The Curious Case of the Star Trek Slides

I spent a good portion of my youth collecting Star Trek junk. A light-and-sound Borg Ship still sits atop my CD shelves, and a very dusty Starship Enterprise (NCC-1701D) hovers above my head, mostly because I’ve had a bout of laziness that has lasted for 15 years that prevents me from taking it down. For all of my collecting and scouring the backs of every Star Trek magazine I could find to obtain a useless but encyclopedic knowledge of the whole Trek property, I’d never, ever heard of collectible Star Trek slides.

So, when a sheet of 16 Trek slides coincidentally fell into my possession a few months ago, I was fascinated. My first inclination was to question the intensity and abject loneliness of a geek who would create his own Star Trek slideshows to display on his living room wall – but closer inspection revealed that these were actually very professionally done 35mm slides, each one bearing a shot from the original Star Trek series. Some were clearly 16mm frames mounted into 35mm slide mounts. They weren’t even all memorable shots – an empty bridge, a phaser – nothing all that amazing.

Even curiouser was the inconsistency of the slides. Some were encased in thin plastic and labeled with the episode number, episode title, and the word ‘original’. Some were in thick, plastic tombs that seemed hand-labeled, and others still were mounted in traditional cardboard sleeves, some blank and others bearing markings of Kodak or Colorite. No matter what these were, I had the geekiest slideshow ever goin’ on, and one was even from the legendary ‘City on the Edge of Forever’ episode.

In 1969, issue #8 of fanzine ‘Inside Star Trek’ features an ad published by Gene And Majel Roddenberry’s own Star Trek Enterprises company for original 35mm film frames – original prints that actually ran through the on-set camera, or if you’re a mega-nerd, a piece of science fiction history. By ‘Inside Star Trek’ #11, the show was canceled.

Further digging reveals a stockpile of over 600 of these slides that were discovered and sold as recently as October of 2008, and auction details confirm that these authentic slides were referenced and explored on page 139 of The Star Trek Compendium. They’re comprised of everything that hit the cutting room floor pre-1969, and yeah, fans ate ‘em up, like this guy on Flickr who has a pretty great collection. So, there’s definitely a collection of real slides out there, but are these they? Or are these just the fevered weirdness I’d originally extrapolated? They don’t exactly match the samples I’ve seen, nor can I confirm that this enterprise continued after these early efforts using other materials.

There’s also a slide of the Transporter effect mixed in here. Unless this was an in-camera effect, it makes little sense that such a shot would be carefully composited and processed and then end up on the cutting room floor – especially mid-transport.

I loaded them into my 1960s Airequipt Automatic Slide Viewer – or at least the ones that fit into it – so even if I have no conclusive idea of what these might be, enjoy the slideshow.