always sort of doomed, though. For starters, the giant heavy discs just made it intrinsically impossible to get the price of the players and discs below a certain threshold. It also had to compete with RCA's technically inferior but much cheaper CED discs, whose failure also kind of tainted Laserdisc in the minds of consumers. Ultimately though, the demand for VCRs was just much higher - time shifting was a thing, as were home movies to a lesser extent - both of which required the ability to record. That was many years away for optical disc based media, at least at anything approaching an affordable price. Once economies of scale kicked in for the home VCR due to that massive demand and skyrocketing sales it was all over for Laserdisc.

The arrival of hi-fi VCRs, then SuperBeta and VHS HQ with their signal processing, and later S-VHS just further doomed Laserdisc to irrelevance.

RCA almost abandoned their CED format in the mid-'70s after sinking zillions on its development. I do wonder what would have happened had RCA backed Laserdisc instead, and if JVC hadn't launched the competing VHD disc system in Japan. It's possible Laserdisc might have gained enough traction to have expanded to more than just a niche format. Then again, if you look at the legacy of the compact cassette vs. the LP, you can see that by the 1980's even the long-established LP got displaced in the market by the former dictation medium. Consumers really valued the convenience, portability, and recording abilities of the cassette over the arguably technically-superior - and already well-entrenched - LP, so much so that prerecorded cassette sales outstripped LP sales before the CD came along to finish vinyl off. So even if a single disc standard had been agreed upon by the late '70s and well-supported by manufacturers, I think the VCR still would have buried it.

 

LDs were a cheaper way to collect movies. Prerecorded VHS tapes were around $100 a pop. LDs were averaging around $30 and at the start some were priced at about $15 but that didn’t last long. So for building a film library LDs was the way to go, except most folks were happy to rent and mostly tape their shows. It wasn’t until Wrath of Khan got released at $30 on VHS that people could buy movies at a lower price that weren’t used rentals.

 

Laserdisc? Jesus, we gave up analog video in 1998. Guaranteed, the DVDs and Blu-rays that replaced those titles will look many, many times better.

Man, you're living in the past. Check the calendar -- it's 2020.

That was true maybe through about 1991-1992 (28 years ago!), but the industry as a whole dropped VHS (and eventually DVD) down below $30 for most titles. In fact, I can remember a pretty long stretch of the 1990s where the Laserdisc was much more expensive than the VHS tape. Bear in mind that Laserdiscs cost about $6 per side to manufacture ($12 per disc), so they weren't making any profit selling them for $30. VHS of course only cost about $2 to manufacture (tape stock, duplication, 4-color box and shrinkwrap). But DVDs eventually went down below 50 cents, and I think those were maybe a buck out the door. This is why they were suddenly able to sell thousands of DVD titles below $10. Blu-rays were maybe double that ($1 per disc), which is still not that bad.

 

That was only true until '83-'84 I believe, then movies on VHS began to rapidly drop in price after - as you mentioned - Paramount moved a metric buttload of Wrath Of Khan VHS tapes (VHS duplication got much cheaper around this time as well). And of course, sales were only a tiny slice of the VHS pie for many years - VHS was all about rentals.

Ironically, there was a small market for rental Laserdiscs as well, and there I thought Laserdisc made a lot more sense. But it was a chicken and egg problem - people weren't buying Laserdisc players because they were only that - players. Everybody wanted the ability to record. So if you were gonna blow $400 on a gadget, were you going to get a Laserdisc player or a VCR? Of course, you were gonna get a VCR. Which meant rental outfits only rented videotapes.

When I lived in Tempe/Mesa/Chandler in Arizona in the early '90s there was one shop up on the south side of Scottsdale that rented Laserdiscs. That was it. I went thru everything I was interested in within a year. I remember when I moved to San Francisco in '95 you could hardly find anyplace that rented Laserdiscs. There was one video rental shop south of the Castro that had a few titles - very few. That was it. I didn't feel like amassing a big library of purchased titles because I knew by that point the format was on its last legs. So my old Teknika player just sat there disused and sad.

Not even until then. By the mid-to-late '80s titles on VHS dropped under $30. Often way under. Any disc purchase price advantage Laserdisc held collapsed before 1990.

And it also has to be mentioned, VHS decks got a lot cheaper than Laserdisc players. And they could record. Again, economies of scale came to the VCR's assistance. They were inherently complicated, finicky devices, but when you're making 100 million of them a year around the world, constantly iterating on the design and in hard competition with a dozen other manufacturers, you get better, fast. That really never happened with the Laserdisc, and I think given the inherent issues with spinning a huge heavy platter that fast, it would never benefit from advances the way VHS did. You just can't make a precision motor capable of slinging a disc that heavy that fast really cheap. Whereas with VHS, there was always room to simplify things, the strip out weight and materials, to make the mechanisms lighter and cheaper without sacrificing reliability.

Of course, as they got cheaper, nobody really cared all that much about reliability, anyhow. Oh, my $300 VCR died after five years? Who cares. I can get a better one now for $250.

 

In Canada we have CRAVE which is available on Bell, Roger's Cable and several streaming platforms. CRAVE has the whole Star Trek library. I get Crave for $10 on Roger's.

Star Trek HD widescreen
Star Trek: The animated series. HD and stereo!
Star Trek TNG HD
Deep Space Nine SD
Voyager SD
Enterprise HD widescreen
Star Trek Discovery HD widescreen
Picard HD widescreen

I ignore the last two. Although some episodes of STD are pretty interesting.

 

MUSE goes back to 1991?! Wow! Didn't know that. But were they any HD TVs back then? I always thought HD didn't show up until 1997 or so.

 

In answer to the thread title question - because it’s Paramount. The studio hasn’t bothered to release most of its catalogue titles on Blu-ray. Until the last few months. It now appears to be doing so. But even then if you buy titles like Funeral In Berlin, The Molly Maguires and Atlantic City from Amazon.com you’ll get a BD-R. Buying them from other vendors appears to get you a pressed disc. I’m hoping for The Parallax View, which last had a release on home video in 1997 - needless to say, that DVD looks quite terrible.

 

That’s good to know. I want only pressed discs for all my disc media. I’ve noticed some companies lately have been getting sneaky (my opinion) with the stuff and making it hard to know. They do this because they realize there are a lot of folks that don’t want CD-Rs, DVD-Rs or BD-Rs and won’t buy them if they know. Instead of giving customers what they want, they try and hide it.

You hit a button on me. Lol! I am tired of this and I’m disappointed they’re doing this.

 

It should be pointed out that the Trek films do exist on Blu-ray, but the source has been rumored to be the early 2000s transfers originally used as a starting point for the DVDs, and they're loaded with DNR that gives the films a waxy look; Star Trek VI is a particularly egregious example.

 

Here's my preferred viewing format.

 

I saw a giant rear-projection HD set at CES in 1986 in Las Vegas. Well, probably 40", but at the time that was inconceivably enormous. I don't recall if they were prototypes or not, just that they were from NEC and were likely commercially available or about to become so, but probably in Japan only and I'm sure they cost more than a car. They were playing a video of I think Chartres Cathedral in France and it looked absolutely stunning. It wasn't the high resolution that impressed me so much as the color. Video could always have pretty intense color compared to what you typically got from film, but NTSC's color resolution was crap and there was tons of noise. All that went away with the analog HD systems, so you had this intense, clear, noiseless color. Night and day. But it would be almost 20 years before that kind of picture quality began to commonly make it into the home, more than a decade longer than I think most of us thought it would take at the time.

Much of that was due to the FCC dragging its feet on analog HDTV until the point where it would have been dead on arrival and digital systems were on the immediate horizon. Had the government moved on it I'm pretty sure we could have had analog HD during the mid-'90s at the latest.

 

So off topic just a bit more...
In 1991, I saw an NEC prototype plasma flat panel at NAB in Las Vegas with live HD content from an outdoor camera somewhere delivered via a special codec/fiber. I remember the display was ~2" thick and had a clunky harness going to another electronics box. I clearly remember nobody seemed interested and the NEC engineer was just sitting there. I asked if the display used cold cathode technology and he got very enthusiastic and chatty because I knew a bit about it.

 

Interesting. The NEC HD sets drew a big crowd at the '86 CES - they're one of my most-vivid memories of the entire Vegas trip. I was a senior in high school at the time and technically too young to attend CES, but I slapped on a suit and just strolled in like I belonged there. It worked.

 

Certainly modern formats excel in performance and I still avidly collect, research and enjoy DVD, BD and UHD.
I don’t think it’s strange to collect and enjoy an obsolete format. I have a really good setup for LD (Panasonic LX-900 player and Sony XBR 960) and can find discs to enjoy sometimes for even less than a dollar. Plus I like seeing how transfers evolved over the years. What really hooked me wasn’t the awesome packaging but the largely untouched soundtracks which I find are often better than later releases. Sometimes the difference can be such that you almost wonder if there is an RL etched in the mint markings.

I couldn’t stand how bad the TOS films looked on bd. They seem to have been made from the source of the dvd reissues from about 2006 or so and have truly weird looking color timing on most. I also didn’t like the 7.1 upmix tracks. Only WOK got a new 4k master released as a stand-alone and the rumor is the rest are being redone.

I went out and bought the letterbox laserdiscs after this to check out their transfers. Overall I was very impressed with them for the format. 2-5 had good solid but not great transfers and their Dolby Stereo original mixes. 6 is a great LD though not quite top tier and it has the weird ratio. The audio is lovely though it predates ac3.
The theatrical cut letterbox TMP LD is a surprise. Not only does it have a great transfer but the audio is stellar despite being only prologic encoded.

 

I had 2 and 6 on Laserdisc. I recall 2 didn't look all that great, altho it stomped the VHS. 6 I thought looked really good.

 

I don’t have the older pan n scan discs outside the special longer version of TMP which is prone to rot. Of the letterbox releases I agree 2 looked merely okay and is a decent LD. 3-4 are a tad better, 5 looks and sounds much better and 6 is even better. For a while 6 was a go-to setup test disc back in the day it seems and still is a great cheap disc for people getting into the format to check their setups. Later discs surpassed it but for 1991 especially its a great release. The letterbox TMP I think was the last transfer done and why it looks the best overall. If you still have a player these are fun to spin and all six can be had for very cheap. 1-5 were also released as a boxset and then eventually all six plus the first two TNG films were reissued in a boxset.

The TNG films also had great releases. Generations and First Contact are great LDs with nice ac3 tracks. Insurrection made it out as a very late release and is thus still very pricey on the used market.

I don’t claim to have the end all in terms of setup but it is remarkable what can be done with the format when combining a great player and higher end displays, scalers and or processors. While you’re never going to overcome the imperfections it’s almost like unlocking more potential because top line gear from years past can be had for nothing now. The lx-900 has a remarkably noise free image, lack of ringing or CLV smear and my xbr960 has the color axis mode you can set to monitor to defeat NTSC red push. Not to mention it has the best onboard comb filter I’ve ever seen.

 

The 12 minutes of extra footage STRTMP version was released on VHS HI-FI. I remember buying it.

 

Getting old and older. Question. What is NTSC red push? A few months back I found out what color banding was but I can't seem to see it. Maybe you need a 60 inch TV or something.

 

Are you saying that the Blu-rays of Star Trek 1 - 6 are not 2k scans from the negatives? The back of my Blu-rays says 1080p. Or are they lying? They don't look 440i to me.
Can you back this up? I am put of the loop. They shouldn't put them on Blu-ray if they see not really high definition. That is criminal.

 

Most big budget motion picture DVDs after 2000 or thereabouts were made from HD scans. The Blu-rays for the TOS Trek films were likely made from high def scans completed for the 2006 reissues. The studios knew Blu-ray and HD DVD were coming - in fact HD DVD launched in early 2006, with Blu-ray following midyear.

 

I never understood this. Very few people have 7.1 setups so why bother? 7.1 upmix sounds like they didn't go back to the source material and remix. Criminal. Or am I wrong here?

A few years back Shogun got a big audio overall. Not video. A real 5.1 mix from the original elements. And no stereo TV back in 1980! This would mean the 2 inch 24 track tape for music, the mag reels for effects and the mag reel for dialogue. I suppose they could replace the effects from the many effects libraries available now.
What I heard blew me away. And that was just the stereo fold down. Stereo effects. Full range stereo music. The mono soundtrack was lame .
I wish they had done this for Roots but then you have to find all the elements and that isn't always possible. Paramount could have done it with Star Trek. All the Sci-fi effects exist on tape. The music scores for every show still exist. They could have re-recorded every piece of music like they did for the opening of the show. Some Foley effects like punching, kicking and knockouts would have to be re-done. All they would need would be the dialogue mag reels from each episode. That I would imagine would he next to impossible. I can't imagine Paramount would have kept dialogue reels.

Any thoughts on this. Is it still possible to have a real 7.1 or 5.1 mix for the Director's Cut of Star Trek Motion Picture and Star Trek 2 (longer version)?

 

The 2016 Director's Cut Blu-ray of Wrath of Khan has 7.1 surround. It's supposedly pretty good, given the vintage of the original Dolby Stereo source elements.

The soundtrack was an early digital recording, and if memory serves was cut on the then-cutting edge 3M digital multitrack recorder. It's a tiny orchestra which shows in places - it never quite packs the punch of the larger ensemble Jerry Goldsmith had commanded for the first film - but that probably works better with the tone of the film, anyhow.