#trek ephemera

[holishkes]

I saw this CD for sale and thought hey, I have a CD drive and a tumblr where I sometimes upload old Trek stuff.

I haven't looked into whether this has been digitised anywhere already, but here it is in any case! I haven't even listened to it yet haha, so please let me know if there are any issues.

This is a CD that was distributed as part of the UK's official Star Trek fanclub in 2000.

When/if I have the time, I might listen and cut out clips I enjoy to post here. In the meantime, please have fun with these files, and please tag me if you do anything with them so I can see/hear!

Track list, back cover image, and download link below the cut.

Tracklist

Introduction (.48): Nicole de Boer welcomes you to Comlink - The official UK STAR TREK Fan Club CD.

Brannon Braga (11.06): Star Trek: Voyager's executive producer talks candidly about the series' sixth season.

Tim Russ (8.14): Tales of logic and what not to do with yoghurt - words of wisdom from Star Trek: Voyager's man of logic.

I,Q (5.06): An exclusive extract from Simon & Schuster's brand new audio novel I,Q, read by John de Lancie.

Nicole de Boer (13.14): The actress remembers her year on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, with stories of beaming down, romance for Ezri and her comm badge moment…

Chase Masterson (9.59): Looking back on life as Leeta with Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's very own Dabo girl.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Cast and Crew (7.24): The cast and crew of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine air their thoughts on the closing of the series.

[thegroovyarchives]

1960's-1980's Star Trek TV Guide advertisements

1. December 2nd-8th, 1967, New England 2. September 26th-October 2nd, 1970, Central VA/North Carolina 3. September 20th-26th, 1969, Northern California 4. August 21st-27th, 1982, Vermont 5. April 1st-7th, 1972, Ohio (via: archive.org/Pinterest)

[misforgotten2]

A book you very likely don’t have on your shelf #574

1978

[spockanalia-archive]

Spockanalia #1: Lettercol

Art by Sherna Comerford

Desilu Productions Inc. 780 North Gower Street Hollywood, California 90038

June 22, 1967

Dear Devra and Sherna:

Thank you very much for your letter which was forwarded to me by Mr. Gene Roddenberry. I am enclosing a biography of Mr. Spock, which I hope will satisfy your needs.

I sincerely hope that your magazine will be a success, and want to thank you very much for your interest in STAR TREK and MR. SPOCK.

Best wishes,

Leonard Nimoy

LN/tv

"Who is Leonard?" – Spock (to Joey Bishop)

Note: With the help and guidance of Open Doors, we digitized the first volume of Spockanalia and imported it to AO3, which you can view here. In order to meet AO3's terms of service, some of the content was edited or removed. The full version of the zine is preserved on this blog. The masterpost is here.

[mitchipedia]

[elancholia]

racoonian soong is building a positronic brain with his clever little handsy wandsies. he is scampering across his laboratory tables to select tools from his tiny toolsbox. he is washing all his little tiny technobabble processor chips in the purest babblingest space brooks.

and the internal review board is hissing at him to git! git outta here you varmint! and his tiny bandit face falls and he packs all the little android parts into a comically oversized bindle and flies his shuttle to the remotest landfill in the interstellar suburb to build. alone. with his tiny clever little hands

[stellar-solar-flare]

hi! saw your reblog about the “fanfics that have a permanent place in your heart” and i’m just curious about what are the fanfics that you keep in YOUR heart. (also sorry if you’ve been asked about your fav fanfics before haha). bc for centuries is certainly one of mine btw!!

Oh no worries, I don't recall being asked this and also I'm always happy to shower my fellow creators with praise they absolutely deserve!

So it's probably no surprise to anyone but the fic (series) that has captivated my heart most is the Star Trek AU by my dear best friend, soul sister, and beta reader StarfleetStgMgr. Her Star and Dove (AO3, Chris Pike/OFC, mostly explicit) is not only the best and most mind-blowing fix it I've ever read but also one of the best romances ever. She's amazing and I have no idea what kind of crossroads demon she bribed to get this good at writing.

She also has multiple amazing Steve Rogers/Reader fics and I recommend all of them but the one that has stayed in my heart most has to be Keeper, (AO3, Explicit) which is a great Halloween read by the way, if anyone is looking for that! It's a story about love, healing, and battles we all fight - and a Reader who takes... quite an interesting job and meets an interesting gentleman. Lots of mythology elements and some horror elements and again, amazing romance.

I love @anika-ann's Steve fics, so again, I'd like to recommend so many, but the ones that I think about on a weekly basis are Anika's takes on Medieval Knight Steve in her two series, In The Name Of Duty and The Witch and Her Knight (both Steve/Reader and ranging from T to Explicit between the fics in series). Anika's Steve characterization is beautiful, and she writes great team dynamics and has a knack for inventing very Avengers-like missions in her non-AU fics! Links lead to AO3 but she's also on tumblr.

I very rarely read Blip/Endgame fics but @darsynia's Ephemera (Steve Rogers/Reader, Explicit)is so absolutely beautiful and even though it's been a long time since I read it the first time, it has stayed in my heart.

Recently, I've been beta reading for my writer friend @wild-typo-turtle - her The Rings Of Power fic Threads (Gil-galad/OFC, Explicit) is incredible and I'm enjoying it tremendously. It has one of the best OFCs I've encountered ever and the romantic soulmate aspect of the Elves is so well done. I haven't watched The Rings Of Power but I love Tolkien and especially The Silmarillion, and it's been wonderful to enjoy this take on the Elvish society and the war against Sauron.

Another recent discovery that I've been enjoying a lot is @steviebbboi's Steve Rogers/OFC longfic Red, (Explicit) which has another awesome OFC character and very well-handled themes of complex emotions and trauma, and a lovely (right now) budding romance.

There are so many amazing fics in the world but I made myself limit to the reply to the ones that have had the most profound effect on me. I have a tag 'Stella Recommends' on my blog, where you can write more of the stuff I've enjoyed! Thank you for the lovely ask.

[pityroadart]

AND NOW TO TOUCH THE MOON'S FORBIDDING FACE

another in my tiny Trek collage series, that I never got around to posting at the time // magazine clippings and various other paper ephemera, on kraft card. the title is from a National Geographic article that I thought would fit the scene

[septembriseur]

Tagged by @aintgonnatakethis

About me

When did you start writing?

Not sure. At the age of ~9 I started writing a terrible epic fantasy novel that basically recapitulated the Terry Brooks and David Eddings series that I was obsessed with at that point. There is (regrettably) evidence of this because my family had a printer that I made copious use of. I started writing X-Files and Star Trek fic before I knew it was something that other people did, around age 11.

Are there different genres or themes you enjoy reading other than the ones you write?

I basically exclusively read crime novels and fic because the sf/f and literary fiction that I encounter is so unappealing almost without exception. And actually I read very little fic because almost all the fic I encounter these days is terrible. I am constantly starving for non-terrible fiction. (Please feel free to recommend some.)

Is there an author you want to emulate, or are compared to often?

I've always been obsessed with Hilary Mantel's prose and used to rip her off often in my sentence structures. But I don't know that there's anyone I look at and think, "I wish I could do that." In terms of fic, Kat Allison was a big influence on me— I read her fic when I was probably 13 or 14 years old and was first starting to develop real ideas about writing, like, "What is this story doing?" Also a Highlander fic called "Heat Goes to Cold," which appears to no longer be on the internet but which introduced fourteen-year-old me to Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, which I still have a great fondness for even though I have (kicking and screaming) outgrown it.

Can you tell me a bit about your writing space?

Right now my biggest problem is that I don't have a writing space and mostly write in coffee shops. My apartment is full of intrusive objects like a work-from-home husband and multiple no-work-from-anywhere rescue dogs, which interfere with thinking. I've just set up (using a room divider) a new attempt at a bedroom office, which is an IKEA table covered in heaps of agates and fossils and ephemera, so we’ll see how that goes.

Did the place(s) you grew up in influence the people and/or places you write about?

Not so much the place I grew up as other places I've lived. I tend to put people in landscapes that I know well and be meticulous in details, which is partly just because I have almost no visual imagination. Northern New Mexico and London are probably the landscapes I feel I know most deeply and find most productive. Thinking about this, it actually seems to be because in both cases my knowledge of the place is very specific and idiosyncratic. My physical knowledge of New Mexico is very linked to nuclear history and fossil hunting, which creates unusual routes and focus. My physical knowledge of London is very linked to mudlarking— the river, the terrain and transit around the river, the material history of the city— and to punk rock, which heavily shaped my husband’s London and therefore (through him) mine.

Are there any reoccurring themes in your writing? If so, do they surprise you?

It's been discussed to death.

Characters

Would you please tell me about your current favorite character?

I think that I'm less interested in specific characters than I am in the potential for characters to be interpreted in unexpected ways. The more generic a fic is in characterization, the less readable I find it. Marvel and (especially) Stargate characters are great for this because there’s so little to them on the page— they exist as a potential for readings, especially critical readings. I see less and less of this in fandom, sadly.

Which of your characters would you be friends with in real life?

Truthfully, I would probably have an easier time being friends with my characters than I do with people in real life. When I look at the characters I write about, they seem to all be veterans, refugees, would-be revolutionaries, and/or people who have had really extreme and unusual experiences that make them outliers. That also describes an awful lot of people I know in real life.

Which characters would you dislike the most of you met them?

Probably Transposition Chloe Armstrong, insofar as a lot of the details of her life are a gentle spoof of people I went to school with at various points.

Do you notice any reoccurring themes/traits in your characters?

I exclusively write about damaged people, pretty much. I guess also maybe see the last question here for more thoughts.

How do you picture your characters?

I have a very poor visual imagination, so I don't really. I have to find photo references, even for original characters. I’ve mentioned before that I have to look up floor plans online in order to figure out spaces in my stories.

My writing

What’s your reason for writing?

I'm good at it— ie I’m able to do what I want to do with it. I'm probably better at it than anything else I do— there are other hobbies I've given up (music) because I know that I will never be as good at them as I want to be. With writing, I feel that I am capable of being good enough.

Is there any specific comment or type of comment from readers that you find particularly motivating?

I probably prefer more neutral comments that engage with the subject matter in depth. I like talking about my stories as a fan rather than an author, I guess. I have a hard time with praise.

What do you feel is your greatest strength as a writer?

Probably my mercilessness in terms of both characters and prose. Secondarily (and relatedly), my intolerance of generic phrasing. If nothing else, I am determined to describe things in a new way.

Have you been told is your greatest strength as a writer is by others?

Its strangeness/unexpectedness. But this has mostly come up in the context of my old original fiction, which is not very good and mostly written to pay bills.

How do you feel about your own writing?

Satisfied— generally. Circa 2019, I’d been writing so much that I really felt like I had an incredible level of technical control over my prose. However, I also had a very shallow understanding of the world and a lack of moral imagination. 2021 onwards really marked the beginning of me developing as a person, ie having a quiet breakdown and having to reconstitute myself. Unfortunately, 2021 also marked the severe limitation of my free time. Now I feel that I am able to write with more insight, but I'm still working on getting back to the same point of skill in my writing.

When you write, are you influenced by what others might enjoy reading, do you write purely for yourself, or is it a mix of both?

Given what I write, it's pretty clear that I mainly write for myself. I think I write to solve arguments for myself— to resolve tension between ideas or principles; to reconcile parts of my character; to understand how to live in the world. That last thing sounds really elevated and pretentious, but I mean it in a pretty down-to-earth way. The last three years completely stripped away what I thought I understood about how to be a person and left me seeking some truth about how a person is supposed to live, day-to-day, in a world that is characterized by such profound injustice. I think that’s the kind of truth that can’t be arrived at except through fiction, because it’s not logical— it has to reconcile fundamentally paradoxical ideas. Is it stupid to suggest that writing, like, pornographic sex scenes is a way of dealing with that? Maybe! But in fact that’s the way I experience it: that everything I write, however silly and trivial, is always also toying with these questions about power and humanity and being in the world, because it can't not be. (And I think that there's probably something really "late settler liberal" about the idea that it's possible to separate the two things— that on the one hand there's entertainment, which is free of these questions, and on the other hand there's real life.)

[edzephyr]

How did you go about finding all the original artwork etc., for your preservation project?

Did you start searching for it and then others started sending you stuff?

When I was just getting into Star Trek I was gifted 3 boxes of fanzines by an ex-convention organizer. I had started to write a book (/extended thesis; the PhD I never did) on Kirk and Spock's characterization and relationship, and as part of my research I realised that a lot of physical fandom history was in danger of disappearing, or already had, as original generation fans were dying and their collections - art, written/publishing materials, and fannish ephemera - was becoming lost (e.g. disposed of by disinterested parties). I saw a lot of art in zines and newsletters and wondered where the original work had all gone. I was gifted the two giant Shelley Butler pieces, that so moved me, that (also as an artist myself) I decided to create the first archive dedicated to Kirk and Spock (and the Enterprise) that prioritized collecting, preserving and sharing original art pieces related to them. Shelley, for example, does not know where most of her originals are now. It would be great to find more of hers, and provide her with scans.

The biggest challenge is when collections including art and fanworks pop up that have come from estate sales and third parties try to cash in; finding funds and negotiating is tricky, and I am glad of the team stateside who help with that in the immediate term. It leaves the challenge of fundraising to cover these costs. Unfortunately my industry is fickle and terrifically difficult to tame, and my income is not a lot to write home about. It would be much easier if I were doing the work I'm capable of, and earning accordingly!

I make it a point to support fellow artists whenever I can, and so the collection is a mixture of contemporary and vintage. Every artists' take has a story to tell. There is also some official and production related art but it is not easy to find, nor often affordable. I missed a TMP concept sketch of Spock on Vulcan due to hesitating over cost, and regret that greatly. There is a set of TAS animation cels to share that was offered at modest cost by a friendly trader at my local comic con, and this is a terrific piece, but requires a custom display that has not yet been addressed (time and cost).

I do wish more vintage pieces would come out of the woodwork and simply land on the doorstep, so to speak, but it's not an expectation; it's a lucky and generous thing if it happens, and always so encouraging. I have also acquired art from other fandoms and gifted that to appropriate fans/archivists - it all works best by supporting each others' efforts.

[adultswim2021]

Robot Chicken #44: “Rabbits on a Roller Coaster” | August 26, 2007 - 11:30PM | S03E3

“The Worst Halloween” is about a boy who gets stuck with a Pink Power Ranger costume on Halloween. He has a bad night, including an almost-rape and finding out that his mom died. Seth called this one one of his favorite sketches. The writer of the sketch said he wrote it without any idea of where it was going and that “it shows”. I agree. Not particularly funny!

I don’t normally highlight quick channel change gags unless they actually make me laugh BUT the Judge banging a gavel only to have his bench turn into a Wack-A-Mole game honestly did make me laugh. The animation is great, and the gag worked for me. Sorry.

“Turbo Teen” is a parody of a relatively obscure Saturday Morning show of the same name where a teenager can turn into a car. In this one he’s drunk leaving a college party. When he becomes a car, a number of terrible things happen to him until he’s crushed into a cube. He changes back briefly and we see him now dismembered and mangled. For some reason I remember seeing this sketch randomly. Like the little bit where he’s in that abstract void writhing around was in my brain already. Most sketches on this show are just “character gets hurt over and over” and this is one of those.

“Dick Tracy’s a Dick” is about Dick Tracy off-handedly giving mean-spirited nicknames to his fellow police officers who didn’t ask for them. Honestly, this is a pretty funny premise. I should’ve guessed the punchline of the sketch before it happened, but this show has a way of lulling me into assuming nothing on it will make me laugh. I actually laughed at this sketch. I laughed twice at this episode. WOW. Not sure how it stacks up to Tracey Zooms In. 

“Trakker in Love” is the finale, and it’s over three minutes long. It feels more like two sketches jammed together, starting with a sequence where a younger character (I didn’t watch M.A.S.K. as a kid, sorry) is getting in trouble for having thrown a party there the previous night. The next scene feels like the beginning of a new sketch, involving one of the members of M.A.S.K. internet dating a fat woman. This one really sucks, and doesn’t seem to have much of a central idea. It feels ridiculous to say this about a show I’ve gone on the record of not liking very much, but it truly drags the episode down. 

After the credits is a parody of Joss Wheadon’s ��Mutant Enemy Productions” vanity card. I remember seeing the “Mutant Enemy Productions" logo before, but I don’t remember why or where. I’m guessing one of his shows aired before something else I liked? Anyway, its not all that funny, just sorta relies on knowing the reference.

And that’s this one. Whew! Nasty show!

EPHEMERA CORNER

These commercials are from earlier in August, but it’s been a while since I linked to a random youtube:

MAIL BAG

I keep forgetting to address my precious mail baggers. I am so sorry. I cherish you all.

please do a top 10 for saul of the molemen!

Literally impossible. No way.

“Wildly unfunny” I bet you one of them yank fellas that just can’t understand the intricacies of Georgian life. I wish I could help you enjoy squidbillies, but the fact is you’re too much a dumsumbitch.

What is this even quoting? I literally searched all of my Squidbillies posts for the phrase “wildly unfunny” and it the only thing that came up was I said it in a Mail Bag referring to Minoriteam. Shut up please! I even *sorta* like Squidbillies

Is that the same comic con where you filmed yourself calling the aliens from Star Trek "f*ggots" because they were doing a Q&A?

This is in reference to my post about Tim & Eric Awesomecon/Comic-con 2007. No. How dare you. First of all, that wasn’t me. Second of all, that was at Great America theme park. GET YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT

[holishkes]

From Star Trek Monthly magazine June 1996: Harry Kim in the simulation in The Thaw

[lady-phasma]

Seeing as great shows are being cancelled right and left, I often wonder if DW is really so good that it is being supported? Or it is just an old useless relict that is continued from pity and nostalgia of its fans?

This is a fascinating question and requires a long answer. Thank you, anon! I truly love these kinds of questions.

First, I'm not going to grant the premises that the opposite of "so good" is "old, useless relic" nor that relics or nostalgia require pity to be enjoyed. Also a note on 'relic': it means an object that is sacred to a religion, usually a body part of a holy person or ephemera from that person's life, it has evolved to also have a pejorative meaning that something is outdated and obsolete. I mention this because I think it's an interesting word choice and it will be relevant in a moment.

Secondly, there are a few assumptions in these questions that I think will make the answer very subjective and incomplete: the assumption that the cancellation of "great shows" is ubiquitous in the entertainment industry and not specific to a few tv channels and streaming services, the assumption that quality has more to do with cancellations than revenue, and the assumption that "useless" is an antonym for "entertaining."

So my answer is yes, all of the above. The full answer is below the break.

I warned you that this wouldn't be short. I am not British and I don't work for the BBC so I cannot isolate any recently cancelled BBC series with which to compare Doctor Who. I don't want to compare HBO's (parent company Discovery) recent cancellations of series like Westworld with DW because the choices Discovery is making are confusing and seemingly random at this point. Additionally, DW was cancelled in 1989. New Who (NuWho) is the colloquialism for the reboot of the series in 2005. DW originally aired in 1963 and was a staple of British television for more than 30 years. The reboot was definitely a result of nostalgia as filmmakers and creators who grew up with the Doctor came of age. So, yes, a part of NuWho is always going to be nostalgia (even the visual effects which I won't go into here).

Now for the pejoratives "relic" and "pity." In film studies we are taught that there can be a barren wasteland between a film/series that is considered Film (capital F) for it's formal qualities (see my other posts on film studies or send me an ask if that interests you) and a film/series that is purely entertaining. I'm not going to use opinion words such as good or bad because those are quite meaningless in film studies. However, anon asked about great or useless, and unintentionally pointed out a paradox in art history: much of what is great art is entirely useless. Is honoring a relic useless? In most religions which have relics, they are venerated and displayed in grand reliquaries. Does this performance and display give something back to the participant, some spiritual component? Yes and it does not detract from the beauty or "greatness" of the object. In this sense a relic would be great and useful. If we assume that Doctor Who is nostalgic for its creators/viewers then perhaps we can also assume that viewing it as a relic can provide an insight into the comfort it gives. NuWho follows the tradition of the first run as a family friendly comedy with very serious moments and lessons. I have discussed before how "our doctor" can be an emotional attachment. Similarly, DW provides a comfort for viewers in new episodes with a familiar style as well as in the rewatching of favorite episodes. Do the silliness or the odd visual effects make DW any less "great" than other series? It would seem that anon thinks so but I'm not sure. I don't have enough space to discuss "greatness" here.

Lastly, I will correlate Doctor Who with Star Trek as it is the closest in length and nostalgia across the pond. Star Trek began in 1966 and, in some incarnation or other, is still on the air. I chose this series not just for longevity but it has a global fan base, requires interesting (and innovative) visual effects, and is technically a relic based on anon's question. Trekkies would never be accused of having pity for Star Trek. Whovians do not have pity for Doctor Who. More casual fans from each fandom may also feel the same nostalgia but perhaps only watch either series because of nostalgia. So how would either relic continue to stay on the air if the only motivation were pity, how would that be viable? It wouldn't. Money keeps most series in production.

BBC doesn't release much of its revenue information based on individual series but when the DW 50th Anniversary Special went to theaters in 2013 we got a glimpse of how much money this series earns. "For the year ending in March [2013], U.S. revenues [for the BBC] reached $550 million, a significant portion of its $1.8 billion in global annual sales." (source) That was 10 years ago. Star Trek, continuing the comparison, also includes box office numbers in revenue and has many feature length films in its universe so the number is difficult to pinpoint. However, in 2013 Star Trek was included in a report of entertainment properties that surpassed $100 million in licensed merchandise sales alone (source). That year CBS (owner of Star Trek) reported $124 million in revenue. This does not include any box office revenue from Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013) or ad revenue from the on-air series. Worldwide, Into Darkness earned approximately $467 million that year (source), the highest grossing film of the entire franchise.

I hate maths but here's your answer anon: in 2013 BBC reported $1.8 billion in global sales, not all because of Doctor Who of course, but the box office alone of the 50th Anniversary Special's first weekend was around $10 million and for some perspective it only ran in about 650 theaters in the US, it is a tv show after all and many people watched from home (source). So let's use the definitive number of $550 million for the BBC in the US alone from 2013 and compare that to the Star Trek film release of the same year and total licensed merchandise sales - $591 million. Those numbers are remarkably close. (And I would like to add that was a good year for casting as well - Matt Smith, David Tennant, and John Hurt in the 50th and Benedict Cumberbatch, Chris Pine, and Zoe Saldaña in Into Darkness.) Using an online inflation calculator $591 million in 2013 would be around $755 million in 2022.

tl;dr - Nostalgia is revenue not pity.

[misforgotten2]

Winkie?

A book you very likely don’t have on your shelf #541

1978

[spockanalia-archive]

Spockanalia #1: Postscript

By Devra Michele Langsam and Sherna Comerford

Art by Devra Michele Langsam

You are receiving SPOCKANALIA because:

☐ You contributed

☐ You helped

☐ You encouraged

☐ You are in Spock Shock

☐ You paid cash

☐ You are mentioned

☐ We thought you might be interested

☐ We would like to exchange

☐ You deserve one after listening to us talk about it all these months

☐ We admire you

☐ You are Isaac Asimov

☐ You are totally illogical

☐ You might contribute if we're insane enough to try this again

☐ You tell us

Note: With the help and guidance of Open Doors, we digitized the first volume of Spockanalia and imported it to AO3, which you can view here. In order to meet AO3's terms of service, some of the content was edited or removed. The full version of the zine is preserved on this blog. The masterpost is here.

[mitchipedia]