Apparently, when the reruns started in Australia, the censors went so nuts over the violence, some episodes wound up around twenty minutes long.
I'll defer to Ian as to how accurate that assertion is.
Bjo Trimble relates that story on a DVD bonus feature, but it's probably a misremembered merging of old factoids.
Yes, TOS was often cut for extra advertising time and censorship in Australia, but we only got one screening of each episode (in NSW) until colour TV arrived in 1975. Many of us had never seen uncut episodes. The network owning the rights to TOS chose to sit on them rather than let them go to another network. TOS's use as an afternoon or early prime time rerun - unlike "Lost in Space" (which was played and replayed to death) - was hampered by the fact that 40 of the episodes were rated "G", but the rest as "NRC" ("Not Recommended for Children").
When the screening rights were purchased by a different network, it did not want to pay the hefty fee to get them all reclassified, so the old, outdated recommendations stopped 38 TOS episodes from ever being able to be shown when children were not yet in bed!
The first glitch I noticed was in "Space Seed", when it ran in the early 80s "for the first time in colour" in prime time (an episode which I'd only just viewed on a commercial sell-thru Betamax tape). The 60s censors had cut the feigned slap to Uhura, unintentionally making it seem like the Khan's henchman
had actually slapped her! Another Uhura cut: they removed her old-age reflection from each shot of the panel in "And the Children Shall Lead". I never realised that was an actual intended part of the aired episode until, a few weeks later, when a wizened-up, wrinkly Uhura flashed into the closing credits of a different episode.
The anecdote Bjo related was re "Journey to Babel". With no TV airings since the 60s, the fans in Sydney and Melbourne had to make do with monthly screenings of TOS on
16mm film, on the big screen, all through the 70s and 80s. The guy running the theaterette bought most of his reels in South Africa, where there was no TV at all till the late 70s.
Originally six eps, later five (plus a TAS or "Zombies of the Stratosphere" episode), per month at our all-day Star Trek Marathons, attracting about 200 people, depending on the weather and rival attractions. The two intermissions were great places to mingle with like-minded fans.
Legally, there was a loophole in the switch from Desilu to Paramount that meant that Seasons One and Two of TOS were not restrained by exclusive international screening rights. (Secretly, we got to see interspersed Season Three eps. too.) But the guy who ran these marathons never showed "Journey to Babel" because his only print was a poor-condition, hacked up remnant, filled with long green scratches. It was a mess. Many of us had never seen the ep at all, so we begged him to play it, no matter the condition - and it ran about 20 minutes, and was reported in our newsletter. And Bjo heard a version of the story, and assumed it was televised that way.
Eventually, he did get a pristine print. Not long after, it also aired on TV.
