Trek Record

Here’s a weird little blast from the past. When I was a kid, I ended up with a Star Trek record produced by the Peter Pan company that contained four stories, and I recall listening to them multiple times, especially my favorite, which I’ve linked to here.

Apparently comic books were sometimes included with these old Peter Pan records, and even though these were created in the ’70s, the artists and the company that hired them didn’t have enough provided information to know that Uhura wasn’t a blonde white woman and Sulu wasn’t a black man. Yet they must have had stills of the bridge and Kirk and Spock and McCoy, because the artist does a fair job with them.

The Peter Pan record company didn’t hire the original actors to play any of the parts in these recordings, although I think the gentlemen playing the parts of Spock and McCoy did a fair job and sound as though they at least were familiar with the parts they were playing.

Alan Dean Foster did the scripting duties on this one, which is probably why it still works pretty well. He did a stellar job adapting the animated episodes into print, managing to convert even the most ludicrous of episodes into entertaining short stories. He also wrote an hour-long episode of the abandoned second original Star Trek series that got turned into Star Trek: The Motion Picture (don’t blame him for what happened).

Anyway, it’s got some strange vocal decisions, but in just over eleven minutes it manages to convey a little Trek story that’s fairly faithful both to the characters and to the feel of the series.

For more information on the whole Star Trek record thing, here’s an entire site that discusses them.