Paramount will release Generations in the UK on the 27th September. I imagine the US will get it a month or two prior to that. No other details yet though I'm afraid.
You can already combine the casts of TNG, DS9, and Voyager without any Q tricks, as they all happen at the same time. And you can throw Scotty and Spock in there with no problems as well.
"35 minutes" of deleted footage is very misleading. When a movie is first cut together it is called an "asemblage". This includes every line of dialouge shot from the script. About half of the cuts from any movie are very short 1,2 or 3 line cuts, as well as cuts made BETWEEN various lines of dialouge. So 35 minutes cut does mean you are missing nearly that much actual dialouge. You can't show 1 or 2 line cuts in a deleted/extended scene section. About half that is all you are likely to get if you're lucky. Sometimes producers and directors say "the movie was 2 3/4 hours long so we had to cut it down" as a way of justify cutting a particular scene or charactor.
Martin Blythe, if you're out there, we'd love to hear you chime in with anything and everything you can supply us with on the Generations CE DVD. We're all waiting with baited breath!
I'm more interested in a Collector's Edition of "First Contact". I wish it would be released at the same time as "Generations", but I'm sure it won't be, so I'll have to wait awhile. Unfortunately, it's hard to predict the gap of time between Star Trek movie releases. I tried to find a pattern by looking up the release dates for all the previous special editions, but couldn't find one. Some were released withina few months of each other, and some not even in the same year.
I don't think we'll ever see Scotty again. James Doohan is retired now and, as I have heard, in failing health. In fact, there is a movement in the Star Trek community to get him his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (he is the only TOS regular not to have one) as soon as possible before he is gone.
Off-topic but I have to mention it: a couple of years ago I was on a date where we browsed through a bookstore. We saw a couple tomes written by Doohan and the woman made some comment about his death. I responded that I thought she confused Doohan with DeForest Kelley, who HAD passed not that much before that time. She insisted that Doohan was dead too, no matter all my claims to the contrary.
As luck would have it, I went on IMDB the next day and they had a news item about Doohan. It indicated he'd been hospitalized for some illness. I sent the woman an e-mail entitled "Dead man catches cold". There was no second date...
That happens way too often. I had a friend who was friends with a girl who insisted her college team had beaten his college team at a certain sport every time they played. He wasn't sure, so he kept quiet. Later, he looked it up on the internet and discovered that it was almost exactly the opposite that was true. Her response? "I can't believe you looked that up!" She didn't talk to him for a good while. I don't think they were ever that close after that.
Thankfully, we still have Jimmy Doohan around. He's scheduled to appear at a tribute convention in a couple of months for what will be his last convention appearance ever. The surviving members of the Original Series cast (Shatner, Nimoy, Takei, Koenig, and Nichols) will be there as special guests for the convention tribute.
I know we're getting off topic here, but my wife swears that the news ticker on CNN a few weeks ago said that a cast member from DS9 had died of cancer...
I did some web searches and found nothing, think my wife needs to put on her glasses once in awhile.
Uh...Frank... I hate to break it to you, but your wife is right.
Well...sorta. It was a semi-frequent DS9 guest-star who died.
Cecily Adams (daughter of Don Adams aka Get Smart aka Inspector Gadget), who played "Moogie" on a couple occasions, passed away recently. (She was the second actress to play the role.) Not sure if it was cancer...but perhaps that's what your wife saw?
Well, considering the pattern over the last couple of years, it becomes pretty easy to see that a pattern of two SE's or CE's per year is the rate. We've had the CE's of II and III in 2002, IV and V in 2003, so seeing the Generations CE in the same year as the CE of VI would continue the formula. That would seem to suggest that 2005 would be the year we see 2-disc CE's of First Contact and Insurrection.