Little Golden gems for Star Trek lovers

 

Little Golden Books featuring Star Trek: The Original Series?

That has to be the absolute coolest find this Trekkie has encountered in a very long time.

They are not rare, they are not expensive but they are absolutely awesome. And the artwork by Ethen Beavers is the best new presentation of the original Enterprise and the TOS crew that I have seen an a long long time.

The first three -- Too Many Tribbles, I Am Captain Kirk, and I am Mr. Spock -- came out in 2019 but the fourth, and best -- Star Trek Alphabet Book -- is as recent as 2020. I don't know if they intend to bring out more but I sincerely hope so.

My favourite is the Alphabet Book for a variety of reasons. First, since it covers the 26 letters of the alphabet, it offers a much wider variety of images than do the other books.

And, as the images on the cover suggest, it includes all of the Star Trek series -- see Kirk, Janeway and Sisko hanging out together on that planet?

It also features a wide variety of aliens, including Andorians, Gorn, Ferengi and Borg, and all three major versions of the Enterprise (the original warp-five ship, the TOS original Enterprise and even the Enterprise C).

Written by Dennis R. Shealy, Alphabet Book makes some interesting decisions as to what Star Trek option it is going to feature for each letter.

"J" is for Janeway, captured holding her trademark coffee, and "K" is for Kirk, who is shown battling a many limbed alien. But "A" is not for Archer, but for Aliens. And "P" is for Phaser, not Picard, while "S" is not for "Sisko" or "Spock" but for "Starfleet Academy" instead. Hmmm.... I like these decisions. They made me laugh out loud.

Now, "N" is for Number One so Riker gets hit say in the sun and Spock gets a two-page spread, representing both "L", which is for Live Long and Prosper, and "M", which is for the Mirror Universe.

"O" stands for Odo, for the DS9 fans. And "Q" stands for the Q, which gives us our one opportunity to see Picard in the pictures while, in case you were worried about the Enterprise series, X is for Xindi.

"U" is for Uhura, another fantastic decision with a great image.

And guess what "Z" is? Zetaran! Yes, indeed. Shealy's fandom takes him all the way to a minor third season TOS episode called "Lights of Zetar"!

I love these books. And the price ($6.99 Canadian each) is absolutely right.

I just hope they pick up on the idea of adapting episodes into children's stories that is set in Too Many Tribbles -- if they wanted to follow up on it, that would give them hundreds of more book ideas -- and I would have to have an all-new custom book shelf made.

Star Trek TOS got good very quickly

 It is remarkable how quickly some of the most iconic tropes of TOS were established:

1. Spock and McCoy begin their bickering as early as "The Man Trap" and even more for in "Charlie X"; note, "The Man Trap" was the first episode broadcast, the third (after "The Cage" and "Where No Man Has Gone Before") episode filmed;

2. Nurse Chapel's love for Spock is established in "The Naked Time", the fifth episode broadcast;

3. The struggle between Spock's Human and Vulcan halves is established in that same episode.

And the leap from the technology shown in the two pilot episodes ("Where No Man" and "The Cage") and the later show (starting with "The Man Trap") is remarkable. The pilots require the relocation of the ship's phasers to the planet's surface to hit a small target, for example, and the ship's sensors are very confined (a single beam that has to be aimed, versus a continuous three-sixty sweep) as well.

What is remarkable is the quality of those early episodes, both dramatically and technically. If you can get past the cheesiness of the Salt Vampire in "The Man Trap", these are all exceptional dramatic episodes of television. The tension between Spock's cold and logical approach to the superpowers building in "Where No Man" and Kirk and McCoy's more human response is especially effective, while the moment in "Charlie X" where the senior crew recognize that the ship is in the hands of an adolescent with god-like powers is also remarkable.

Interestingly, "Where No Man" and "Charlie X" are basically the same story - how does the crew of the Enterprise deal with an entity that possesses god-like powers and no understanding of/regard for the needs, the lives of the people around him.

I have not watched these early episodes, in their entirety, for more than a decade and I had forgotten how exceptional they really are.

It's time to get back to TOS' IDIC principles in Star Trek

I am getting back to the basics -- the Star Trek basics, that is -- by re-investing myself in The Original Series (TOS) and that most fascinating of periods, the 10-year period that stretches from the cancellation of TOS in 1969 to the release of The Motion Picture (TMP) in 1979.

I started by reading the book by Herb Solow and Robert Justman, followed that with the Stephen Whitfield book, The Making of Star Trek, and now Star Trek Lives, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak and Joan Winston.

To accompany that reading, I have been scouring the internet (mostly Youtube) for video materials related to that era. It's amazing what is now available: I have found footage from the first several Star Trek conventions in the early 1970s, promotional/bonus material from early Star Trek videos of TMP and numerous television interviews with members of the TOS cast and production team from the 1970s.

I have also started watching the episodes again on Netflix (I have them all on DVD but it is just easier to watch them through the streaming service), beginning with the original pilot, "The Cage".

The books I have read before and, of course, I have watched the episodes numerous times over the past fifty years. But the online videos that are now available are, to be frank, remarkable.

I hope to get back to blogging in a serious way about this "research" but I wanted to post an initial comment now, in light of recent events in the United States (including the Trump inspired attempted coup in Washington that happened the day before I write this) and the worrisome directions we have seen the most recent iterations of the Star Trek Franchise take in the past several years.

What I find most remarkable about TOS and the decade that followed it is the focus on diversity and inclusion that permeates the episodes (even if it now seems rather clumsy fifty years later on), the literature that studied Star Trek and its increasing fandom, and the consciousness of its fans, its followers and its cast and crew during that decade.

It is clear that what engendered the explosion of love for and commitment to Star Trek in the 1970s was that focus -- as best encapsulated in the IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations) philosophy that Spock introduces in later episodes of the series.

Star Trek thrived because it put forth the basic principle that, if humankind is to survive into the 23rd Century, it would have to set aside its focus on minor differences in race, religion, gender identity, religion, sexuality, physical and mental "ability", and celebrate those differences, work together to meet the challenges to come, celebrate IDIC. And because it implied, by the very existence of a Federation in the 23rd Century with humans at its centre, that humankind could and would succeed in that seemingly impossible, but absolutely necessary, exercise.

My online research has so far focused, at least in so far as tracking down 1970s era interviews, on William Shatner. Over the decades, we seem to have focused on some of Shatner's less attractive attributes, permitting ourselves to be convinced that he was something of a ham as an actor, that he was jealous of his co-stars and greedy for the spotlight, that he has become pompous and self-absorbed, but the Shatner we see in those 1970s-era interviews is none of those things.

He is intelligent, funny, charming and thoughtful. He clearly takes his craft seriously and, remarkably, he displays a deep understanding of the impact Star Trek had on its growing fan base and on society itself. He talks about feminism, about racial inclusion, about questions of sexuality and gender, intelligently and thoughtfully. He talks to those fans in respectful and in many instances loving ways.

I am writing all this because Shatner's "presence" in these interviews surprised me. Like so many other people, I had learned over the years to take Leonard Nimoy seriously and to see Shatner as something less. So when I watched interview after interview where Shatner shatters that image, I was completely taken aback and a bit ashamed.

But I also gained a significant amount of respect both for Shatner and for the depth to which he (and his castmates and the TOS creative team) understood and respected IDIC principles upon which TOS was based and that were so cherished by the growing fandom, assuring the rebirth and survival of Star Trek as a cultural phenomenon.

I think we, as a society, need TOS' commitment to IDIC principles more now than we did even in the late 1960s and 1970s. I think we need a vision of hope for the future of the human race that is founded on the understanding that, if we are to survive and thrive, we must do so together, by celebrating difference rather than letting it divide and defeat us.

Recent Star Trek series, like Picard and Discovery, have strayed much too far from these original principles, have instead implied that the differences that divide us today will continue into the future, exacerbated perhaps by the introduction of the vast array of non-human lifeforms we can expect to encounter.