Early 80s TOS VHS Tapes

I uploaded all those intros to You Tube some time ago. So you can still enjoy them!

http://www.youtube.com/user/ENTERPRISENX01#grid/user/B2246EE90736AB16



An old photograph of my collection at its height in the early 2000s. Eventually I parted with a lot of the titles before tapes died out completely and became unsellable on eBay. I couldn't bring myself to part with the TOS trios though... with their spines making up the phrase "We Are The First To Reach This Far".

TNG was also repackaced into three and four on a tape, but didn't go beyond the fifth season when VHS folded. ENT made it up to the end of the first season, together with Nemesis when CIC stopped and switched to DVD.

 

Note the sagging of the shelves under all that weight...

 

Somebody either here or on another one of my forums used to have a sig that said, basically, "the problem isn't that you're still seeing the wires; the problem is you're still looking for them."

We've just been getting into classic Who in the last few years, and we've been watching the DVDs on our 46" LCD widescreen TV. Wires a plenty, cardboard sets and that robot dog is plenty dodgy looking. Still fantastic stories

 

Heh-heh, yeah. Funny thing is, I flipped those groaning shelves so they bow upwards since and the combined space full of DVDs still hasn't corrected it.

These days the entire 40 years of Prime Trek only occupies the top shelf!

In years to come, they'll probably all be on a hard drive... just waiting for the outbreak of WWIII, and an electromagnetic pulse high over the Western world, that erases everything.

Trekkie survivors will huddle around the campfire, with the odd fan who bought edited highlights of Star Trek The Motion Picture from eBay, on three reels of Super 8mm. Or that loser with Standard 8 and no sound, if they're really unlucky!

I'd sooner be drinking myself into oblivion at the bar, while listening to Roy Orbison.

 

Ooby dooby
Ooby dooby..

 

Most stations followed production order because of the simple fact that it's how the episodes are numbered when the tapes arrived at the station. So it was either production order or completely random; very rarely did they do the homework required to show them in airdate order.

 

Sorry, Therin, I gotta correct you on this. Columbia House Video in the US released the episodes in stardate order, two episodes per tape. Episodes without stardates were left to the end (the final tape had 3 episodes). Trust me, I still have the set. Episodes from other seasons were sometimes mixed together because of the inconsistent star dates. There were a couple of mix ups, and one or two assumed stardates (like The Doomsday Machine), but for the most part, it was in stardate order.

I wish that were the case, but sometimes they just jump out at me because I'm not used to seeing them.

 

I've always wanted to rip all my Trek DVDs to a media server so I could put stuff in stardate order, but for the case of eps without a date I would just leave it in it's production# order. Seems odd to have put eps on a separate tape like that.

You need to watch more stuff with wires then
You'll get used to it or go crazy.

 

Are you gonna include TAS in that stardate order scenario?

 

It would generally work if not for The Magicks of Megas-Tu which somehow wound up with a stardate before Where No Man Has Gone Before.

For simplicity's sake I would probably just do all of TOS, then all of TAS, each one in stardate order within each show.

 

I like video tapes, they feel retro.

 

Well, the episodes were so tossed around, there wasn't much of a production # order left to work with. And since there was no episodic flow (Amok Time and Space Seed being on the same tape for example), it really didn't make much difference to have a few "dateless" episodes at the end.

Yeah, I should watch more puppet shows.

 

THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO!!

 

How much did all of that cost?

 

I'm usually an absolute sucker for novelizations of anything[i/], and I usually like ADF's work, but.... I hated the TAS adaptations. I thought they were absolutely awful and a complete betrayal of the original stories.

And ChristopherPike, what is that red boxset on the upper right shelf?

 

I dread to think. Each tape used to cost about a tenner each. £10. Thousands of pounds? Over a decade or more... if that makes a difference! The attraction was seeing brand new episodes of Star Trek. British TV was often a couple years behind the US, unless you had satellite or cable.

I should've taken up a cheaper hobby, like cocaine addiction. I hear the withdrawal symptoms are easier to treat...

 

The first seven movies in a VHS box-set, with a booklet featuring the poster art.

http://trekbbs.com/picture.php?albumid=70&pictureid=713

http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/8097/30thdpq4.jpg

 

That is gorgeous! Heck, even though I have them all on DVD, I would still hesitate to get rid of a VHS set that nice looking.

What's the gold writing on the cover of each movie say? Looks too long to be the titles.