Maurice said:
It's funny that anyone would think Star Trek, talky as it was, was so visual that you could not follow the story from audio, when it was actually Mission: Impossible shot next door that would be impossible to follow.
Oh, I didn't mean you could not follow the story from audio, I never even thought that far into it, I just meant it didn't appeal to me to try to record the audio back then. I'm talking about how I felt at the time which is not necessarily how I feel now.
I meant the show was so visually interesting it hardly even occurred to me to record just the audio which is not to say it wasn't also interesting in itself.
I guess one reason is the sound quality would have been pretty bad, all I had was a cheap portable cassette tape recorder with a built in microphone and I couldn't afford to buy very many tapes.
Ironically, much later I ended up listening to tos eps only through audio anyway. in the late stages of slowly going completely blind, when I so-called 'watched' tos among other things on my TV, I was only listening, I couldn't even see the screen anymore.
I'm very much into listening to audio books now and I don't have a TV anymore but once in a while, I'll listen to some old TV series if they're availible on youtube, but the last I checked, complete tos episodes weren't abailible. I've even listened to a few episodes of My Mother The Car.
Christopher said:
Oh, the early ones are more interesting. I mean, the ones that just retell the episodes exactly are kind of redundant, because I saw the episodes over and over again in syndication and had them practically memorized. The early ones that took liberties were much more interesting, because they offered new and different material. Sometimes Blish's interpolations were more interesting than what was in the episodes, like his "polywater" explanation for the Psi 2000 virus. And Blish's take on "Operation: Annihilate!" is much better than the episode we got, a valuable glimpse at an abandoned earlier draft.
Anyway, I gather that most of the later ones weren't really by Blish at all, but by J.A. Lawrence under his name.
Interesting. Like I said above I was talking about how I felt in the '70s. For instance, I didn't know then that Blish was using earlier versions of the scripts.
now, I might be interested in listening to those books in audio format. The Library of Congress Talking Book Library for the Blind and Print Disabled only has Star Trek 5 and 8 but if 1, 2 and 3 are availible at Audible, I might by them.
Roberrt
Edit: I deleted my post because it's much easier for me to repost than edit an existing post, apologies.
I still have the beats down. I had "Day of the Dove" on last week. I wasn't watching, just listening. I was reeling off the dialog on rhythm as it was playing.
