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TOS film break repairs

BoredShipCapt'n

BoredShipCapt'n

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Rear Admiral
Yes, the Seventies syndication copies of TOS were littered with film break repairs where small snippets of dialogue were lost, but can anyone name an instance where the effects of such a film break were apparently enshrined in a published book?

mGkQsVPZTNpIJ7l1L0tpWzA.jpg


I believe I can: The Mandala Fotonovel of "The Trouble with Tribbles" had Spock describing Cyrano Jones not as "a licensed asteroid locator," but as "a licensed astrogator." Now, since the astrogator was a piece of navigational equipment, either Cyrano was an android or something was up with the print of the episode used by the Fotonovel editors. :p
 
Actually an astrogator can be a person. The word simply means the navigator of a spacecraft; it's short for "astronavigator." ST's usage of it to refer to a device is specific to ST.

A number of words can refer to either a person or a device. An organizer can be a person organizing an event or process or a book for organizing your schedule. A putter can be a golfer engaged in putting or the instrument the golfer putts with. Even "computer" used to be a word for a person who did computations manually.
 
Ah, I see. Still, there seems no reason to change his profession other than a misunderstanding arising from a film break. :)
 
Being a former movie theatre manager and also a projectionist. Considering the rate that the film passes through the projector in a second. You're not going to loose that much film to a break. I've repaired thousands of breaks over the years in 35 MM and 70 MM film. And we always tried to minimize film loss because it effects the presentation. A normal break would result in three or four frames of film being lost. We always cut out the breaks and made clean splices. Lesser trained people would just tape over the breaks. Which would lead to more breaks later. Usually the long diagonal tears which were a mess to repair. That's how you loose alot of film.
 
This didn't make it into print, but for years I had an audio tape of "Requiem for Methuselah" in which Kirk said to Flint, "You'd wipe out four lives?" The actual line was four hundred.
 
I owned two of those books when I was a kid ("Where No Man Has Gone Before" and "Galieo Seven"). Both were from the local library and were bought at a book sale there once. I was always impressed with 'em, often wondered how they were done. The picture quality was too good to be photos taken from a broadcast. Did they use actual film prints to source the images from?
 
Can't speak to the OP's question, but I can throw in a couple of lines that were probably typo'ed. In the DAY OF THE DOVE Fotonovel, the dialogue has McCoy calling the Klingons "friends" instead of "fiends." And I cannot remember which Fotonovel it was, but Spock, that groovy hipster, via his word balloon, says "What it is" instead of "What is it?"

Sir Rhosis
 
BoredSantaClaus said:
The Mandala Fotonovel of "The Trouble with Tribbles" had Spock describing Cyrano Jones not as "a licensed asteroid locator," but as "a licensed astrogator."
Click to expand...

I'm sure they were also working with actual scripts, but when converting dialogue into word balloons, compressing words can be a useful space saver so you don't cover too much of an image.

I recall they also reused a previous Fotonovel's stardate for an episode that had no stardate.
 
Amazing. The only TOS photonovel I had was the Day of the Dove and I always remembered they accidentally had the the line "Out, we need no urging to hate humans!"---repeated twice.

And yes they included a captain's log at the end that had to have been taken from the script where kirk states that they are going to drop off the Klingons at a starbase and he will be relieved when they are off the ship.
 
Grant said:
Amazing. The only TOS photonovel I had was the Day of the Dove and I always remembered they accidentally had the the line "Out, we need no urging to hate humans!"---repeated twice.

And yes they included a captain's log at the end that had to have been taken from the script where kirk states that they are going to drop off the Klingons at a starbase and he will be relieved when they are off the ship.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I remember that repeated line, including the "burning house" bit. Made it seem as if Kang thought his metaphor was so funny he had to repeat it, like a drunk.
 
This isn't worth its own thread but isn't unrelated: The View-Master version of "The Omega Glory" (which I owned as a kid) has it that "woman's intuition" (rather than a telepathic suggestion from Spock, as clearly implied in the episode) is the reason why the woman across the courtyard during Kirk and Tracy's final fight scene decides to open the communicator near her, signaling the rescue party to beam down.
 
@ scotpens

I'm not sure, the quality of the photonovel pictures looks almost too good to just have originated from single frames of a film roll copy of the original camera negative.

Here are two quick HD screencaps (source: original negative) that do not have noticably more picture resolution, the way it looks to me:

http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x28hd/thecityontheedgeofforeverhd301.jpg

http://tos.trekcore.com/hd/albums/1x28hd/thecityontheedgeofforeverhd327.jpg

It's however a testament to the great work put into these 1970's photonovels (and given probable technical reproduction limitations).

Bob
 
I wish I had something more intelligent to add to the conversation, but all I've got is that in the first picture on the photonovel page posted, it looks like those two wandered onto the set of The Andy Griffith Show. I don't know, the lighting, maybe, makes me think that... :shrug:
 
That's because it IS the Andy Griffith set.

If you watch City where Kirk and Edith are walking past some storefronts, they even walk past Floyd's Barbershop.
 
The Trek TOS episodes "Miri" and "Return of the Archons" were also shot on that Culver City lot known as "Forty Acres." It was demolished in the 1970s to make way for an industrial park.
 
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