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
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