-
Did you play the Star Trek V phone game in 1989?
Star Trek fan David Penn recently shared with me a VHS tape crammed with vintage Trek videos. One of the gems is a commercial for a 1989 phone game based on Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. I consider it a gem because I had never heard of the game.
Here is the commercial:
Photo from WorthPoint.com And just to be clear: if you’re picturing gamers pulling out smartphones for this, nope. It would have been old-timey landline phones almost exclusively.
There is no information on this game online and certainly no recording of the audio. Until I posted the video above, even the commercial did not exist on YouTube. Which means fandom has forgotten about this little Trek past time.
Players were presented with “six interactive Star Trek adventures” and, being a phone game, the interaction was of the “Press three to raise shields” variety. At $2.50 per call, the phone bill could deliver a nasty surprise at the end of the month.
Luckily, Penn played the game and shared some memories.
A narrator (not a recognizable actor) would quickly introduce a scenario. As the story progressed, you were given a choice and made your decision by pressing a button on the phone. If you scored high enough, you would be mailed a prize. I got a USS Enterprise NCC-1701-A ensign patch, which was about the size of a US half-dollar. Obviously, I wasn’t good enough at the game to be command material.
I can’t remember if there was more than one dilemma per game. I’m afraid I don’t remember anything really specific about the scenarios, other than one I played involved an encounter in space and the option of firing phasers or photon torpedoes. I do remember being delighted that they used actual TOS sound effects in the story and game play.
I don’t think I could have played it more than eight times total. I wouldn’t have had more than $20 to throw away at the time.
@joebailey64 on
TwitterX told me he was also a winner: “I was sent a small delta pin that was about a centimetre in height.”I am glad I could post the commercial and a little information on the game, but I really wish I could have located more details. I like to think that someone out there has audio recordings or scripts of the scenarios.
And remember kids: check with your parents before calling.
I also published a post about the seasons one, two, and three bloopers that were on Penn’s tape. More videos are coming.
Postscript
MeTV.com posted an article about other 1-900 game lines (and some that peddled gossip and teen heartthrob dreams). It seems Hulk Hogan was plying a similar game back in the ’80s. From the article:
Hulk Hogan gave his Hulkamaniacs a little interactivity with his hotline. The WWF superstar had a game built into his 1-900 number that allowed you to “wrestle” opponents like the Mountie by pressing buttons on your phone to perform moves.
-
Check out the definitive reference work on Trek signatures
I own a lot of Star Trek autographs. More than 150, some quite rare. And I am in awe of the collection assembled by lifelong Trek fan Gerald Gurian. He has hundreds of signatures, and he decided to share them with fandom by publishing the 468-page masterwork Autographs of the Final Frontier.
The book presents more than 450 autographs, but what’s really impressive is the breadth of the coverage. No one picking up a book like this would be surprised to see examples from William Shatner, George Takei or Gene Roddenberry, or even William Campbell, DC Fontana, or Ralph Senensky, but Gurian goes well beyond that. He has Max Kleven, a gladiator in Bread and Circuses; Arthur Batanides, D’Amato from That Which Survives; propmaster Irving Feinberg; Linwood G. Dunn, special effects photographer; matte painter Albert Whitlock; and hundreds of others.
The autograph book is actually Gurian’s fourth. His first published works are the three-volume To Boldly Go set, which presents rare production photos.
The autograph and production photos in this article were supplied by Gerald Gurian and used with his permission. “I never thought I would author a book on Star Trek,” Gurian told me. “I posted some rare photos on my site (Star Trek prop, costume and auction authority) and that attracted the attention of Marc Cushman and his publishing team and they contacted me to ask if they could use some photos for his book series, These Are The Voyages.” Gurian was happy to have Cushman use his images but they were reproduced in black-and-white and mostly in a fairly small size, and “I thought it was a shame no one could see the colour versions.
“That led me to create the original three books, and then I thought it’s a shame I have not used the autograph material, and so that led to this book.”
About a dozen autographs in the fourth book come from other people but Gurian owns the rest. And he also included 500 of those rare behind-the-scenes photos.
I think of the book as a tribute to the cast and production crew and all of the guest and supporting actors of TOS. It’s a series that I literally grew up with and [it has given] me so much inspiration and enjoyment over the years. So the book not only provides some biographical information on all those key folks but also provides fans with a little greater insight into their personal sides, through some of their behind-the-scenes writings and interactions, like a Fred Phillips Christmas card to Bob Justman or the Nimoy Deadly Years memo.
And, from a fan perspective, I think it’s cool to see many of those handwritten accounts from the guest stars that elaborate on some of their TOS filming experiences, and, in general, the book is a good reference. Plus, the inclusion of quite a large number of rare, behind-the-scenes photographs from the filming of the episodes hopefully makes the volume even more enjoyable for fans.
What is it about autographs?
I asked Gurian why fans collect autographs. He says it’s all about a personal connection to the celebrity.
Even a simple signature allows a fan to feel a more intimate bond of association with a much admired actor or athlete or historical figure than, say, owning a mass-market trading card or photograph or figurine, since the signature was actually created directly by the person. And if it was obtained in-person, then there are all of those additional memories of personally interacting with the individual and obtaining the autograph. For more sophisticated items such as handwritten letters or other correspondence and documents, there is of course further valuable historical insights that could be derived.
Gurian is right. James Doohan was a guest at one of the first conventions I attended, and I decided not to get his autograph. I didn’t want to hand over the few dollars I had for a scrawled signature. Then, watching the fans, I realized they weren’t paying for the actual signature; they were getting a few minutes to chat, and the signed photo was a reminder of that time. I bought a 5×7 from Doohan (because it was $2 cheaper than an 8×10) and I have always been glad I did. See also my chat with Nichelle Nichols over her Ebony magazine cover.
The book was published in 2018 and at that time Gurian already owned perhaps the most extensive collection of Star Trek autographs. But a lot is not always enough. “I have acquired some additional ones since publishing the book,” he told me. Because collectors collect. We can’t help it.
Autographs of the Final Frontier and the three To Boldly Go photo collections are available from Amazon and elsewhere.
-
Ponder the mystery of the F-104s sculpture
Much of the action in the episode Tomorrow is Yesterday is set in a US Air Force base in 1969. As the episode was filmed in the US in 1966, it presented relatively few challenges for Art Director Matt Jefferies. But he still had some work to do, including designing and crafting (or commissioning) a small sculpture of three Lockheed F-104 fighter jets. Here is Jefferies’ design sketch.
You can glimpse the sculpture a couple of times. At 23 minutes into the episode, a guard strolls past a cabinet in a hallway, and a half minute later Kirk and Sulu walk through the same area. The sculpture sits among a number of trophies near the middle.
The odd thing about this is the piece is on screen for only a few seconds. For a series that was always strained for both dollars and time, why expend resources on such a small detail? It is not like an early draft of the script had Captain Kirk pick up the sculpture and say “Ah, here is the answer to our time-travel dilemma.”
It seems to me that this is an example of what made Star Trek great at the time and explains its ongoing popularity: the people who made it all valued quality. Desilu paid de Forest Research to vet every script. Leonard Nimoy cared about the verisimilitude of his character. Roddenberry pursued heavy hitters to write for the series. And Jefferies put effort into even small elements that our characters would just stroll past.
About that boomerang
The on-screen sculpture looks a lot like Jefferies’ design, except that the back piece became more elaborate between drafting table and set. It took on the boomerang shape that we often see in other episodes, as in this screencap from Court Martial. Again, this attention to detail adds a richness to the universe that was rarely, if ever, seen in other TV programs of the time.
-
Laugh along with the rare season three blooper reel
I recently wrote an article about the wonderful Trek Bloopers album in which I mentioned that the blooper reel from the third season is rarely seen. Then I heard from Star Trek fan David Penn, who has an old video tape packed with vintage ads, interviews, TV features — and all three blooper reels.
And David, who I have never met, was willing to mail the tape from Florida to Toronto, and trusted that I would send it back to him. Which, of course, I did, once I digitized all that old VHS goodness. I will post most of that content on this site.
About the bloopers
The blooper reels were not created for public consumption. The producers and editors collated flubbed scenes to show at season-end wrap parties, and the reels were apparently a hit.
But then Gene Roddenberry started screening the goofs at conventions and during his lectures in the 1970s, and reportedly some of the actors were not thrilled about this. Leonard Nimoy in particular. He felt that showing the clips diminished the craft of acting and the dignity of the characters. In a letter to Gene Roddenberry dated July 6, 1676, Nimoy wrote:
You must be aware that I have long held certain, very strong negative feelings about the use of the “blooper reel” in public. I personally expressed those feelings to you a year and a half ago…
My objections to its use are two-fold:
- The artistic question of the characters being exposed in less than an ideal light.
- The unauthorized use of an actor’s work without payment where there is a financial gain involved for the user.
Copies of the reels began to circulate, however, and became a standard feature of conventions in the 1970s and 1980s. Typically, though, fans like me who packed con screening rooms typically saw footage only from seasons one and two. Season three was rarely shown.
It’s also interesting to note that there are no official or authoritative versions of the bloopers. A quick look at YouTube shows different edits and even different clips.
On with the show
Here then are the doors that didn’t open, the words that got mixed up, and at least one wardrobe malfunction.
Season one
Season two
Season three
At time of writing, the video above is the only season three reel online. It was on YouTube but the service removed it for unspecified copyright reasons, so now it only exists on this site.
Thank you, David, for trusting me with your tape and for sharing this content with us. More videos are coming.
-
The script said Lincoln bounced down the cliff. Matt Jefferies was all in
Abraham Lincoln’s death at the hands of the evil faction in The Savage Curtain was a little uninspired: he was stabbed with a spear after a somewhat noisy attempt to rescue Surak.
An early draft of the script also featured his death, but it was a far more dramatic demise: Lincoln was hurled from a cliff, and the audience saw his broken and bloodied body on the ground. Which meant that, at work one day, it fell to Matt Jefferies to envision that fatal plunge.
And I imagine the Art Director enjoyed the challenge, as the script said it was not enough that the poor president drop straight to his death: he was sent “bouncing down the rock slope.” So Jefferies had Lincoln bang into an outcropping on the way down and only then hit the ground.
I am sure the NBC Standards and Practices folks would have objected to that spectacle.
Also, Surak was Lvak
Another interesting piece of trivia from the first draft: the greatest of all who ever lived on Vulcan was originally called Lvak.
This was changed to Surak after the good people at de Forest Research, who checked all the TOS scripts, pointed out that the original moniker broke the Vulcan naming convention. In a memo dated December 3, 1968, they wrote:
…during three seasons, the precedent has been established of giving male Vulcans names beginning with the letter “S.” E.G.s: Spock, Sarek, Stonn, etc. To conform, suggest: Savak, Solak, Surak…
I think the producers picked the best of the three de Forest suggestions.
-
Prevent a robot uprising with Peter Pan
The third Peter Pan comic and record set in my collection is The Robot Masters — and it’s a hit-and-miss outing. The Romulans are hilariously wrong and Uhura finally looks more like herself, but there are also weird oversights in the artwork and the story is really predictable, even for its intended kid audience.
Unlike the first two Peter Pan sets I covered (which you can experience here and here), this one contains only one story. The audio comes on a 45-RPM record and is accompanied by a standard-sized comic.
The tale centres on missing robots. Someone has been stealing robots in this area of space for almost a year and Mr. Scott angrily informs Captain Kirk that he placed an order two months ago but his “little friends” have disappeared. Scotty is really, really fed up. Humourously so, all through the story.
The plot follows Kirk, Spock, Chekov and a new guy named Tanka as they track down the scoundrels who have been grabbing the robots. I won’t spoil the rest of the story. Enjoy it for yourself; hit play and flip through the comic.
Side one
Side two This issue offers some weird lapses in illustration and storytelling. The tale opens with Kirk sitting in his captain’s chair on the bridge, and Uhura then calls Kirk from the bridge — and asks him to report to the bridge.
Kirk is told about the robot problem and immediately says finding an answer is “Why I’ve called a meeting” — but he’s still sitting on the bridge, just continuing the conversation. In both cases, it seems Peter Pan couldn’t be bothered to come up with new settings to draw.
Then there are two writing issues. The story is about Romulans but at one point Chekov exclaims “Only the Klingons would have the gall to make a robot attack army…” and Kirk replies “Yes, Mr. Chekov, curse those Romulans!” The mix-up is in both the audio and the comic, so it must have been in the script and no one caught it.
Similarly, at the end, Scotty brings the robot leader to the bridge to meet Spock, but the first officer was in the group that first found the robots. The leader already knows him.
Still, the artwork is fun even if the Enterprise is sometimes missing bits, the Romulans are enjoyably ridiculous, and it’s nice to see Uhura look a lot like Uhura. The rest can be forgiven. Maybe kids who got this in 1979 didn’t care about any of the odd bits.
-
How fast is warp three?
The specifics of warp speed are never discussed on screen in the original series. We know that warp five is faster than warp four and that the Enterprise usually sticks to the lower end of the speedometer, even when time is short; consider Captain Kirk’s order from The Squire of Gothos: “Ahead warp factor three, Mister Sulu. Colony Beta Six wants their supplies. Let’s get across this void in a hurry.”
Other than that, we can’t make canonical statements about how fast each warp factor is. But we can cite the next-best thing: the TOS show bible and The Making of Star Trek, both written or approved by Gene Roddenberry. Those sources do specify speeds but they also contain what can only be a typo on warp factor three.
The show’s bible, third revision, has this to say about warp speed:
So warp factor one is the speed of light: 186,000 miles or 300,000 kilometres per second. Warp two is eight times the speed of light, and warp four is sixty-four times. That makes the formula speed = wf3 x c, where wf is warp factor and c is the speed of light.
Warp Multiple of c 1 1 2 8 3 27 4 64 5 125 6 216 7 343 8 512 9 729 But that means the show bible got warp three wrong. It should be 27c, not 24. That error also appears in The Making of Star Trek, by Stephen E. Whitfield. On page 191, Whitfield had the following, copying his numbers and some of the language from the show bible.
…greater problems result when it becomes necessary to express a speed many times faster than the speed of light. STAR TREK dialogue solves the problem by measuring all faster-than-light speeds in terms of “Warp Factors.” Warp Factor One is the speed of light. Warp Factor Three is 24 times the speed of light. Maximum safe cruising speed of the Enterprise is Warp Factor Six, or 216 times the speed of light. At Warp Factor Eight (512 times the speed of light) the ship’s structure begins to show considerable strain… Warp Factor Six is therefore exceeded only in instances of extreme emergency.
My often-read 4th, 6th and 22nd printings. The formula was changed for The Next Generation. The Star Trek Encyclopedia by Mike and Denise Okuda has a good explanation of the TNG math but, as this is a TOS blog, I won’t go into it here.
It’s interesting to note that Fotonovel 11, The Deadly Years, states correctly that warp 8 is 512 times the speed of light. Those books were gems when they were published almost 50 years ago and still are today.
Postcript
While Kirk typically kept his ship to the slower warp speeds, Captain Pike had no such compunction. In The Cage, he casually ordered Tyler to take the Enterprise to warp seven and no one looked surprised.
-
Check out these animated-series mini CDs from two decades ago
I really like the mini CD-ROMs that Rittenhouse Archives produced as box toppers for its 2003 animated-series card set. And I entirely forgot I owned them.
Which is why I say again, if you have a largish collection, go through your storage boxes. You might find collectibles you’ve forgotten about (as I experienced here and here).
A few days ago I went looking for specific copies of Star Trek, The Magazine for an upcoming post, and I came across these five CD-ROMs. I own the base set of the cards plus a number of the chase cards, but the CDs are the fun part, because they were a real value add. Rittenhouse gave collectors AOL Instant Messenger icons, a screen saver, wallpaper, and a video interview with TAS season one associate producer and story editor DC Fontana.
I own the complete set of five CDs; the content is the same on each.
Wallpaper and that interview
Here are the nine wallpaper images Rittenhouse offered.
The pictures are okay, but the company could have been a little more adventurous by including images such as the following. However, it’s important to remember this was 20 years ago, and having even the basic images was cool.
These images from TrekCore The real gem of the CDs is the four-minute interview with Dorothy Fontana. Here it is.
My favourite bit is her statement that “We weren’t doing a cartoon; we were doing Star Trek.”
My understanding is that relatively few collectors own these disks, so hopefully this is a fun visit with a rare collectible.
Postscript
Digging into an old storage box might reveal a collectible you didn’t even know about. Four years ago, I found a Gene Roddenberry autograph.
-
Why did I buy a kids’ colouring and activity book?
Being a collector is often an odd pursuit. You get the high of a great acquisition on one side or the consternation of “Why did I buy this?” on the other. Who among us has not muttered that question the day after a convention?
I recently attended Niagara Falls Comic Con and I didn’t buy much. I picked up three DC comics, leaving me 17 short of owning the complete DC run. (Of the TOS-era, which is all I collect.) I have all the Gold Key and Marvel comics so I am now closing in on completing what I consider the mainstream classic set. And I am getting them the old-fashioned way: by flipping through boxes at cons. No eBay. It’s more fun and I get to chat with comics dealers.
I do own this DVD with PDFs of all the mainstream comics from 1967 to 2022 and it’s great, but I like owning them in paper.
I also bought this.
Why? Three reasons, none of them all that logical. First, I had never seen it — and that is a huge draw for me. There are a bunch of collectibles I don’t want (I am looking at you, Funko Pops) and collectibles I can’t afford but it is rare for me to spot something I have never seen. Reason two: it is unused and in great condition, even though it is 44 years old. Condition is a big factor if you collect vintage toys, trading cards, comics or anything else that was marketed to kids. Third, the dealer was a nice guy and he only wanted $15, which was reasonable.
So, I have reasons, but the item itself is silly. The story is nonsensical and it reads like the publisher cut a bunch of pages to save money.
Read it yourself.
Why is Kirk talking in numbers? Why did Dr. Rycho put some Starfleet personnel in sleeper tubes? Why is McCoy suddenly unconscious on the ground? “This will revive Dr. McCoy,” says Dr. Burton, but how did he get knocked out?
And then I did a bit of research and discovered my guess was correct: the publisher cut pages. My new acquisition is actually a Merrigold Press Design reprint of an earlier Whitman Publishing book, and I learned from this page at Memory Beta that chunks of the original story are missing here, including the bit when Rycho threw knock-out powder at McCoy and Spock, explaining why the doctor was on the ground.
So this is a really lazy product, even for a kids’ activity book. But it has Star Trek on the cover, it’s vintage and in good shape, and the dealer was a nice guy. So now it’s in my collection.
Postscript
And then it got worse. I was on eBay moments after finding that Memory Beta page and I am now the proud owner of the Whitman version as well. It was $19 including shipping and will arrive soon.
Being a collector can be weird.
-
Creating the Star Trek Giant Poster Books
Star Trek would not exist today without the fandom of the 1970s. We would not have 10 follow-on shows and 13 movies and countless books and tons of merch had the original series faded away once the sets were torn down in 1969.
The fans kept it alive by watching reruns, attending conventions and buying any book or magazine with Star Trek on its cover. And the first professionally published Star Trek magazine is arguably also the best: the Star Trek Giant Poster Book.
Many early Trek books and magazines began essentially by accident, and a surprising number of those came out of The Federation Trading Post, a Star Trek store that occupied what is now a high-end bit of real estate in Manhattan in the 1970s. The Star Fleet Medical Reference Manual and two of the best Gold Key Trek comics both originated in that store.
As did the Giant Poster Books. Star Trek production luminary Doug Drexler told me recently he was behind the counter one day in 1976 when a guy from Fiona Press came into the store. Fiona “had a skin magazine, and it was a slick publication.” That magazine was called Club, an American version of the British magazine Men Only.
“He said they had just gotten the rights to do a Star Trek poster book, but they knew nothing about Star Trek. He asked if we knew anyone who could do it, and we said ‘Well, there’s us.’ We had our own photos, we were plugged into the fan base, and Allan Asherman had all kinds of studio transparencies. We used those to make our posters.”
Store staffer Asherman would go on to a lengthy career at DC Comics and as a magazine and book writer; his Star Trek work includes The Star Trek Compendium, The Star Trek Interview Book and The Making of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
A fourth book, detailing unproduced scripts, was printed and two days away from distribution when Gene Roddenberry killed the project because a Hollywood writers’ strike stopped the flow of stories for the second season of The Next Generation, and he needed those older scripts. Asherman told that story on a recent episode of the Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner podcast.
The team assembles
The magazine’s editorial staff in its early days all came from the store: Ron Barlow, Doug Drexler, Allan Asherman, Anthony Fredrickson and Geoffrey Mandel. And the quality of the writing and editing is excellent, especially when you consider these guys were not, at that time, creative professionals.
Ron Barlow (left) and Doug Drexler from All About Star Trek Fan Clubs, December 1976, and the masthead from issue 1 of the Poster Book.
“Geoff Mandel, Allan Asherman, Anthony Fredrickson and I wrote the articles and drew the pictures. There was a small group of fans who knew each other, and stuff would get passed around. Allan…had the most amazing collection of anyone I knew at the time, and the rest of us had been collecting images and interviews, so we had that stuff, plus we had the passion to write about it.”
The team turned out a high-quality issue almost every month. “I used to write down all my thoughts and then I would cut up [the pages] and put this one here and move that one there and then I would tape them together and I’d have an outline,” Drexler said.
The group would change a little over time, with Drexler drifting away after about a year and new people joining.
The publisher of the magazines is listed as Paradise Press, the same company as Fiona Press. I imagine the new name distanced the titles from their progenitor. And the model was obviously a success, as the company went on to produce poster books on Star Wars, Starsky and Hutch, The Black Hole, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Grease, The Great Muppet Caper and many others.
Drexler, however, said even today he can’t assess the magazine’s financial performance. “They sold well enough but there was no way to gather reactions, so I don’t really know.”
Way ahead of their time
But he does know how important those magazines were. “I’ve seen photos from the production of Star Trek: The Motion Picture with Fred Phillips putting make-up on Leonard Nimoy and with our posters on the wall.”
The team spent hours drawing blueprints and analysing scripts and scenes, and “now there are thousands of people doing that but, back then, we were it. That’s why so many people remember our books. They left an impression.
“The Poster Books were way ahead of their time. They were the first professional Star Trek magazines, and they were done by people who knew and loved the show.”
I’ll cover each issue of the magazine. Here is the article on issue one.
Collecting Trek
A TOS collection 40 years in the making
Collecting Trek 