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The first thing I should probably note is that I am not a “trekkie”, although I have enjoyed watching Star Trek in almost every iteration. My fondest memories are of the original series, which I used to watch in reruns as a kid. Along with Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Robotech it was a show I would go out of the way to make sure I caught. That being said, I never went out of the way to obtain an encyclopedic knowledge of the Star Trek universe. In fact, for a long while I was much more of a partisan (as far as these things become divisive) of George Lucas’ Star Wars universe. But as I’ve grown older and watched more and more Star Trek, I’ve come to appreciate Roddenberry’s vision and those of his creative followers.

So it was that about a year ago I decided to buy up all three of the boxsets of The Original Series (TOS). I waited only as long as it took them to drop the price from an outrageous $99 to the slightly more reasonable $70 level. Yep, $210 worth of episodes. But little did you know, dear readers, that my little financial indiscretions would also ensnare your kind selves, for now I embark upon a critical journey of every episode of the original series.

Now let’s meet our companion for the next few weeks and months, Season 1 box set:

Note the clever “tri-corderesque” packaging. Here’s the same lady with all of her bits showing:

Included are a set of 8 disks, an episode guide featuring brief descriptions and artwork from all versions of Star Trek and that handy dandy plastic case which doesn’t stand up too well without its cardboard base. All-in-all the production design is almost excellent.

Finally, here’s a close-up of Disc 1, which will bring us our first four episodes:

As you can see, each episode is labeled with its original air date (which determines the order by which they are presented in these sets) and the in-story-world star date. I almost would have preferred that they went with the star date as their key, but oh well.

My one big criticism is the sheer lack of features on these disks. About one episode a disk has “Pop Up Video” style comments by Michael and Denise Okuda, set designers from The Next Generation. Disc 7 and an additional (unpictured) 8th disc in a paper sleeve have a handful of some somewhat interesting interviews and documentaries, but for the prices above I had expected a lot more. But let’s put all that behind us and proceed.

The first aired episode is “The Man Trap”, which we will visit in detail next week! I hope you’re as interested in reading my episode commentaries as I am in writing them!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 4:49 pm and is filed under Television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.