All Good Things...: 70s Trek podcast

Sometimes, things you love come to an end.

In 2017, I discovered one of my all-time favorite podcasts: 70s Trek. Hosts Bob Turner and Kelly Casto created this podcast series that focused solely on "“The decade that built a franchise.” Their personable demeanors really made this show feel like Bob and Kelly and you, the listener, were just pals talking about Trek. It is a wonderful show. I wrote about it here.

But when you have a title like "70s Trek," there was always going to be an ending.

With the actual decade of the 1970s, the logical end is the December 1979 premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. With the podcast, it was soon after that subject as well. That last episode debuted on 16 August 2019.

I only got around to it this week.

Why the delay?

I didn't want the end to arrive.

For many things I enjoy, there is a finite number of entries. Take Sherlock Holmes for example. Despite the myriad of stories available, there is only sixty tales penned by creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I have purposefully not read all sixty because I want there always to be just one more original story. The same is true for Ian Fleming's James Bond novels.

With 70s Trek, however, there is already an additional Bonus Trek episode detailing the CBS and Paramount merger (or re-merger). Star Trek: Discovery has been out for a couple of years, but I haven't watched any of them. Yet. And tomorrow comes the Trek series I will pay for and watch: Picard.

So I thought it high time to listen to that final episode. I did this morning. It was, of course, bittersweet, but still joyful and wondrous. The episode was necessarily a reflection on the entire series and process of making the show. It's a great conclusion to a great podcast, one of the best I've ever heard.

Thanks Bob and Kelly for this show and the hours of entertainment y'all provided. And, from a guy who is probably the same age as y'all, thanks also for the time capsule and the memories not only of Star Trek, but life in the 1970s. It was a blast.

The Scarcity Mentality in 1970s SF Fandom

I was listening to the “70s Trek” podcast the other day when one of the hosts made an interesting comment.

The podcast is a celebration of the Star Trek franchise in the 1970s which, according to their tagline, was “The decade that built a franchise.” In episode 118, host Bob Turner and Kelly Casto talk about the decade itself. In their discussion of consumer technology, Turner mentions the personal tape recorder. He described the very one my parents purchased from Radio Shack: a black plastic device, about five inches by seven inches, mono, with all the requisite buttons.

Turner went on to describe how he was record the *audio* of Star Trek episodes off the TV…because he never knew if one of his favorite TV shows would simply go away and not be aired. He would at least record the audio because that was the only option available to him. He followed up that mentality with the advent of VHS recorders and the debut of Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1987, actually recording all the shows.

But his comment about the audio really struck me. Back in the 1970s, we lovers of SF had few options. We had Trek on TV (on Houston’s UHF channel 39 for me), Star Wars by 1977, and Buck Rogers by 1979. Comics and books were out only other options. With the pool of things to digest so small, naturally we scooped up all we could, in any manner we could.

It is one of the reasons I think we geeks in 1977 onward can still name you things like the trash compactor number from Star Wars*. Since we didn’t have a lot, we engorged ourselves in what we had. If you missed the Star Trek episode on Saturday afternoon, you had to wait an entire week for the next one. And given a 79-episode catalog and assuming the station manager ran all the episode in order and then repeated the run, you’d have to wait quite a while before you even had the chance to see that missed episode.

Naturally Turner’s option to record the audio became one of the only ways we could experience Trek at our leisure. I’m surprised I never tried it.

Is it cool to have all the content at our disposal, able to consume it any time and almost any way we want? Sure. It’s basically what the characters in Trek had. But having grown up with a scarcity mentality regarding beloved content, there is still a special fondness for those times when we didn’t have much, but we loved that stuff dearly.


*Okay, so you’ve had time to think about that number, right? I had “The Story of Star Wars” album with all the dialogue and sound effects. I played it constantly. Thus I can still remember: 3263827

Podcasts I Like: 70s Trek

They had me at the title: “70s Trek.” 

Heck, they had me at "70s"!

I listened to the first episode, then promptly downloaded all episodes up to that point (29 at the time). I binge-listened to all of them in a week’s time, loving every minute of each episode.

I was born during Star Trek’s third season so I grew up with Star Trek. Now, I’ll admit that my memory is a tad hazy and I only came to Trek after Star Wars debuted, but that’s where this podcast comes in.

Hosts Bob Turner and Kelly Casto are a delightful pair, easy on the ears, with a warm comradery and shared love of Trek in the 70s. In each episode that averages around 30 minutes, Bob and Kelly examine some aspect of Trek. While you don’t have to listen in order, it’s not a bad idea as you’ll get a good overview of how Trek came to be and the influences that went into its creation.

The main focus, however, is the 1970s, as the tagline reads, “The decade that built a franchise.” For us, over 50 years on, Trek permeates our daily lives, from cell phones to tablet computers to speaking to our computers. But Bob and Kelly take us back and remind us what it was like to be a fan of Trek in the 70s. Fans in the 70s didn’t know a lot. They had only a few books. They had a cartoon. Heck, they never even knew if there’d be any more live-action Trek. After all, Trek was actually a cancelled TV show, but it proved to be much more than that.

One of the aspects of this podcast that remains joyful is Bob and Kelly’s sense of wonder. Often one of them will take the lead on a particular subject, leaving the other co-host the first listener. Many times, new facts will be revealed, and cries of “I didn’t know that!” are great fun. What’s also fun is their clear joy at the subject and other things in Trek’s orbit.

So far (remember: I’m still catching up) a particular favorite episode is #3 (What We Knew in 1970), #13 (the Richard Arnold interview), and #9 (Star Trek in Syndication).

This is a love letter to Star Trek, the people behind it, the fans that kept it alive in the 1970s, and everything in between.
70s Trek has now firmly ensconced itself in my weekly podcast schedule. Utterly and completely enjoyable.

Oh, they have a Facebook presence and respond personally to comments. So after you subscribe to the podcast, head over there and join the conversation.

iTunes

Book Review Club: Redshirts by John Scalzi

(This is the September 2012 edition of Barrie Summy's Book Review Club. For the complete list of other reviews, click the link at the end of this review.)

You need only know two things to sum up my thoughts on Redshirts by John Scalzi: while listening to the book, I laughed out loud and I cried. I don't often cry when reading books. The last time was the seventh Harry Potter book, but I expected to when I cracked that book. When I cued up the audiobook of Redshirts, I didn't even see it coming, which is, to be honest, better. So, if you want to stop reading this review right now, go ahead. If you want more details, read on.

Redshirts is John Scalzi's parody/love letter to Star Trek. After a funny yet unexpected prologue, the novel introduces Ensign Andrew Dahl, newly assigned to the starship Intrepid, the flagship of the Universal Union. (Think Enterprise) Dahl and his new group of friends start to get accustomed to their new duties and lives aboard the Intrepid but the seasoned crew members all act weird. It soon becomes apparent that the members of the Away Missions (off the ship for you non-Trekkies) always seem to face some heretofore alien presence. Said alien almost always inflicts bodily injury or death to a member of the away team, yet the senior command staff never suffer any harm. It's as if the lower staff members are jinxed to die if they go on the missions.

To put this in context of Star Trek, let me explain. In just about every single episode, Captain Kirk, First Officer Spock, Doctor McCoy, and some member of the the crew, nameless until the first commercial break, wearing a red shirt, perishes. For the rest of the episode, the lead characters emote over the death, emerge victorious by the end, and live to trek on another day. If you ever wondered what it was like to be a member of the Enterprise crew who didn't have a job on the bridge, this is your book.

Where Scalzi provides the bulk of his humor, early on, is in the myriad ways the crew employ to avoid going on an away mission. Naturally, Dahl gets himself assigned to one and, while he is injured quite badly, he survives. The other crew member does not. As a long-time fan of Trek, I was laughing at all the obvious references to actions done in a 1960s-era television show for dramatic purposes and what really might have happened were all this stuff real. Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation, provides the narration with just enough snark to truly bring out the best in Scalzi's prose. He reads the boisterous captain's lines with gusto, the science officer's lines with calm precision, and the rest of Dahl's friends with skepticism that borders on incredulity.

Now, the story turns on a plot device that I loved. In fact, as a seasoned crew member gathers Dahl and his friends to explain his theory as to why all these occur on Away Missions, I had a thought: what if Scalzi did This Thing? Well, cool as it is, he did. I will not give it away here because I want you to be surprised.

The full title of the book is Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas. In short, these are three epilogues that resolve some of the more human aspects of the story and, for me, these are what gave this book its emotional depth. In the final two codas, I was listening while doing something else which is one of the best reasons to listen to audiobooks. As the second coda wound down, I paused and felt the tears sting my eyes. You know, I thought, if that coda got me this way, I knew I was in for it as soon as I learned the subject of the final coda. I had to get up and walk away from everyone as I listened to the last coda. It got me, and it got me good. It got me so good, in fact, that, later that day, I could barely get through a retelling of the story to my wife without breaking down. Not sure she's ever seen me that way over a book.

You know what? I haven't seen myself that way, either. I loved this book, both for the laughter and the tears. It moved me, and isn't that what a great story is supposed to do?

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