(Click on images for a much bigger version!)
Please note that the first article below was written by Doug Drexler, who went on to actually contribute much to Star Trek in the later series and films!
Below is the back cover, with a thumbnail of the inside poster and a preview of next issue. Due to the size of the poster, I'm not scanning it here; too much wear and tear on the copy. The ads for the Tech Manual and Blueprints also are neat to see again. Do you know the answer to the trivia quiz questions?
Update: Doug Drexler commented this when I posted the link on his blog: "Fred! That’s a real blast from the past! Thanks for linking that! That was during the Trading Post days. BTW, LOVE your blog!" Thanks, Doug! That means a lot coming from you.
I have a funny memory of the time I bought this issue. We had just moved from Ft. Lauderdale, FL to the little "town" of Gray, GA and it was very discouraging to me to go from such a great place to find Trek material to a Trek desert out in the country. But I traveled to nearby Macon (my hometown) for a job and I would stop at the drugstore on the way home the day of the week that the new magazines came in. I was 17 at the time, still living at home, and many of my regular readers know of my domineering stepdad, who hated Trek for my sake. I had to sneak in everything I bought and then when I went to spend the weekend at my Grandma's house, I would take my new items over there for safekeeping. To get this magazine in, I used a slick trick; earlier, I had slit the screen in my bedroom window right along the bottom where it wouldn't show. I then cracked the window some and left it that way. When I got home, I came by the window, slipped the magazine up inside it under the pane, then went in the front door. When I went to my room, I opened the curtain and pulled the magazine in through the split in the screen. Another contraband item successfully smuggled in!
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13 comments:
I hope you can put all the inside pages of the magazine.
Thanks for commenting! All of the pages are posted here in this issue, and I do plan on posting all the inside pages of the other ones as I do them. Because of the newspaper-like format of the mag, which opened up larger every time you unfolded it, there are only three articles per issue; but granted, large articles. I have to scan them in by sections and the photoshop them back together.
Heop you enjoy them all!
1978 was a great Trek year for me. We moved to Orlando Florida and Trek was on the Orlando and Tampa stations so we got two episodes every weekday.
What was also cool was the Florida stations edited the episodes for time in different places so each episode had extra new scenes.
JM,
When I was living in Ft. Lauderdale, catching the show at 4 PM each weekday, I was seeing most of the episodes for the first time. I taped them on cassette, and listened back to them endlessly. I knew the stories from the Blish books, but only just then seeing them. What a time! I loved Fl.
I saved my complete Poster Book collection too, and scanned them all for safekeeping and digital preservation. Children of the Internet era will never appreciate how important and valuable these things were. - JohnG7
Today, with all 79 unedited hi-def episodes on blu-ray, I sometimes get a kick thinking how far we've come. I used to stack books in front of our console TV's speaker and set up the mike of my $20 cassette recorder to capture a crude audio record of the episodes, which were of course edited. I must admit this method gave my collection a certain "character". A key bridge scene would incorporate the sound of our telephone ringing or the clatter of dishes from our kitchen.
A VCR would have cost maybe $1500 back then, and I had never even seen one!
Brilliant! thanks for putting these up. 78 was a strange year for me, but I remember watching TOS every night on the local syndication station in St. Louis.
I didn't get to see these poster books until much later.
Panickyguy,
I too had to put up with stray home sounds intruding on my all-important recordings. I enventually moved from taping from TV when I got a radio that could pick up local TV channels also. I plugged my Radio shack cassette deck into the radio earphone jack, and was able to make much better quality tapes with no external sound.
Wow this brings back memories. I recall as a kid buying a few of these. I pinned a few up on my huge bulletin board. What a ST geek I was. ;) I think I gave them away or they disappeared into the mists of time as I got older/moved, etc. I do recall a STAR TREK time line in one issue. I don't think it has been followed very well through the years though.;)LOL. Man I love the Internet.
Funny all of us taping the episodes on TV as kids. I even played some tapes with those ST Photo novels which I still have to this day. The novels not the tapes. My one brother and I tried to go a step further by taking bits of audio from actual episodes and making a brand new audio episode with us in it. Funny how as a kid you try to be so ambitious. But then look at ST fan films of today so some of those kids kept their ambition.;)
But hey kids these days do have it so easy. They don't even need DVDs you can watch STAR TREK on line 24/7. It is wild how fast technology has changed the way we all live.
Rick,
Again, how funny we did a lot of the same things! I remember listening to my tape of "Where No Man Has Gone Before" while I read along with it in the fotonovel. It was the closest I could come to having the episode to watch.
And, some friends and I also took music and sound effects from the cassette tapes and used them to make our own adventures. Once we mixed our voices with the effects, we would play it back and act it out! I still have a few of these tapes. I also took clips from the record by Roddenberry where he interviewed various stars, and put myself as the interviewer, and made a mock radio program, with the station call letters as "WUFP." I listened back to that tape not too long ago and it actually sounded like I was talking back and forth to Deforest Kelley. Years later I went into radio for real.
Fun memories!
Funny how we tried to make our own.
Yep, these were INCREDIBLE in their day.. I actually just brought one over with me here in Kuwait to hang up (still deployed..). Frederick, THANKS for sharing about your stepdad.. Mine was nearly as bad, we didn't get along all that smoothly as a kid.
He never liked Star Trek, but did compliment me once on my modeling skills for the Galileo. I nearly died..!?! But 'course he's the SAME guy who actually taped 3yrs of Next Gen for me and sent them over to me back when I was stationed in Germany in the early 90s. He didn't just set the VCR to record.. He actually STAYED up until 10:30pm each week and taped them LIVE, so I'd have the best quality recording. THAT was super cool of him.. GREAT blog, David B.
David,
Thanks for commenting, and thanks for serving your country over there! We appreciate it. Glad you are enjoying the blog, and hope it brings back good memories.
Sounds like your relationship with your stepdad ijmproved a lot; sometimes they just have to "grow up," don't they? I had t ohide my models at my grandma's because they would never have gotten me a compliment, only a criticism about being immature. And it would have been unthinkable for him to actually help me get something like yours did with taping the show; so it sounds like it turned out well!
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