About a decade ago I was in a comic book shop when I stumbled upon a folder with several photographs from the original Star Trek television series. The owner of the store told me that he acquired the images in the 90s as part of a collection of items that belonged to a man who worked for a production company that did work for the show. Included in that collection were also some props and episode scripts that were sold years prior, the photographs were all that remained.
I was eager to add these photos to my ever growing collection of memorabilia and the store owner just wanted to get rid of them. Luckily for me, no one had ever shown any interest in the photos so I was able to purchase them for next to nothing.
Over the years I have speculated that the images, which were taken from actual episodes as opposed to being staged publicity shots, were probably used in the series of Star Trek Fotonovels that were published in the late 1970s.
Star Trek Fotonovels were a series of twelve softcover pocket fotonovel books, produced by Mandala Productions and published by Bantam Books during the years 1977-1978. These books were essentially re-tellings of the Star Trek: The Original Series episodes in question, with word balloons and text being arranged over the stills from the episode in the style of a comic book or graphic novel. Something of a short-term fad, such books were conceived in the days before the advent of home video, most notably VHS, and quickly fell out of fashion thereafter. No specific order was observed, be it production, or broadcast order-wise. Instead, a random selection, stemming from all three seasons of the Original Series was selected for adaptation, resulting in all three seasons being represented in the twelve-issue run of the publication.
This image is from the classic Star Trek episode Mirror Mirror where Captain Kirk, Dr McCoy, Mr Scott and Uhura are accidentally transported to an alternate universe where the Federation is an evil empire and the Enterprise is its main battleship. Here the alternate Mr Spock listens in on a conversation between the misplaced and confused captain and his comrades. The logical Vulcan deduces that this is not his captain and that he must figure out a way to get the group back to their universe.
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