Everything you need to know about Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) 

Nick Meyer tells a wonderful story about getting Montalban to dial it down in the BOTANY BAY scene. In the first take, Montalban nailed the entire scene down but in full scenery-chew. Meyer called for a break and called Meyer back to his trailer...all the while realizing that while he was making only his second feature film, the actor following him was a seasoned veteran of several decades. In his trailer Meyer said something like "Olivier had a saying: never show an audience your 'top'...you want to keep them guessing what you might do..." and then Meyer feinted a lunge at him. Montalban said (in that amazing voice), "Ahh, I seeee...you are trying to DIRECT me..." and then "Good! Good! I NEED direction!" and proceeded to tell him how once some director simply told him and Lana Turner, "Ricardo, Lana...make it a good scene." It was Meyer's and Montalban's creative collaboration that gave us Khan as a bitter, seething maniac bent on avenging his love's death on Kirk.

Was willing to do the role of Khan for nothing because enjoyed playing the character so much Montalban ended up making $100,000.00 .

This has to be in my top ten favorite movies

Gravitas

Dee plane! Dee plane!

Because Montalban was amazing. That's how. There will never be another like him.

I like Cumberbatch and all, but he just didn't have the same gravitas and exotic look.

Drip venom, ha ha ha, what a fabulous way to describe his performance!!!

Bordering on Shakespearean.

He put the emotions behind it. We believe he is angry and wants Kirks blood.

Most definitely the best of the best loved it

Amen

Absolutely. Loved it as a kid and love it now.

Yep.

And one of finest science fiction movies there has ever been.

can anyone remember any of the dialogue from the most recent Trek movies?

Good One!

What do you say when the receptionist informs you that the caller still hasn't raised their shields?

Raise ours! Then trace the call and FIRE!!!

I only recite JJ Trek dialogue when I'm on a diet and need an appetite suppressant.

Spock: "As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy, than to create." McCoy: "Not anymore! NOW we can do both at the same time! According to myth, the Earth was created in 6 days. Now watch out! Here comes Genesis! We'll do it for ya in 6 MINUTES!"

In memory of DeForest Kelly too! "I'm a Doctor, not a .... "

Let's Not forget James "Scotty" Doohan. "The more they over-think the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."

Even allowing its faults, and that it was produced very much of its time, I wouldn't touch a frame.

*the digital touches would be so minor as to not be really necessary...true a high resolution remaster would be amazing and in that respect a few tweaks might be needed but apart from that, i would easily welcome this masterpiece's return to the theaters...in fact seeing this in IMAX would be stunning* *i have this soundtrack on LP and still enjoy it*

@@scottmantooth8785 I SECOND and THIRD THAT! And I TOO Have the Soundtrack on LP! It was a Christmas Present from my Mom/Parents! My Mom ALWAYS Knew the BEST Gifts to give people! She knew people's Hearts and Souls and What they Liked and Loved! She always said that I was "VERY Easy to buy for!" :) My Mom was AWESOME! I Miss her ALOT! :(

@@j.s.connolly8579 *very fortunate to have had such a mom...lost my mom a few years ago and can relate in some respects...mom was such a unique person (not that i'm being biased or anything) and loved everyone she ever came across and constantly made gifts for people...she knew sign language and even had learned a bit of Cherokee and played the ukulele on road trips (that was a lot of fun)... she loved being in the mountains and loved animals especially our black Lab...also got my sense of humor from my mom who got her's from her dad...good memories all around...very very blessed by having such amazing parents*

Wrong way round. He recycled Khan (1982) music in Aliens (1986). However, some of his Battle Beyond the Stars (1980) music made it into Khan. There's a particular 'accelerating sequence' which actually appears in almost every Horner movie, appearing most prominently in Titanic (1997) . Then again, Jerry Goldsmith was just the same - listen to Star Trek V and Total Recall side by side and theme music excepted, they have the same scores!

That's the big thing. Wrath of Khan is easily one of (if not the) best movies in the franchise,... but it is not the best Trek. It falls short of what Star Trek stood for, for the sake of making a better movie. This brings up a very good point I try to make. Star Trek belongs on Television. That is where it thrives the most, and where it can do what it is meant to with the greatest effect. Star Trek movies (for the most part) are more for bringing in more viewers for when Star Trek returns to television. Even when a Star Trek film tried to be just like TOS (right down to the relatively poor visuals and campiness) it failed. This, of course, being Final Frontier. You have to find a blend of good movie and good Trek, which is relatively difficult to do, as the two don't always jive together. For my money, the closest we ever came to this perfect blend was Voyage Home. Though,... if it were made today, it would get ripped to shreds by people calling it "leftist garbage" I'm sure. Oh, and speaking of James Horner's wonderful score, the movie score was the one thing I DIDN'T like about Voyage Home, and wish they could have gotten either Horner or Goldsmith to return for it. It sounded a bit too Ralph Bakshi's Lord of the Rings to me,... but then Nimoy was a big Tolkien fan...

I find James Horner always recycles his music. Since he was fresh during STWOK, it is more of a baseline of where his major themes begin to start (heck, can even hear a few movements in Avatar that are reminiscent of STWOK). While I do enjoy Horner’s music that shows up in the Star Trek films of the 80s, Goldsmith is more everlasting. Look at how different his score of Alien is to ST the motion picture. Then how the theme of motion picture would be picked up by Next Gen later on.

How about Horner's soundtrack for Apollo 13?

+dsr0116 I couldn't disagree more. James Horner absolutely knocked it out of the park with this one. The soundtrack to Wrath of Khan is one of the greatest soundtracks ever composed for any movie and will always remain his finest work imho.

Bingo!

I actually thought that TMP was a harder gut punch. Kirk just wants to force time to get backwards abd make things as they where before, but it doesn't work out and everything feels stiff and strange and not quite how it used to be. I can understand that fans didn't like it at the time, but as the start of q film series, its genious.

McCoy (haunted): "Jim, you'd better get down here." Kirk (puzzled): "Bones?" McCoy (haunted): "Better hurry...."

Yes! A very well-filmed scene. The musical score here, in crescendo, is sheer emotional perfection.

Sad but they never got better than Star Trek II. I was really upset that they even attempted to remake this film in Star Trek: Into Darkness. STID is the epitome of all the rubbish filmmaking and remakes that are typical today but of course you get called a curmudgeon by all the people who NEVER SAW any of the original cast feature films!!!! I do like Trek III a lot of as a follow-on to Star Trek II. It's another gutsy film in the series and is very undervalued. I'm liking it better than Star Trek VI which used to be my next favorite film in the series. I've cooled on Trek IV very much since the 1980s -- it hasn't aged well for me.

I've never cooled on Star Trek IV. It is still the closest to the heart of Star Trek you'll find in the film franchise. It was a straight-up fun adventure with a relevant socio-political message, giving every main character a chance to shine (rather than just sitting them at their console all movie), AND was able to do it all without the need of a "bad guy" to fight. Even from the outset, the alien probe was treated as something misunderstood, rather than a purposeful antagonist. Star Trek II may have been the better "movie",... but I still say Star Trek IV is the best "Trek"

I still think ST2 is the best film in the franchise (by far), but I agree with you that ST4 is special in its own right. It's lighter, more adventurous, with such fun humor - plus it's the only film from 1982 - present which does not feel trapped in ST2's shadow. Star Trek's cinematic history peaked early... which both saved and doomed it.

And ironically, those TV series went on to kill Star Trek, mostly through departing from source material and ending up more like TMP.

Wait... are you trying to say that Next Generation was killing Star Trek? TNG played a greater hand in ushering in a kind of Star Trek renaissance, leading toward Deep Space Nine and Undiscovered Country (arguably the biggest time in Star Trek's history). Hell, TNG kept Star Trek afloat when Final Frontier could have potentially crashed it into the ground. Though,... many of Star Trek V's failings can be attributed to Paramount too.

+K1productions _"Wait... are you trying to say that Next Generation was killing Star Trek? TNG played a greater hand in ushering in a kind of Star Trek renaissance, leading toward Deep Space Nine and Undiscovered Country (arguably the biggest time in Star Trek's history)."_ Judging from some of your other comments, I'm mildly surprised to see you reference _Deep Space Nine_ and _Undiscovered Country,_ since you think having a military is antithetical to the Federation's ideals (despite those ideals including protection for it's citizens). I'd have assumed they were both too military for your blood. _"Hell, TNG kept Star Trek afloat when Final Frontier could have potentially crashed it into the ground. Though,... many of Star Trek V's failings can be attributed to Paramount too."_ The problem with TNG was a shift in ideology, to a system that simply cannot work in Star Trek's universe. Starfleet was reformatted - and semi-retconned - into a massive intra-Federation diplomacy team, rather than an expeditionary military out to explore new worlds. In TOS's episode, _A Taste of Armageddon,_ we see that Starfleet operates separately from the diplomats, and only serves to ferry them from planet to planet. TNG's "Diplomat Starfleet" severely clashed with the existing lore, and caused major issues with newer series, with new writers not at all knowing how to balance the opposing concepts.

Once again you misunderstand me. In Deep Space Nine, we see a war begin slowly over time, and a slow shift into the need to be soldiers out of necessity. Even the introduction of the Defiant took time, and was introduced as something that was radical, new, and not exactly in line with typical Starfleet mindsets. Undiscovered Country I do have such problems with, BUT it uses those aspects to tell a relevant socio-political story, comparing itself to the end of the Cold War, and how certain people of the time reject the idea, as they can only define themselves through conflict. I don't think Admiral Cartwright was the right man to pull this on, as so much more could have been done with the wonderful Brock Peters. And we all know Gene Roddenberry was against making Kirk racist. Something Nick Meyer promised Gene he would change,... then once Gene died, he refused to follow through on his promise. Even so, the military feel of Undiscovered Country complimented the narrative and served the story in a necessary way. And even after all that, it still ended on a positive note, with a message of peace and understanding as we move toward the Undiscovered Country of the future. I just wish we got to see how Qo'noS survived, as there was supposedly only 50 years of life left on the planet. ... y'know, the reconstruction of the Klingon Empire would have made for a great (at the very least) miniseries. Show how we got from where we were, to the alliance we saw in early TNG (note in "Heart of Glory", when the Klingon Captain was on screen, we see both the emblems of the Klingon Empire and the Federation behind him). Now, I do agree that lore had clashed pretty severely in TNG. Even in the very first episode,... it erased the fact that the Eugenics wars were "The last of your so-called World Wars" and threw in a "Post Atomic Horror" nearly a century later,.... THEN in TNG's (arguably) best movie, retconned that again by putting First Contact 15 years before Q's terrifying courtroom scene, thus invalidating it. and then we have Voyager going back in time to 1996,... where there was nary a Eugenics War to be found. I actually liked how Star Trek Enterprise (in its exceptional fourth season) actually referenced the Eugenics Wars as if they still occurred in the proper place in Trek lore. Deep Space Nine did this too, but more as a passing reference in "Doctor Bashir, I Presume"

Hell no, STII was a massive step back from exploration and first contact to progressive stuff like World War II submarine hijinx, revenge, charismatic villains, and banter.

Yup...Benedict Cabbagepatch was such a weak Khan. Shoulda been antonio banderas and stuck to the original story of finding khan on the botany bay.

Dave Druid Mr Saavik. You go right on quoting Starfleet regulations!

Then: "Lets see how badly were Hurt" followed by Turbo Lift opening with Scotty holding a Badly Injured Engineer Cadet.

I never understood why Scotty would do that....If wounded, he should go to Sickbay, and if dead, there are teams aboard which move the dead to the ships' morgue.

No, it was for the Shock Factor for that particular Scene.

Dave Druid no... It WAS Scottys nephew. As revealed in the deleted scenes. Do you think thats the first man Scottys ever lost yet he cried considerably. Cuz he was family. Look it up. Its in the directors cut, both the dvd/bluray as well as the 35 yr special screenings last year. Im sure the scenes here on youtube as well.

I got home from the movie theater and found "Space Seed" was showing on TV, but Mom said I couldn't watch TV after going to the movies! I had to wait for it to cycle around again.

@@sandal_thong8631 Parents have to make a lot of decisions. And they'll never please everyone.

@@ploppysonofploppy6066 I didn't realize when I was 11 that going to the movies meant I had to give up my allowed 1-hour of TV that day! Arbitrary decision.

@@sandal_thong8631 And no appeal process I suppose. That's life I guess.🤷‍♂️

Great anaology.

My wife and I saw it in the theater...she knew just enough about Kirk and Spock's relationship, that when Spock dies, she cried. I was taken aback by that.

@@johntiggleman4686 I cried too

I believe Gene Roddenberry intended Star Trek to follow submarine tactics early on. That's why I was wondering why he objected to the uniforms appearing more naval.

Yeah the red uniforms were a lot more militaristic but i loved them a lot more too, compared to the grey "throw-away" uniforms in "TMP" or the grey/black DS9 Uniforms in the last 3 Next Generation Crew movies.

+Brian Kitchens Gene Roddenbery's entire stance on Star Trek and morality in general did a complete 180 somewhere in the 1970's. Before TMP, you can find quotes of him calling Starfleet a military service and deliberately organizing them as such. Epidodes that he had a direct hand in, like _Balance of Terror,_ and _Bread and Circuses_ deliberately separate Starfleet from civilian services like the Federation's Merchant Marine, and show them acting to _destroy_ hostile invading forces.

Its a conglomeration of defense, exploration, humanitarian aid, colonization, and so forth. The idea is that it can be everything, without having to be labelled as one thing in particular. How it can serve military roles, without being dominated by them. That is why in so many episodes, when outsiders cannot understand Starfleet being peaceful even though the Enterprise is so heavily armed, Kirk has to explain how the weapons are purely for defensive purposes and Starfleet does not seek conquest. Sometimes some writers and directors forget this and choose to over-emphasize the military aspects, almost in spite of what the Federation truly stands for. As for the "monster maroon" uniforms from Wrath, they look great,... but I don't see them as Duty Uniforms. They make more sense as Ceremonial Dress like the Marine Corps Dress Blues. Appropriate for diplomatic functions, ceremonial occasions, memorials and the like, but not appropriate for sitting at duty station for 6-8 hours. Even in the actual military, duty uniforms are more subdued

+K1productions _"Its a conglomeration of defense, exploration, humanitarian aid, colonization, and so forth."_ Starfleet never colonizes anything. The most we see Starfleet do is defense and exploration, both of which are military initiatives. _"That is why in so many episodes, when outsiders cannot understand Starfleet being peaceful even though the Enterprise is so heavily armed, Kirk has to explain how the weapons are purely for defensive purposes and Starfleet does not seek conquest."_ False equivalency: Military does not equal conquest. _"Sometimes some writers and directors forget this and choose to over-emphasize the military aspects, almost in spite of what the Federation truly stands for."_ Because having a military in place to protect the citizens totally isn't necessary with Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians and Borg as neighbors.

Yep. I was just going to say that.

Also STWOK wasn’t the first film with a complete CGI sequence. It was one of the first shaded sequences, but films like Star Wars had wireframe 3D animation before. The first movie considered to have 3D CGI animation is Futureworld (1976).

I don't think the video says ILM became Pixar. I think the video says the division within ILM is what broke off to become Pixar. ILM is still around.

Mike Zerker Into the Darkness was good. No?

Was ok I guess.

Dude undiscovered country was awesome

Yes Undiscovered Country was really good!

The Undiscovered Country is my second fave. But TWOK is flawless. TUC has a few goofs.

if we're taking 2009, maybe. But seriously, there was little "redo" about Into Darkness, aside the fact Khan was in it, but he wasn't the same character he was in Wrath. ID was more about being about blatantly bashing American Foreign Policy at the time. Admiral Marcus was the true "bad guy" of that one. Khan was just a tool (which is the main problem I have with the whole thing. He was only thrown into the movie because all the focus groups and message boards after 2009 wouldn't shut up about Khan. "will Khan be in the next movie?", "Who should play Khan?", "I hope we don't see Khan again", etc etc. When they focus entirely on keywords, all they see is "Khan", "Khan", "Khan",... and in their backwards corporate mindset, they had no choice BUT to put Khan in the movie.)

Benidict Cumberbatch was the worse, he was plain dry bread with hard butter! Dev Patel would have been great. I wish they would have use an ethnic actor.

The question is, what KIND of ethnic? Indian or Spanish playing pseudo-Indian? Cuz remember, Montalban was essentially just wearing a variation of Blackface in TOS

Montalban was a powerful actor. I miss him so much.

if it aint broke then remake screw hollyweird

O.G. dawg!

Abrams ruins everything he puts his greedy hands on. They should jail him for destruction of property. He loves to exploit the works of others then claim it's his own ideas.

I didn't really like that one at all, either. It looked good and all, but reworking Khan? Meh.

I read that also. Also he dreaded doing ST 5 for that reason, oddly he said they got along better during ST 5 than before.

Thanks so much :-) Yes, I'm working on a Star Trek III video, should be out soon, I'm planning to do videos on all the Star Trek films! Stay tuned!

JonnyBaak That’s good to hear; I’ll be looking out for it. By the way, did you know that at one point, TREK II was going to be called THE VENGEANCE OF KHAN, but it was changed when it was too close to REVENGE OF THE JEDI. So Khan’s vengeance became his wrath, and a Jedi’s revenge became his return.

He's basically reading everything from Wikipedia....

I mean not everything, just the facts about the making of

Comanche Viper I agree.👍🏻

I never thought TMP was boring and I don't get why people did

Star Trek and Amiga ... that's nerdy² :D

The content creator is pronouncing "Omega" as "Amiga". His audio editing is pretty choppy, too. Interesting info, though.

It is omega. Wait... just like the omega device on “Galaxy Quest?”

@ MikeyKnox: You mean nerdy³² ;)

Amiga 500 didn’t exist until 1987

That really would have changed what happens off screen between Saavik and young Spock in the next movie.

Saavik was male????? Sure fooled my verga!!!!

News to me too....

I keep forgetting how good First Contact was. If I'm allowed to have 'ties' I go Wrath of Khan and then a tie between First Contact and Undiscovered Country.

I watched _Krull_ for the second time this past month and found that Horner scored that, using some themes that sounded like Wrath of Khan!

Memories... I remember a PACKED theater. As in not an empty seat. Same age range as you. Probably like 10. 1st or 2nd weekend I'd guess. No internet or stuff to 'get ahead' of things. When Spock died... Holy (censored)ck... Audible crying, of adults too, in every direction. Looking back it's how "space and tech" would look to someone then; in the 80's. All sci-fi; Star Wars, Space Odyssey 2001, Battle Star Galactica (kinda "both" now... even the new BSG) ...they all look like 'the era' they were filmed in a bit. BUT AT THE TIME, no one seen anything like the Genesis computer scene. And the villain... well... really pulled you in with the drama. An all time great for Sci-Fi, and movies overall.

lonster3000 I think it's a beautiful film, myself. I don't get all the hate for it.

lonster3000 Need a tissue?

here! here! thank you

Ill take it over the next generation and other spin offs this crew had the chemistry

Ugh, that movie was 🚮!!! Glad it didn't kill off the franchise.

Glad you like it. I can buy your argument.

That is why I loved Voyage Home the most. It was a straight-up fun adventure in true TOS fashion, told a relevant socio-political message, gave every single main cast member something to do and moments to shine, AND didn't need a "bad guy".

I totally disagree on your assessment of The Dark Knight, as I feel (for what it was) it was quite excellent. You of course cannot compare it to anything Trek, because they are totally different genres. And as far as I am concerned, Dark Knight Rises only failed in as much of it being a missed opportunity and had some MASSIVE shoes to fill, that few could ever hope to live up to. But then, there is also the problem of today, where people seem to grade everything like an over-controlling asshole father, feeling everything below an A+ is a failure. Is there no such thing as "good" anymore? It has to be "great" or its crap?

yeah but it wasn't what fans were waiting 10 years for either

I'm with you; I said this elsewhere, but to me... I found it not 'boring', but sort of ominous, foreboding, and sort of atmospheric... Like a scary sci-fi mood. Not knocking people who dislike it, but I gotta say it... For those people... If you got ADD or short attention span, then you probably miss how freaking over-powered that thing is. The size and scale of the... the... "ship"? or "object"? that 'V'yger' controlled was insane. Plus they leave you hanging on what was actually running it, not what was controlling it--which was 'V'yger' if I remember right. Haven't seen this in ages, I got to re-watch it.

Well, considering they stripped Gene Roddenberry of all creative control and brought in a Director and Producer who were not familiar with Star Trek beforehand,... and the film's climax is a big flashy starship battle. Yeah, there is a lot of bitterness from Paramount. They had been overly manipulative from day one, and it even impacted TMP. But their bitterness shown through the worst with Final Frontier, even to the point where they denied some of the budget that was promised while the film was deep into production and much of the money was already SPENT.

Well that's stupid. It makes sense for it to be Savvik, with her backstory in Star Trek 3.

And you understand something that ST: TMP fans STILL don't to this day! It's a great film for modelers of the revised Enterprise and Klingon battlecruiser, but that's about it. (Okay, I DID like the music!) ST:TMP was an attempt remake 2001: A Space Odyssey and less of a Star Trek story. If you don't have the characters interact the way we all know, the rest of the film falls apart no matter what you try to do! It's a pity -- I really do like the original "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (a "Twilight Zone" episode with a feature budget) so that proved the main problem was a script issue and less of Robert Wise. I think to this day people are reluctant to admit Roddenberry might have been in over his head with a feature film production of Star Trek. He also did NOT have the support of a Robert Justman, Gene L. Coon and some key executive guys at Desilu who made his life easier, too. I've been rewatching episodes of the original Star Trek on the 2016 Roddenberry Vault Star Trek collection. Granted that collection was mostly an excuse to do several short documentaries and re-release the same restored, remastered episodes YET AGAIN in another video collection but it's still interesting to see the surviving cast, production crew, and professional fans (producers, critics, people who worked on later Star Trek series/movies) all agree in the documentaries, "It's the damn characters, Jim!" The Roddenberry Vault WOULD have been better if they isolated the deleted scenes/extended clips from the documentaries -- and if they had more of these clips on the discs, period! I am a bit annoyed that they didn't do this although I haven't viewed all three discs yet. I'm still on Disc Two and plan to rewatch "The City on the Edge of Forever" without the audio commentary this time. As far as the movies go, while the general fan consensus (at least among those of us who grew up in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s) is that Star Trek:TWOK was the best of the films featuring the original cast, I've been leaning more recently towards Star Trek III as my NEXT PERSONAL FAVORITE because of what happened with Kirk and McCoy in that film. The destruction of the original Enterprise was icing on the cake for the drama but people get caught up in that and forget that the characters were what made that ship special. I felt the best performances from Shatner and DeKelley in the film series probably came in Trek III and that it was probably the best Trek film Nimoy directed. Star Trek IV hasn't aged well for me -- the whale thing and humor hasn't held up --, the ST VI storyline is "meh" decent even though Christopher Plummer's General Chang has become my next favorite Classic Series Klingon after Jon Colicos/Kor. (Canadians make the best Klingons!) The best Klingons were NOT psychopaths or strictly evil which is a problem I had with Commander Kruge in Star Trek III, one of the few points that falls flat in that film for me and I LIKE Christopher Lloyd! They were military people and maybe a "little bit" nuts (much saner by degrees than the guys in Dr. Strangelove) but it's not like they behaved without some kind of personal motivation, a sense of patriotism. I saw ALL these films in the theaters when they were originally released including Star Trek V which had the worst distribution of the films in my area. And I like Star Trek V more than ST:TMP for the character scenes it DOES have even as clunky as the plotline and parts of that film are. At least I wasn't bored like I was by ST:TMP!

AvengerII A full response. As an aged Trekkie who was there at the time, I'd say that TMP came hard on the heels of Star Wars. There were dozens of cheap rip offs, and man were some of them ropey! Paramount were looking to resurrect trek on TV but realized that they had a genuine product ready to run. I think they tried too hard though great story (similarities to"the changeling ") and the acting and directing were up to speed, just an hour too long imo.

AvengerII I didn't hear about this Roddenberry's Vault! lol what's in it, and does it cost an arm and a leg?

The Roddenberry Vault was a 3-disc Blu ray released issued in 2016 on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek TV series. It was the big Paramount/CBS Home video celebration of Star Trek: TOS besides the big LE collectors set with all the classic episodes, original cast series, and the animated series. Basically, there are 6(?) mini-documentaries on those discs, 2 per disc. The episodes are 11,12 of the most popular/significant episodes of TOS with both the original and CG remastered editions as well as isolated music tracks on a few of the episodes OR audio commentary by Star Trek:TOS production crew and/or professional fans (writers, critics). It's a toss-up on whether it's worth it to people. I'm on the borderline. Not worth more than $25 (originally MRSP around $50 for this 3-disc set, but you can get the complete original series on the standard Blu ray set for $50 now!!!), honestly, debatable if it's worth getting for people who already have Star Trek: TOS on Blu ray. I think the isolated music tracks, commentary tracks, and possibly the restored mono audio with the original broadcast versions of the episodes included are exclusive to this set. I could be wrong on the mono audio I admittedly have not watched all three seasons of TOS on Blu ray yet (or even DVD). The episode selections are excellent. There are episodes that SHOULD be on a definitive collection like The Corbomite Maneuver, Devil in the Dark, and The City on the Edge of Forever. I was disappointed that there the deleted and extended clips were NOT isolated and available to watch separate from the documentaries (which themselves are 30 minutes or shorter a piece). It's horrible to tease people like that! There are some interesting clips (that would have taken the storylines in different directions) but you have to listen to professional fans before you can see half that stuff! I did like seeing the surviving cast members and archive clips of deceased cast. The way the 50th Anniversary of Star Trek basically WASN'T celebrated was a major letdown. They did much more on the 25th and 30th anniversaries!

too not to GN