I watched "The City On The Edge of Forever" in digitally remastered form over the weekend.

Its not a noticeable difference, except the quality of the broadcast is better--brighter and truer colors. It sort of reminds me of the Dick Tracy movie that came out in th 1980s with its stylistic use of primary colors. I suppose Star Trek was originally filmed in just bright tones to make it pop on the new-fangled color TVs people were watching in the early 1960s.

The digital effects are subtle, and not really much of an improvement over the original--at least from what I can tell from this one episode (which doesn't have much in the way of special effects). It was only really obvious to me with the establishing shot of the Enterprise orbiting the planet--the ship was grayer, in deep shadow, as one might expect to see it in space. A later establishing shot of the planet was more obviously remastered--the original planet shots were always lame, particularly when contrasted to the shot of earth we got during the Apollo program. Unfortunately, one of the special effects scenes that I recall in this episode was cut--McCoy arrives in a Depression-era U.S. city still maddened by his overdoes of cordrazine and collapses at the feet of what we would now call a homeless person, but what in the day was called a "bum". The bum rolls McCoy and starts fiddling with his phaser and shortly vaporizes himself. It could be argued that the scene doesn't advance the story, but it was part of the original story, and so should have been retained.

I looked at the title sequences again, and it looks like they did some work there as well, but I have to question whether it was worth the effort.

The original Star Trek is archaic, and we like it that way. It strikes me as ridiculous to update the special effects in an artistic work that reflects the time of its creation in every other way.

I think its fine to restore the series to its original glory, but leave well enough alone...