The Center Seat: 55 Years of Star Trek (DVD)

Series:	Star Trek documentaries and specials
No. of discs:	4
Run time:	535 minutes (NTSC)
Director:	Brian Volk-Weiss
Release date:	25 April 2023
Reference:	ASIN B0BT8G5QMX (Region 1)
Year:	2021

The Center Seat: 55 Years of Star Trek is a four-disc Region 1 only DVD home video format of the documentary series The Center Seat: 55 Years of Star Trek, which had originally been streamed by History Vault (the paid streaming service of The History Channel) two years earlier, in November 2021. Aside from featuring the series' eleven episodes on the first three discs, the set also features outtakes and cut interview segments as bonus features on its fourth disc.

Director/Producer Volk-Weiss justified the release as follows, "One of the things that’s very tough as a filmmaker is to have hours and hours of amazing footage from some of the most important people in all of 'Star Trek' history, from Leonard Nimoy to Kirstie Alley, and only use 1 or 2 percent of it for the show.(...)So what we tried to do with the DVD was to make it very easy for the fans to see ALL of it; we simply put ALL of it on the DVD. That's 3.5 hours of great and many unknown stories that will hopefully add value to current and future fans." [1]

The DVD was a co-release by Volk-Weiss' own The Nacelle Company and third-party production company Mills Creek Entertainment.

Summary[]

Amazon.com blurb,

This multi-episode documentary series takes viewers on the definitive in-depth journey behind the scenes of one of the greatest landmark franchises of all time: Star Trek. Celebrating the show’s 55th anniversary, each episode focuses on a different chapter in the groundbreaking program’s history. Interviews with the cast, crew, and experts – including one of Leonard Nimoy's final in-depth Trek interviews - reveal never-before-heard backstage stories and offer fresh insights. The Center Seat details how Star Trek began, where it’s been, and how it’s boldly going where no television series has gone before!

Created in partnership with The History Channel and from the producers of the Netflix series The Movies That Made Us and The Toys That Made Us. This collector’s edition is narrated by Gates McFadden, who portrayed Dr. Beverly Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation and the four subsequent films, and includes all 11 episodes of the in-depth documentary series plus over 3 hours of never-before-seen extra material.

Extra content includes uncut, full-length interviews with Leonard Nimoy, Nichelle Nichols and Kirstie Alley.

Excerpts of copyrighted sources are included for review purposes only, without any intention of infringement.

Disc contents[]

Background information[]

Contrary to the Blu-ray Disc home video format, which has – albeit it not officially – for all intents and purposes become region-free in recent years, the geo-restricting region encoding is still officially maintained for the DVD format (for the reasons why, see: main article), meaning that formally this DVD is unwatchable on non-Region 1 players. Since the 2010s however and while still legally required to do so, player manufacturers (deeming the requirement utterly irrelevant in today's society) have entirely done away with the mandatory DVD region encoding on their newer models as once ordained by the home video industry, for their backwards compatible Blu-ray disc players in particular. Older model owners though, might still not be able to watch this release on their non-Region 1 (DVD) players.

External link[]

• Official company webpage at NacelleStore.com