Saturday, April 1, 2023

Got the Star Trek - The Motion Picture Director's Edition box set? You might wan to check your discs

TL/DR

Star Trek The Motion Picture The Complete Adventure box set claims to contain a special, longer cut of the film. However it seems that this is not the case for some editions. The British edition does contain the longer cut, but the Scandinavian one seems not to. The back of the box still claims that the box set does contain the longer cut.

The claim and evidence

This is the box set in question.

At the back of the box we find the following text:

I bought this at the end of last year but I could not find the longer edition anywhere in the menus. I mentioned this to a friend of mine who has the same box set and he had found it immediately. After a lot of debugging we discovered that he has the British edition of the box set whereas I have the Scandinavian one.

The British box set, which has the longer edition, consists of the following discs:

  • EU151495BLB Blu-ray The Director's Edition Bonus Disc
  • EU151496ULB 4K UltraHD The Director's Edition Feature Film, Special Features
  • EU151460ULB 4K UltraHD Feature Film, Special Features (Special Longer Version, Theatrical Version)
  • EU151496BLB Blu-ray The Director's Edition Feature Film, Special Features
  • EC150885BLB Blu-ray Feature Film, Special Features

My Scandinavian box set has the following discs:

  • eu151495blb bonus disc
  • eu151496ulb director's edition 4k ultrahd, Feature film
  • eu150884ulb 4k, regular version, feature film
  • eu151496blb blu-ray, director's edition
  • eu150885blb blu-ray, regular version, feature film

The only differences here are that one disc has a serial number with letters EC instead of EU and that the British edition has this disc:

Note how it says "special longer version" in microscopic letters under the Paramount logo. This text does not appear on any disc in the Scandinavian edition.

The Scandinavian edition does not have this disc. Instead it has the disc with the product id EU150884ULB whereas the corresponding British disc has the product id EU151460ULB .The missing content can not be on any of the other discs, because they are the same in both editions (the EU/EC issue notwithstanding). 

I reported this to the store I bought the box set from. After a lot of convincing they agreed to order a replacement box set. When it arrived we inspected the contained discs and they were the same as in the box set I already had. This would imply that the entire print run is defective. After more convincing we managed to get the Finnish importer to report the issue to the distributor in Sweden.

They eventually replied that the longer edition is in "the extra disc in the set that is in a cardboard sleeve". This is not the case, as that disc contains only extras, is the same in the British box set and further is a regular Blu-Ray, not a  4k UHD one as it should be and as it is on the British edition.

We reported all this back up the chain and have not heard anything back for several weeks now.

What to do if you have a non-British (and presumably non-US) edition of this box set?

Check whether your discs contain the special longer edition. The British disc has this this fairly unambiguous selection screen for it when you insert the disc:


If your box set does not contain this version of the film, report the issue to where you bought the box set from. If this really is a larger issue (as it would seem), the more bug reports they get the faster things will get fixed.

The film store said that they have sold tens of these box sets and that I was the first to notice the issue so don't assume that other people have already reported it. This is not an issue of the physical copy that I have because the replacement box set was defective in the same way.

Speculation: why is it broken?

The British disc that has the special longer edition does not contain Finnish subtitles (or possibly any non-English languages). When the box was being assembled someone found this out, decided that they can't ship a disc without localisation and replaced the disc with a regular version of the film that does not have the longer cut. But they did not change the back of the box, which states that the box set contains the longer edition which it does not seem to have.

2 comments:

  1. Hi there and thank you so much for this. It seems that the only way to buy this set for a reasonable price now is to get the EU Import edition which you have. Could you please tell me if you're aware of anything else missing from the box set? And also, are the contents all in English?? Much appreciated, Steve

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    Replies
    1. After a lot of digging the movie store guy finally got some answers. It seems that the special longer edition should not have been in any european release, only in the US release. The publisher even sent out emails to movie stores requesting them to return all boxes that have the longer edition so obviously nobody did and those boxes that have the longer edition are prized collectibles.

      The discs contain the original soundtracks, as pretty much every european disc release has. All other content should be the same (as you can verify via the disc serial numbers).

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