Toys and Stuff: February 2015

By now the passing of Leonard Nimoy is no new news and media coverage has been pretty extensive. Bloggers everywhere are adding their condolences and memories as best we can considering we didn't know him personally, so we're left with personal Star Trek anecdotes. I'm of the opinion that the series would would have been fine without any of the other characters. Replace Chekov with Kleeman or Sulu with Renaldo or Kirk with Pike, it wouldn't have mattered. The Star Trek constellation revolved around Spock. Gene Roddenberry may have created the character on paper but Nimoy created Spock the flesh and blood Vulcan and without him the show would been just another Rocky Jones Space Ranger, fine for what it was but nothing spectacular.

It's funny how I never got into the world of Star Trek collectibles as an adult collector because as a young 'un I devoured the books, bought the calendars, I had the first AMT models of the Enterprise and the Klingon Bird of Prey and even had the set of Enterprise blueprints. I remember watching the first episode when it aired way back in '66. It was a treat seeing it on our new color TV in the living room but in later years when I would rush home from school to watch the re-runs it would be on the smaller black-&-white TV in my room. It was only one of two television series in which I actually remembered the individual episode titles (the other being The Dick Van Dyke Show).

One of my early memories. I bought this soooo many years ago when gripped by the Star Trek fever and it survived my periodic bouts of house cleaning.

Then there was the time I went to my one-and-only Trek convention in Milwaukee and saw Gene Roddenberry himself along with a couple of other cast members. It was there that they showed a partially restored version of The Cage - it was a hybrid of color and black-&-white film, the story being that it was cobbled together from surviving film thought to have been lost. At that time - mid '70s I believe- I could see no one dressed in Star Trek uniforms, no Klingon's, no endless stream of people wearing fake Spock ears, just regular people coming to hear Gene and company talk about the future of Star Trek.

My last real 'contact' with the world of Star Trek was being able to get a picture (a pretty bad one - sorry) of the original model of the U.S.S. Enterprise at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. Unfortunately I couldn't stay in D.C. long enough to re-visit the museum and take more photos. Today the Enterprise is being restore by museum staff.

So here we are today in 2015, and yet another icon has passed. Along with so many others I mourn his passing and the passing of the other Enterprise crew members. I miss the 'good ol' days' but life goes on. Perhaps I'll begin a Star Trek collection. Perhaps not. Back then as a child the show provided many perfect moments, but...

"A life is like a garden. perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"

- Leonard Nimoy 22 Feb 2015