I have always been a big Star Trek fan. Besides the obvious allure of fast ships, bare knuckles, lasers and Klingons, I think at the very root of what I dug about the show was Gene Roddenberry's optimistic view of the future. A future where man has done away with hunger and war and racism and everybody spends their free time studying astrophysics. I thought I had seen every last Star Trek episode 100 times, but I recently rediscovered 22 episodes I bet you haven't seen very often either.

I'm talking about the Animated Series (TAS in "Trekker" verbage) of course. The animated series, although done in pretty poor 1970s Saturday morning cartoonesque style, has most of the original cast doing the voice-overs, and remains true to the original spirit of the show (much more so than some more recent spinoffs of the the original series IMHO). I found that the series is currently only available on VHS at Amazon and I don't know of any current plans to release them on DVD, but there is a fan web site, Star Trek: The Animated Series that even offers short (some are 5 to 6 minute long) realaudio and avi video clips from the shows. It even offers Realaudio audio from the entire show! I'll probably be picking up some of these classics, and I'd like to plan a monthly Star Trek TAS beer and pretzel party if anybody local is interested.

Live long and Prosper!