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I bought every single one of these. I kept them until I retired the VHS player about five years ago.
I totally had these. Not all of them, because I was in high school and didn’t have a lot of money, but all of my favorites for sure.
I loved Star Trek from a tiny age, because when I was small, PBS used to run the series, and my mom was a total sci-fi/fantasy nut who made sure we were exposed to all the important things in life. But mostly I kept catching the same episodes over and over again.
So I first really saw the original series around the age of 12, via a friend’s VHS bootlegs, handed to me in a big honking paper grocery bag. That was glorious because I got to binge-watch the whole series in one go (minus “Miri” and…two others I can’t remember because one tape was corrupted)–a rare opportunity around 1990. This was much to the disgust of my sister, who got inundated with Star Trek for two weeks straight whether she liked it or not (mostly she didn’t, as she got bored easily).
Eventually I had to give the bootlegs back. But a few years later, to my great glee, SciFi and then PBS picked up the series and began running it again.
These days, I can watch it whenever I want, through the power of the Internet. It’s weird now to think that there was a time when I couldn’t, when we were at the mercy of the television networks for a dose of our favorite shows or a chance to discover old ones from before our time. PBS kept a few of the greats alive, but shows like Red Dwarf, Battlestar Galactica and The Prisoner were, for many, legends passed down from one generation of geeks to another. (The SciFi Channel eventually came to suck, but we owe it a great debt of gratitude for bringing many great shows back to the public consciousness.)
I owned a lot of Star Trek books in those days. Some were better than others, but it was a way to be able to revisit the world and characters anytime I liked. (And, in the way of fanfiction, to delve deeper into their minds and universe.) Through several moves and space-clearings, only my favorites have stayed with me, but I even look back on the kinda terrible ones with nostalgic fondness.
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