Collecting Star Trek…

[Neopeius]

For us older gents, there's always room for commodores and admirals. The fitness requirements are less strenuous.

But the uniforms are no less form-fitting...

I've been assembling pre-motion picture Trek stuff lately, including some of the fanzines. Star Trek was such a wide open thing back then, with lots of room for fan imagination - fun stuff. It's also fun to explore Trek before so much original material got contradicted or "ret-conned" by later official productions.

Obligatory invitation to join us "back then"

We're watching the original Star Trek "as it comes out" every week, with period commercials. We just finished the last episode of the first season and will be starting on summer reruns this Wednesday.

Invitation to the Discord where we watch.

Our reviews of the episodes, many by first-time watchers, from a period perspective.

 

[Hofner]

Like many others in this thread, I collected every Star Trek material I could find during the '70s. One thing I don't know has been mentioned yet is that there was some magazine, I can't remember what it was called, that had large posters of shots from the show. One was from the ep Miri of Kirk, McCoy and Rand in that old place where they found Miri. Another poster was a shot of the Enterprise as the Tholian ships are spinning their web.

Another Star Trek related thing I got was some kind of big poster accompanied by a little booklet with a list of every star system visited and even mentioned in TOs along with their spatial coordinates.
I can't remember everything on that poster but it did have a graphic of the Rigel star system including Rigel 7 and 12. Does anybody else remember this?
Using the coordinates from this little booklet, I made my own star maps on graph paper. I would do one with the x y coordinates and then another with the x z coordinates and then I would look at the two graph papers side by side to get an idea of the 3 d picture.

Later in 1986 when I worked at the Amoco Research Center, I was temporarily assigned to work in a computer room that had printers and one graphic color printer. So I put the star systems and their coordinates into a spreadsheet and made my own color star maps.

I'm surprised no one else has mentioned this but when I was only 7 or 8, I didn't have the money to buy the Enterprise model so I made my own. Y'all should be able to guess what I used, two paper plates, one cardboard tube from a roll of toilet paper, two cardboard tubes from two paper towel rolls, four pencils and I forget what I used for the pylon between the saucer and the secondary hull. Now THAT'S what I call a starship.
Of course before that, I had used two paper plates to make a model of the Jupiter 2.

Robert

 

[Warped9]

Back in the day before I got my first AMT Enterprise for Christmas 1970 I used to make a cutout and fold Enterprise from an 8x11 piece of white cardboard.

Hmm…maybe I should try making one of those again…

 

[Daddy Todd]

One thing I don't know has been mentioned yet is that there was some magazine, I can't remember what it was called, that had large posters of shots from the show.

Star Trek Giant Poster Book. 17 issues. There was also a single-issue TMP revival a couple years later.

Another Star Trek related thing I got was some kind of big poster accompanied by a little booklet with a list of every star system visited and even mentioned in TOs along with their spatial coordinates.

Star Trek Maps. It apparently sold poorly, and many copies wound up on bookstore remainder tables. So, today, it’s somewhat rare.

 

[Poltargyst]

But the uniforms are no less form-fitting...

That's what the green wrap-around is for.

 

[Hofner]

Star Trek Giant Poster Book. 17 issues. There was also a single-issue TMP revival a couple years later.



Star Trek Maps. It apparently sold poorly, and many copies wound up on bookstore remainder tables. So, today, it’s somewhat rare.

Thanks.

All that stuff is long gone now. Like I said, I can't remember the Star Trek Maps poster very well but it didn't seem to be much in the way of being an actual star map, that may be why it didn't sell very well. As I said, I got a lot more fun using the booklet to create my own star maps.

Robert

 

[Warped9]

A funny thing about collecting Star Trek stuff back in the day. Most shows create buzz while in production then drop off the radar when it comes to an end. It’s remembered by some, but largely gets forgotten by the masses. Star Trek got ever more popular after it ended production. Syndication saw the show really catch fire during the ‘70s. It generated a massive amount of merchandising for a show that was already a done deal. And for years successive sci-fi shows on television continued to be compared to Star Trek, a series that had ended production several years back.

And candidly I still compare more modern productions to TOS, and not just Trek.

But thats another topic of discussion.

 

[SchwEnt]

The Star Trek Spaceflight Chronology is one of my favorite books.

The Spaceflight Chronology IS my favorite book!

 

[Hofner]

There's a free space simulator called Orbiter that accurately depicts Newtonian physics in space that I used to play with twenty years ago. I would think at least some people here in the Trek BBS knows about it although I don't remember anyone mentioning it.

People can create addons for this simulator such as the space shuttle, the ISS and Saturn V rocket.

So of course there were Star Trek addons with virtual, 3d models of the TOS Enterprise and shuttlecraft among others.

In addition to launching the space shuttle and rendezvous with the ISS and flying the Apollo lunar landing missions, I would launch the Shuttlecraft from the Enterprise hangar deck, land on a planet, take off again into orbit, rendezvous with the Enterprise again and pilot back into the hangar deck.

That was so much fun. I would also get into an MMU and just do an inspection of the Enterprise exterior, you could get a sense of how big the ship is while drifting around it close up.

A couple of years after I discovered Orbiter, the simulator became capable of sound so you would hear the sound of rockets when launching and things like that.

I had a powerful, high end sound system so when launching the space shuttle or the Saturn V rocket, I would crank my stereo up so that just about the whole house was shaking.

Robert

 

[publiusr]

Plaid Stallions and Mego Talk have lots of goodies. After my first AMT was smashed my Dad tried an all wood Enterprise with a yo-yo spit atop for the top and bottom sensor I guess…saucer like the Mann class would be. In 73 or saw I drew a TOS with swept back pylons…as I am sure many others did pre-TMP Mom cut up a Star Trek bedspread and made a pillow of the Enterprise…all long gone.

There was the No. 1111 space cruiser playground equipment that was on a children’s public TV program…spaceship park in Camrose, Alberta Canada and the Miracles Historic Starseeker playsystem that resemble the Enterprise.

 

[EllaCote]

Star Trek Phaser Original with Communicator, Star Trek CCG 2000 Reflections UR Future Enterprise Foil PSA 9 Mint

 

[Ssosmcin]

A funny thing about collecting Star Trek stuff back in the day. Most shows create buzz while in production then drop off the radar when it comes to an end. It’s remembered by some, but largely gets forgotten by the masses. Star Trek got ever more popular after it ended production. Syndication saw the show really catch fire during the ‘70s. It generated a massive amount of merchandising for a show that was already a done deal. And for years successive sci-fi shows on television continued to be compared to Star Trek, a series that had ended production several years back.

And candidly I still compare more modern productions to TOS, and not just Trek.

But thats another topic of discussion.

I don't wanna cause too much of a drift, but this happened to a lesser degree to a lot of shows in the 70's and 80's. Gilligan's Island, for example, just kept growing in popularity, as did a lot of 60's TV, but none of them had the merchandising bonanza of Star Trek. It was pretty unique for a show that had been cancelled years before to generate a flood or merch that just kept on selling - and still does 50+ years later.

 

[JMS]

The growing popularity thing for old shows might have partly been from the Gen-X effect. We watched lots of TV, and that meant lots of re-runs. I remember growing up in the 70's and not really realizing that things like Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch were "old" - they were just "on". I picked the Trek habit up from my dad - and again, probably didn't think of it as being old, it was just on and cool and fun and I liked it.

 

[Kor]

I was starting to collect trade paperback volumes of the Gold Key comics reprints. But then I got that DVD-ROM with all the Trek comics pre-IDW, so I sold the paperbacks. I try to get digital versions of comics when I can, because those big paperbacks take up a lot of room when you start getting more and more.

Kor

 

[Ssosmcin]

The growing popularity thing for old shows might have partly been from the Gen-X effect. We watched lots of TV, and that meant lots of re-runs. I remember growing up in the 70's and not really realizing that things like Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch were "old" - they were just "on". I picked the Trek habit up from my dad - and again, probably didn't think of it as being old, it was just on and cool and fun and I liked it.

Yup, I agree with a lot of that but some of these shows just hit it big and stuck around for decades. These shows found a new, rabid audience. Maybe it was the type of programming that hit the generation the right way. That bright, imaginative escapism the late 60's was so good at. Nothing too topical, just fun or exciting, easy to get into tv.

 

[Donald G]

The growing popularity thing for old shows might have partly been from the Gen-X effect. We watched lots of TV, and that meant lots of re-runs. I remember growing up in the 70's and not really realizing that things like Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch were "old" - they were just "on". I picked the Trek habit up from my dad - and again, probably didn't think of it as being old, it was just on and cool and fun and I liked it.

The thing is, for some of us growing up in the seventies, Gilligan's Island and the Brady Bunch weren't that old. Gilligan was cancelled by CBS in 1967, and the Brady Bunch finished its network run on ABC in the summer of 1974.

Of the popular syndicated rerun staples, Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, Dragnet, Wild, Wild West and Gomer Pyle ended their network runs in 1970, The Beverley Hillbillies, Green Acres, and Hogan's Heroes ended in 1971, My Three Sons in 1972, Bewitched and Mission: Impossible lasted until 1973, but earlier seasons had entered syndication a few years previously. Adam-12 lasted until 1975. Older Gen-X-ers could still have memories (however fragmentary) of some of these programs' network runs during their toddler hood and others from later childhood.

By the time I became engrossed in syndicated Star Trek reruns, Star Trek had only been cancelled for three years.

 

[Warped9]

Yeah, coming of age in the ‘70s meant watching shows that weren’t really old. They still felt fresh to us even if they were a decade old, and particularly if we didn’t recall much of them from glimpsing them as a little kid in the ‘60s.

 

[Ssosmcin]

Sure, I get that, but the difference is that a lot of the shows have never stopped playing, or didn't stop until 30 years or so later. Shows like Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond have also achieved that kind of status, but they also ran for much longer and just kept going (Raymond petered out but Friends seems to have legs). Gilligan's Island, as an example, was a three-year series that kept re-running every single day for decades. I Dream of Jeannie, a five-year Bewitched clone (in concept if not execution) every day well into the 90s. You can still find it. There is still brand identification with the shows. These canceled shows became more popular in their syndicated reruns then they were in their initial broadcast. We're not talking about shows that just weren't old at the time or retained their popularity. Some of these shows failed in their network run, like Star Trek, The Munsters and The Addams Family, etc. and achieved a kind of immortality. Or at least much greater success in reruns.

 

[EllaCote]

Romulan Vessel Starship

 

[Hofner]

Only a failed show like Gilligan's Island could spawn a TV movie entitled "The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island".

Robert