spockslash:

adhdcaptain-kirk:

I found a little book of star trek trivia at my favorite used book store and the book was published in the 80s and I’m flipping through it and it’s like “dedicated Fans taping episodes of star trek ensure that future generations will be able to enjoy the series” which is such a weird sort of technology whiplash like we went from VHS tapes being THE way to consume media on demand and I’m over here in 2018 watching this show on my smartphone on Netflix and?? When the show came out VHS wasn’t even a wildly avaliable thing??? Sometimes little things give me hope, like a tiny book reminding me how much humanity has accomplished in 50 years.

Oh my goodness, there was no such thing as media on demand when TOS aired! We could not have imagined such a thing. 

Around 1970-71 a group of original fans in the LA area did what we could to make a record of what happened in each episode, because it could easily be a year or more before our local station might run any given episode again. Whenever a rerun was shown, we worked as a team, taking Polaroid photos of the TV screen at each scene change and writing a quick description of what happens in the scene.  These we glued onto poster boards, one for each episode, building up the collection over a couple of years (the rate at which we were able to see the episodes in reruns). The poster boards hung in a couple of our garages and were available for any fan to view with an appointment. 

We would have been so jealous of fans now, had we known the day would come when we could see episodes any time we wanted. I still find it somewhat miraculous!