Category: Star Trek

Spock’s Brain.  It’s considered by many to be the worst Star Trek episode ever!  In fact, Entertainment Weekly published a special Star Trek issue in 1995 and Spock’s Brain was picked as the worst all-time episode. But there is more to Spock’s Brain than just a search for…well…Spock’s brain.  Co-hosts Bob Turner and Kelly Casto take a deeper look at this show on this week’s episode of 70s Trek. There was a lot happening leading up to the production of this episode that may have influenced its production.  Star Trek seemed to be on a high note at the end…

This week co-hosts Bob Turner and Kelly Casto discuss the Star Trek Log series of books by Alan Dean Foster.  They were adaptations of the animated series episodes. Foster wrote these adaptation from 1974 to 1978.  There were three episodes per book in the first six books.  That means Foster filled in a lot of detail that never appeared in The Animated Series.  It’s this aspect of the Log books that makes these books so fun to read.    In the last four books of the Log series, Foster was assigned the job of taking one 22-minute episode and making…

This week on 70s Trek co-hosts Bob Turner and Kelly Casto talk about the first reference book about Star Trek, The Starfleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph. It was published in 1975, and is a great look into what Star Trek was in 1975, and what it might have been, as well. Joseph was a designer who came upon this project because his daughter was a Trek fan. The book is full of diagrams and proposed information about Starfleet, the academy and much, much more. Joseph closely examined frames of film from episodes to see what props, sets and consoles…

In 1975, Gene Roddenberry and Paramount Pictures struck a deal to develop a new Star Trek feature film.  The production was set to begin in July 1976 and the film would have a $50 million budget!  It was the culmination of six years of growing anticipation over bringing the show back. Co-hosts Bob Turner and Kelly Casto discuss what led to this deal and what eventually happened.  The treatment, entitled The God Thing, never made it to the big screen.  But while Paramount rejected Roddenberry’s treatment, they didn’t reject Star Trek and actively sought out ideas for a new script.…

  In December 2016, CBS Video released the Roddenberry Vault.  It is a DVD collection of never-before-seen footage from the production of Star Trek.  70s Trek co-hosts Bob Turner and Kelly Casto discuss some of the highlights from this set.  Fans thought they’s seen everything there was to be seen about the original series.  But in 2007, Mike and Denise Okuda were asked to catalog a large collection of film canisters by Rod Roddenberry, Gene’s son.  It turned out that these canisters contained hundreds of hours of lost Star Trek footage! This footage included deleted scenes, omitted dialogue and alternate…