A YouTube video discussing the time between the cancellation of Star Trek and The Motion Picture. It would be an era unimaginable to fans of a just-cancelled franchise today: back then, you either saw the showed when it aired, or you didn’t. Until it hit syndication, there was for all intents and purposes no way for someone to see the show. All you had were your memories, the verbal descriptions from others, the occasional magazine article, and a series of novelizations of the episodes. There was no renting an episode on tape at Blockbuster, no buying the DVD, no streaming it online. A few might have access to crappy films.
And yet… when the first Star Trek Convention was held in 1972, the place was swamped, and attendance only grew from there. It was an analog IRL experience unlike anything possible today. On the one hand it was lean, dark times, with limited resources and opportunities; on the other hand, it led to fandoms and communities of a kind impossible today. There is value in rarity, I suppose. People value that which they have to work for.
A post from a few years ago with a Star trek Convention film shot in 1976.
5 responses to “The “In Between” years of Star Trek”
Star Trek was on pretty constantly on repeats out of New York City, at least from the late 1960s on. Not “syndication” as such, bunch second and third tier stations buying content. If you wanted to watch it, check TV Guide. It was there. I do remember nerds making cassette tapes of the audio over the air… At least hey didn’t have the rabbit ear snow.
Where I grew up, it was Big News in the early 80’s when it was announced that one of the local stations would syndicate Star Trek, which is when I finally got to see the series in whole. I had seen bits of it sometime in the mid seventies, but only a few episodes and I was too young to really get it, though it made an impact on me. I *vaguely* think the 70’s run was on UHF, which never came in all that well, but by the 80’s it hit a network affiliate and you could finally see it clearly. At least as clearly as my little 12-inch CRT TV would allow…
In the market I grew up in, it was hit or miss to get it aired locally in the ’70s, even on UHF. I can recall the frustration of just barely being able to receive it from the next one over. Even if you could, it was often sloppily edited for time. Even when cable came along, the rule about blocking “duplicate” programming from other areas kicked in because it was considered the same show as TNG, but at least by then you could scour the video rental stores for episodes.
I was technically alive during much/most of the show’s first run, but of course too young to have remembered anything, even if my parents had watched it (which I do not know). However, as a young child, I remember watching TOS on Saturday afternoon TV. I was too young to knew what “syndication” was, but it would seem that that was the case somewhere in the early to mid-1970s. If not for that, I would not have cared that Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out, but I remember asking my mom to take me.
Vaguely related: Beverly Hillbillies and Gilligan’s Island were on every day after school, with Gillian ending shortly after my dad got home. My brother often got in trouble because he could see the TV from his chair at the dinner table, and often watched the last few minutes, which was a big “no-no” (and we were too young at the time to wonder why Mom didn’t just turn the TV off).
While in grad school in 1978 at the University of Illinois in Champaign, I seem to remember that Star Trek was broadcast on the local PBS station!