William Shatner Presents: Chaos on the Bridge (Blu-ray)

William Shatner Presents: Chaos on the Bridge is the single disc Blu-ray version of the 2014 Chaos on the Bridge documentary, released in Germany by New KSM in July 2016 on the occasion of Star Treks 50th anniversary. As of 2024, it has remained the only standalone Blu-ray Disc release version of the documentary available at retailers.
It was initially intended by New KSM to have this documentary become part of their limited Unendliche Weiten - Die William Shatner Edition für alle Star Trek Fans anniversary set, which collected the four older, William Shatner-centered as director/co-producer/host/star, documentaries. The company decided however, to concurrently release two of them, and Chaos on the Bridge, as standalone Blu-ray and DVD retail issues as well, while keeping the other two as set exclusives only. The discs of the standalone retail issues came mounted in the standard plastic snapcase without the customary cardboard slipcover however – unlike its German DVD counterpart.
Like all the other home video releases, the German release, besides the documentary proper, only contained the documentary trailer as a special feature but was augmented with a still gallery. Also included was a postcard as an added bonus.
Upon the original release of the DVD in 2015, a High Definition (HD) version was temporarily offered by retailer Amazon.com to its clientele as a professionally "manufactured-on-demand-only" (MOD) home video disc option if ordered at the company. Essentially a Blu-ray Disc, it was never offered in a regular fashion at retail though. Five years later, in 2020, Shout! Factory did release a retail Blu-ray version in North America, but that issue was only available as a set-exclusive of their Blu-ray gift set, and not as an individual standalone retail release.
==Background information==
*New KSM became the very first company anywhere in the world to embark on the remastering of older non- documentaries, with having already been produced to the requirements of the High Definition age as one of the more then-recent newly made productions. It remains undetermined however, if KSM had made use of the original 2015 Amazon MOD HD option, if they had performed the remastering themselves, or if they had been provided with the original footage as shot by primary production company 455 Films.
*While Chaos on the Bridge had not been released individually by Shout! Factory, their "Limited Edition" variant of their 2020 set had an extra fifth disc included which featured extended interviews with production staff containing substantial parts, over 45 minutes worth, that were excised from the Chaos on the Bridge documentary as originally released.
*Though it had by 2020 become commonplace for most Blu-ray Disc manufactures to dispense with region encoding as an obsolete, outdated and irrelevant security measure, the ones for the official franchise included, it has for unknown reasons been maintained by Shout! Factory as confirmed on Blu-ray.com, and quite possibly by New KSM as well as is implied on its case back cover with its "Nur für ("only for") Region B Player" notification. Oddly enough, no such indication is present on its DVD counterpart case, most likely because the initial 2015 DVD release had already been region-free to begin with.