I wasn't around when TOS was on the air, but my brother was. Later, whenever he used to watch the reruns in the early 70's, I'd watch too in fascination as a 5-7 year old. Initially what attracted me were the special effects I think. Sometimes, instead of playing cops and robbers with my friends using our toy guns, we'd play "Star Trek" and I had a place in the yard set up where I'd pretend there was a transporter room and bridge. When they tried to shoot me, I'd be in the middle of beaming up. I could only get away with it so long because most of my friends didn't like 'Trek. My dad knew I liked the show and brought home a die cast metal Enterprise that would shoot torpedoes out the front and a couple of phasers, both obtained from a local auction. I still have both. When I turned older, I must have grown a liking for the music: I recorded the theme onto cassette tape and then walked around the neighbourhood playing the theme on a portable cassette player. I wanted all three themes, but the local tv station at the time seemed to only be showing episodes from the 2nd/3rd seasons, then one day they suddenly started showing 1st season ones. I was about 8-10 at this point and recorded the latest theme onto cassette, but knew there was still an episode where there was no voiceover (Where No Man), so waited patiently for days until that episode was aired. I was excited when I finally captured it's theme onto cassette. I was also thrilled one time when a first season episode aired where the voiceover wasn't perfect. When Shatner said "It's five year mission. To explore strange, new worlds....", there was NO pause between "mission" and "to", but a large gap after that. I don't know if this was a blooper or what, but I had it on tape for years. The underlying theme wasn't affected, only his voiceover. I still may have the "ancient" cassette somewhere with that. It was within one of the first ten episodes using the original electronic violin theme and his voiceover. Much later, as a teen, I spent a lot of free time doing sound editing of the music, again onto cassette at first. I especially like the "fight" music of both Where No Man and the same music used for Alternative Factor, and I would piece together cassette edits so I would get as much music as I could without the dialogue or effects. My great set up in those days was a VCR feeding a cassette deck. I did have most of the episodes either recorded off of the local TV station at that point, or started purchasing them as VHS whenever I could. Later, I actually did graduate to a 1/4' reel to reel deck and would cut and splice together the music. I also started trying to grab off sound effects as purely as I could. This was a bit before the GNP Crescendo Sound Effects release, which I later did get, but would still try recording, splicing, and cutting sound effects appearing in the show that weren't on the CD. Most of the time, the result was barely passable as there was generally too much background or tape noise as the effects would be recorded at low volume (like the other three alien planet surface sounds that never made it onto the CD). Later, digital noise filtering helped somewhat, but there was still plenty of compromise because digitization manipulation tends to add artifacts easily if the signal's not strong enough to start with. Just this past decade, I was especially thrilled to see La La Land release all of the original music, which I quickly obtained. The sound effects I sought after still weren't present, although an apparent early version of one of the alien planet surface sounds was (Spock's Brain), but I just about died for the music! And, yes, I still did some edits and re-edited some of the Alternative Factors scenes using mostly the music from Where No Man, but this time all done on a PC. That's my story, leaving out some, but that's mostly my interest. A bit OCD, maybe. Often thought I had a touch of it. I also wanted to add, just for the record, that much of the audio sound effects appearing on both the DVD and Blu Ray are NOT what they sounded like originally, especially the alien planet surface sounds. They remixed most of them to make "surround sound" and for other purposes and the way to the originals is either VHS or laserdisc.
