The latest on Enterprise blurays

TrekCore has posted up some stills from the impressive looking animated menus on the Enterprise season one bluray set. They're a busy combination of Daniels' temporal database, Enterprise style computer menus, and elements from the opening titles. Here are a few samples:

TrekCore also recently did an extensive interview with the Enterprise and TNG bluray extra features producer Roger Lay, Jr., who talked about some of the exciting stuff coming to Enterprise, and other Star Trek bluray projects. Here are a few highlights:

As the newest series, Enterprise was well prepared with extra features for the DVD release, and those are coming over to the blurays, as long as lots of new behind the scenes footage:

The deleted scenes have been ported over; everything has been ported over. We found the original presentations for the network; we found the syndication presentation and we also found the cast introduction – I don’t know if you’ve seen that – it’s one of the first days of filming, Rick Berman is on set; he addresses the fans and he welcomes them to the set; he introduces Scott Bakula as the new captain, and Scott introduces the entire cast. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that. We found a really good master of that, so that’s in there as well.

The bulk of the extra features are new retrospective documentaries though, which look back on Enterprise's place in Star Trek history:

What was lacking, from those DVD special features that were there before, was a chronological exploration of how the show came together, why it came together the way it did, why they made the creative decisions they ended up making… you needed that, kind of like a "Stardate Revisited" documentary, like we did on TNG Season One. That’s kind of what we did – again, the centerpiece is a ninety-minute, feature-length documentary which answers all of those questions. It really presents a clear idea of where the franchise was at the time; where the creators were at the time; why they made the decisions they did. Some of the things, you never would have heard about in terms of why the show came together the way it did; even some casting choices that didn’t come together.

That documentary will include incites into the original plan for the first series of Enterprise:

Something you’ll see in the Season One documentary is that [Rick Berman and Brannon Braga] had a very different vision of what the show was going to be initially. I mean, it wasn’t that different, but there was a very different structure to it, year one was going to be very different from what you ended up seeing, because originally, year one would have taken place on Earth. It was the dynamic of, how do you launch a ship? How do you go into a deep space exploration project such as the Enterprise? What are the repercussions -- politically, geographically, socially? There was going to be this whole movement on Earth of people who didn’t want humans to go out that far into space and announce to every other species, "Hey, here we are, we’re brand-new at this… come over and take advantage of us or destroy us if you want!"

There will also be plenty of time spent looking at the design of the new Enterprise:

I have a lot of stuff with Doug Drexler, talking about the ship – you’ll see the first flyby, the first render of the NX-01; you’ll see it. Doug Drexler gave me the original file, and it’s in there, so you’ll see how they moved it around, trying all the different lighting elements

Another extra feature on the blurays will be a new behind the scenes look at the making of one episode, Vox Sola. On the Set, was made for an abandoned TV series, as Lay describes:

Back in 2001, during Season One, Barry Kibrick, who has a show here on the PBS affiliate called "Between the Lines"; he was putting together a show called "On the Set". The idea was that he would go to a different TV set every week, and he would pick a scene or a sequence from that week’s episode and he would dissect it – he would show you how those two minutes or ninety seconds of screen time came together, from every aspect, every department; from the writing room, to filming on stage, editing, to effects work, scoring – everything.

He spent a week on the Enterprise set, and before that, he spent a week in the writing room with Brannon and Mike [Sussman] and Andre [Bormanis] and Phyllis [Strong] as they were writing and rewriting the episode. It was for the episode "Vox Sola", which was a very interesting one production-wise since you had that organic thing growing and the actors hanging from it, and a lot of slimy goo – so he spent a week during the filming of "Vox Sola" following Roxann Dawson around as she directed the episode and its great footage. He put together a thirty-minute piece called "On the Set – Star Trek: Enterprise", which never saw the light of day. No one saw it. They showed it to Brannon and to John Wentworth at CBS Television publicity – because he helped set up the whole thing for Barry and his crew to film there. Barry made this pilot but it didn’t get picked up so he just kind of put it away.

Also coming to the bluray release is a dicussion piece with Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. For future seasons they hope to have other cast and production group discussion pieces, similar to those coming on the TNG blurays, including a look at the stories they never got the chance to tell with Enterprise being cut short:

For Season Three, we’re planning to get all of them together for this piece called "Temporal Cold War: Declassified", opening up where the Temporal Cold War was headed, who Future Guy was going to be… which is a really interesting answer.

So, the writing staff will get together and reveal everything they had cooked up for the Temporal Cold War, then they’ll go into what would have happened on Season Five and beyond. They’ll fill in the gaps of everything they were never able to explore on the show. So I’m excited about that one too.

They also plan to explore the issues of TV networks which caused problems for Enterprise:

We're definitely going to deal with UPN – the ‘UPN Factor' is dealt with on Season Two, and then Season Four when it became The CW, and the repercussions that came about because of the change of management. Definitely – that's all part of the plan. These docs, for season 2 and beyond are still being edited but I have great footage that I'm really clear on how I need to utilize in order to tell the most in-depth story on the making and the end of the show.

You can read lots more about Enterprise, TNG, and more, in TrekCore's full interview.