A Follow-up To My Star Trek Audio Recording Post

[morgandawn]

My earlier post about  Star Trek audio recordings is here. Today, I came across this essay written by Lillian Stewart Carl in which she talks about her friendship with Lois Bujold, their love of Star Trek and the Star Trek fanzine they wrote and published (one of the earliest media fanzines). I am only quoting the section about the audio recordings, but the entire essay is worth a read:

"Then, one fall, I returned home from a vacation to find Lois enthusing over a new television program, one that linked naturally into her years of reading science fiction.

I watched Star Trek. I fell for it too. Spock made intelligence classy. He was so cool, so—unattainable. Unlike Kirk, who was incessantly Available. And there were women on the Enterprise. They wore miniskirts and said, “Hailing frequencies open,” and “Captain, I'm scared”, but they were female nonetheless.

Every Thursday evening during our senior year found us sitting in front of Lois's television (she had the color set) watching Star Trek.We suborned other friends into joining us. We rigged up Lois's father's reel-to-reel tape recorder and recorded each episode—audio only, the concept of the VCR being science fiction itself.

The tape would pick up the sound of the telephone ringing in the background, chairs scooting, popcorn crunching. And during the previews to the episode This Side of Paradise, it recorded half-a-dozen female squeals as Spock actually (be still, my teenage hormones) smiled!

I wish we still had the tape which immortalized her mother's voice saying, “You girls are going to be so embarrassed when you grow up and remember how you acted over this program.”

....

Our graduation from high school took place on a Thursday night, forcing us to miss the episode Shore Leave. Strangely, our families refused to attend the ceremonies without us. The younger sister of a friend was deputized to do the taping and fill in the video portion with gestures and expressions.

The next fall I went away to college, in a town that had only two television stations, neither of which showed Star Trek. Lots transcribed the episode Amok Time, including the stage directions (“bowl of soup flies across passageway”) and sent it to me. My roommate sniffed and said I was psychologically abnormal. But another friend gave me a poster of Spock."

Comments

[kass]

Oh, this is so wonderful. Thank you!

[talitha78]

So much love for these stories! Thank you.

[green]

<33333

[gattagrigia]

I remember those days when Star Trek was new, except I was alone in my 16yo obsession. I taped episodes, I wrote screenplays then acted them out. OK, I was always cast as the heroine who saves Spock, then dies of course. (The girl always dies!)