TNG season 7 and future blurays

Due out later this year is the seventh, and final, season of Star Trek: The Next Generation on bluray. Nerdist recently interviewed Roger Lay Jr., one of the producers of the extra features on the new bluray releases, about what's to come on the final box set.

As we have become accustomed, the set will include a suite of new documentaries, two hours worth in four-parts this time:

By this point, we’ve filmed over a hundred hours of interviews. So all the people you’ve been seeing in these documentaries, you’re now gonna hear from one last time. We always make a feature-length documentary, and this one will be a four-parter. By part 3 you’ll be hearing about the end of the show, ‘All Good Things…’, but by part 4 you’ll kinda get a philosophical approach from everyone involved in the show about what it meant to have been a part of this chapter in the Star Trek saga.

Jon Conway and the Okudas on the TNG in HD panel (via StarTrek.com)

Reporting from the Star Trek Las Vegas convention's TNG in HD panel, TrekMovie reports there will also be a featurette looking at the making of TNG, to let viewers "understand the machinery of making weekly television". Director Jim Conway, producer David Livingston, and director of photography Jonathan West will feature in this documentary.

There will also be some behind the scenes footage filmed by the Mike and Denise Okuda, before the TNG sets were modified for Generations.

TrekMovie got the impression from the panel that All Good Thing... will also be getting the stand-alone release for this season, and are expecting a "new special commentary and that CBS planned in advance to give it special attention". The finale is certainly getting attention, as Lay told Nerdist:

...we’re definitely going to give you guys the definitive final account of everything that happened, and we’re putting a lot of really cool things in there that haven’t been seen before. I’m going through the Entertainment Tonight archive right now, finding behind-the-scenes footage and interviews filmed during the making of the finale. I’m dealing with the TV Academy, trying to get footage from when the show was nominated for the Emmy and all that stuff. So we’ll be covering all that, and we’ve got some really great footage that Mike and Denise Okuda had filmed on the sets before they were altered for the film. So we will have the ability to paint a really clear picture for the fans of what the ending for this chapter was.

Updates on theatrical releases and DS9 after the jump:

Talking to Nerdist, Lay revealed the bureaucratic background that has caused theatrical releases to stop coming alongside the blurays:

We really can’t do the theatricals anymore, because of all these things that have come up with the guilds – the Writers Guild, the Directors Guild. All these things where we were doing theatrical releases of episodes that were meant for television. If you go into theatrical you have to factor in all these royalties. So probably not.

Looking ahead, everyone involved in the TNG remastering project seem keen to continue onto DS9, but it seems to be on a knife edge, depending on how TNG performs in the round, as Lay described:

Deep Space Nine, we all want to do it. I’ll tell you that. I think it’ll be more difficult in the sense that by season 4 of DS9 you had digital elements, a lot of digital elements. By the Dominion War they were doing entire sequences that were digital, there were no models anymore. On TNG we’ve had all these plates and all these model motion-control shots to re-composite. You don’t have anything like that now. So you kind of have to recreate everything when it comes to that stage. I think the first three seasons will be fairly close to what has been done on Next Gen, but by season 4 and beyond it will get a lot more complicated. So all of that has to be factored in. And honestly they have to look at the sales of Next Gen and see how it did overall and what kind of a budget they could allot for Deep Space Nine. So will it happen immediately? I don’t know. Do we all want to go and bring Deep Space Nine back? Absolutely. I think the next couple of months will be crucial. It will also be crucial to fans who have been waiting for all seven seasons of TNG to be released. It sounds sad, but it’s a business decision when it should be a creative one. But you need sales in order to put out more product, it’s as simple as that. We’re hoping to get news within the next several months. But if fans want to do anything to make that happen, pick up these Blu-ray sets right now, because the entire Next Generation collection will be out.

So make sure you buy those blurays people, surely we all want DS9 and Voyager to follow!?