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Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

Generally, movies that focus on set design age much better than movies that focus on effects. If you make a good set, it will look good no matter how technically advanced your setup is. It may look better when filmed using the latest cameras, but it will never look wrong when it isn't, because it is the real thing. Effects are not the real thing, and as technology improved people have gotten better at noticing and are less tolerant of the details that make it look fake, that's what makes them look dated.

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If the plot is good, then dated effects don't matter. Both the 1916 and 1954 versions of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea hold up today.

I guess some people just can't cope with anything but the most cutting edge effects. If they notice something is fake the movie experience is ruined for them or something. I'm glad I'm not afflicted with this.

It’s not a problem as long as the experience is consistent. If you have an otherwise beautiful movie that suddenly comes out with a terrible effect they would have been better off without it.

Eh, that can be good still. Terminator 1 has the shitty stop motion fully metal terminator at the end, but if you consider the impact that the poor technology had on the movie as a whole, they were essentially forced to leave it to the end because of the low quality. It was a good creative constraint, which served to draw out the tension by only progressively revealing the true nature of the thing, which also concealed how it might be beaten. It also didn’t matter too much because the audience already understood how scary it was by the time the effect came on, so we were able to suspend disbelief easily, and if you watch the movie start to finish for the first time today, it’d be the same. The pacing ended up being incredibly good. Would they have hit that with better effects? Still possible, less likely.

it's why I think the Farscape puppets were absolutely genius. They look so timeless compared to a lot of the heavy CGI use during that era of TV sci-fi.

Farscape is criminally under rated/known! It’s also amusing that SG1 ended up with two of the leads from it too for a bit.

I like Farscape very much, but, to be fair, the really good episodes were few and far between. You had to slog through a lot of sub-par episodes, and people can be forgiven for not really taking to it because of that.

It's really a shame that Farscape didn't have stronger writing because the whole puppets and minimal effects thing works pretty well. (I can forgive Season 1 a bit as the actors and the writers were still figuring out the characters. Season 2 and forward sub-par episodes were all on the writers.)

However, as I understand it, the problem with the puppets is that they are expensive.

Leading to the best joke in the Episode 200.

No upres issues either like what happened with Babylon 5 when they did the hd transfers for dvd.

You mean they dont still use 1980s computer screens in 22nd century Star Trek?

For how bad much of the computer imagery has changed, the overall bridge sets in the TOS films look a -lot- better to me than all of the fancy CGI stuff.

All of that said...

There's a certain correctness in my head to the idea that in a pre-replicator future [0], it would be more smart to use a bunch of physical buttons and CRT type monitors.

The main reason that comes to mind, is that a simple CRT is probably easier to fabricate on a deep space mission than a flat screen, if it needs replacement. Similar for all the buttons/lights/switches.

Now, it wouldn't necessarily be -easy- for a ship in deep space to re-fab these components. Thus the need for 'low-fi' graphics, since you might be in a region where the best your folks can fab is NTSC-quality.

[0] - While TOS had food synthesizers, that seems like a subset of a full replicator's functionality.

TOS had famously low budget fake "high school theater" quality sets. They are only tolerated because the story is good.

Keep in mind people originally watching TOS were likely doing so on black and white TVs with a 10"-13" screen ten feet away. The sets looked no worse than Forbidden Planet, a theatrical release from a decade prior.

Modern high definition scans of the original film looks hilariously bad on modern TVs. It looked far less bad on TVs contemporary with the original broadcasts.

Actually, many people then were getting color TVs. The reason the sets on ST:TOS were so colorful was to attract viewers who had spent a bunch of money for a new color TV set, and wanted to see things in vivid colors.

The modern HD scans of the original film look fantastic. They do, however, show how low-budget the sets were, but the detail of the original film is quite amazing, and these old shows look far better than most stuff produced in the 1990s which was done using videotape.

Also I was talking about TOS era films which had much more proper sets.

That’s an example of bad set design.

The best episode of Star Trek, City on the Edge of Forever, holds up today because of its story and its period sets and costumes, not its sci-fi stuff.

They use 1960s plastic and foam panels with arrays of giant light bulbs.

on that - i was flabbergasted at how dated LOTR looked...couldnt believe it!

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