Where's Captain Kurt? Early encounters with Star Trek

Star Trek celebrates its 50^th anniversary this year: indeed, Captain Kirk and Mr. Sulu beamed down to the NEC last weekend as part of a celebratory event (I wasn’t there). All well and good, if you live in the USA. But here in Britain, the Star Trek phenomenon is a mere 47 years young. The series was already cancelled and sold into an afterlife of syndication by the time it made its debut on BBC1 in the summer of 1969.

The first installment of Star Trek in the Joe 90 comic (image borrowed from the excellent 'Blimey…' blog by Lew Stringer… well, it saves me from doing an identical scan from my own copy!)

But I knew about Star Trek already. I’d known about it for seven months, in fact, and had been eagerly awaiting its arrival. My first encounter with the series was in comic strip form, as the impressive centrespread of the Joe 90 comic, launched in January 1969 as a companion paper to TV21. I was immediately intrigued, and, more than anything else, impressed by the design of the Enterprise, which was like no other fictional space vehicle I’d ever seen. But what exactly was Star Trek? Had it been made up for Joe 90 comic? Evidently not, as I noted from the copyright panel citing Paramount Pictures corporation. Star Trek was, seemingly, a TV series: so how come I’d never seen it? My dad offered the plausible suggestion that it might be running in one of the other ITV regions; but beyond that, Star Trek remained an engima.

(For more on the history of Joe 90 comic, see here: http://lewstringer.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/joe-90-top-secret-1969.html

A few aspects of the strip provided further cause for intrigue, for the artist, Harry Lindfield, had been supplied with references of space suits and other hardware from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I recognised these items, having seen the film on release the previous year (I was seven when I saw it... more on that story later). Their presence served to reinforce the impression that Star Trek must be some kind of film or television series. Another oddity within the strip was the depiction of the Enterprise making planetfall, in the second installment. Although I knew nothing of the TV series, or the concept of the transporter, this image still struck me as decidedly odd: the Enterprise just didn’t look as if it had been designed to land on a planet. As it transpired, I was right. One error rapidly corrected was the misnaming of Kirk as Kurt in the first two episodes. Again, I noticed this and wondered why the name had been changed...

It was on a sunny Saturday afternoon in July of that year that the mystery was finally solved. I was playing outside in the back garden when our mum opened the kitchen window and called to me to come and see what was on television. I ran into the front room to be confronted with... Star Trek. The episode (Where No Man has Gone Before) was already under way, but I watched it through to the end (in fact, it would be almost ten years before I saw the first five minutes of this episode). I was hooked immediately, and didn’t miss a single episode right through to the end of this ‘first series’ in December (the BBC showed Star Trek in four seasons, often mixing episodes from across the three series – notably, during this first run, the second season episode The Doomsday Machine was shown as a last-minute replacement for The Alternative Factor and to this day it still ‘feels’ more like a first series episode to me).

Star Trek quickly became a favourite game to play in the back garden during the summer of ‘69: at the time, I owned a mustard yellow top that looked almost exactly like the early version of the jersey worn by Captain Kirk in the second pilot, so I usually took the role of Captain, with my brother playing Spock or McCoy or anybody he felt like. In fact, I looked a lot more like a junior edition of Spock, with Vulcan-style eyebrows and, before long, a Vulcan fringe. All I lacked was the ears. We even had our own phasers, in the form of two toy torch-rayguns, manufactured by Pifco (a company more famous for its hairdryers and Christmas tree lights). These guns had a red plastic tip on the barrel which, when unscrewed, left them looking uncannily like the ‘phaser 2’ weapons seen in the series. As if that wasn’t enough, we also had ‘phaser number one’ in the form of a small Ever Ready pocket torch which again, was of a very similar shape to the smaller hand phaser seen in episodes like What Are Little Girls Made Of?

The wrapper and a selection of the cards from the A&BC Star Trek bubblegum set (1970)

That particular episode was featured in one of the first items of Star Trek memorabilia that I encountered: a series of bubble gum cards, available during 1970-71, which told the story in frames clipped from a 35mm print. Although it’s far from being classic Star Trek (Spock barely gets a look in and McCoy, Scotty and Sulu are all absent) this was, for a while, the episode with which I was most familiar, simply on account of those gum cards.

As to the other Star Trek memorabilia, it was a long time coming. I recall seeing – or thinking I’d seen – an Enterprise model kit in the window of a toy shop close to our grandparents’ house. I’d glimpsed it from the car as we were driving past, but on visiting the shop the following week, it was nowhere to be found. It was some considerable time before the Enterprise kit arrived in the UK, and when it did, it was in a different sized box, adorned with a photograph of the kit, as opposed to the tall, rectangular box with its painted cover that I’d seen in the shop window. It wasn’t until many years later that I saw one of the original USA kits made by AMT and recognised it for the one I’d glimpsed fleetingly, several decades before. The enterprising owner of that toy shop (see what I did there?) had evidently acquired some early imports of the American kit, which unsurprisingly sold out very quickly.

Until the arrival of that kit here in the UK (at Christmas 1971, alongside a companion kit of Mr. Spock fighting a multi-headed snake), there was pretty well nothing to be had in the way of Star Trek merchandise. An annual appeared in time for Christmas 1970, from the reliable World Distributors imprint. In common with many of their licensed annuals, this and subsequent editions were compiled from the Gold Key comic strips that had been appearing in the USA for several years. But as to toy phasers, or communicators, or shuttlecraft: well, we had to make our own.

Compare that situation with what we have now: more merchandise than you can shake a Vulcan lirpa at, and most of it little more than generic corporate tat adorned with a logo. It would have been impossible to stage a memorabilia fair back in 1970, because that kind of memorabilia simply didn’t exist…

This Star Trek blog will continue after station identification...