I have always loved Star Trek. Kirk, Spock and McCoy were among my babysitters as a child. My mom would plop me down in front of the TV and reruns of TOS were part of the programming I’d watch, after Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Mister Rogers, etc.
The movies came along and only helped to grow my love for Star Trek. Then, one day, I was perusing a local book store and discovered there were novels with original stories about the crew of the Enterprise, and I was hooked. And also poor. But now I knew they existed, I would have them.
My mom was a bartender at the time, and told her patrons about her son the bookworm who loved Star Trek. One of those patrons began bringing in boxes of books for me. Mostly Star Trek, but there were some others in there, too. I read every Star Trek book he gave me. I also saved up and bought new ones when I could.
I mention this because I really loved Star Trek. Still do.
Then came Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Holy crap.
Huge fan. And I prepped by saving up and buying a VCR and some blank tapes. Then I recorded every episode so I could rewatch them whenever I wanted. I tried to do the same with Deep Space Nine, but, as with so many of the stations carrying that show, my local channel often preempted the show for sports or other programming, so I’d get the last 20-30 minutes of golf or something, and then the last 30-40 minutes of DS9 with zero context. It was annoying.
At this point, my grandmother gifted me a thing – Time Life Video had a subscription for The Next Generation. Two episodes a month in ‘high quality VHS’ for like $30 a month or something stupid. I was grateful for the gift, but I thought it was ridiculously overpriced.
This would be a trend with all things Star Trek shows moving forward.
When my grandmother cancelled that subscription, I was not upset. I considered continuing it on my own, but the tapes look up a LOT of room and I found I didn’t watch them very often. Plus, I had the entire series recorded on my own VHS tapes, and I barely ever watched them, too.
As time went on, I had a complete series run of TNG and Voyager, but not DS9 or Enterprise – the latter because I just couldn’t get into the prequel series.
When DVD became a thing, I saw they would release a season of TOS and it was ridiculously priced (IMHO) at like $120 (I feel like it was that high? Maybe it wasn’t?). Meanwhile, new series like Buffy, Angel, Lost, etc, were $30 for a season. The disparity was insane and as much as I loved Star Trek, I couldn’t imagine spending that much money on a single season of any show.
Sadly, things didn’t get much better. As they released more of the shows to DVD, the prices – especially for TOS – were ridiculously high. I’d see them and shake my head. I was a MASSIVE DVD buyer. I spent way too much money at Best Buy. I loved having seasons and fulls series on DVD because I was a repeat watcher. I could and did put something on as background noise while I did other things. I also tended to not watch shows as they aired, preferring to binge a season on DVD once it was released rather than waiting week after week for new episodes to air.
I was Netflix before Netflix existed.
But the cost of Star Trek shows priced me out of purchasing them.
And it irked me.
It felt like price gouging. As if they (Paramount/Viacom/CBS) figured they had this limited resource and were going to squeeze every drop of profit from it they could. And they did.
Fast forward to the Paramount+ era of Trek. Discovery, Lower Decks, Strange New Worlds, Prodigy, Picard – all amazing shows. And while I did pay to watch them, I still wasn’t buying them.
Until the streaming wars ended (IMHO) and Netflix emerged as the winner (again, IMHO) and platforms like Paramount+, HBOMax, etc, started freaking out and dropping shows left and right, pushing them to Netflix for licensing, and, in the case of Paramount, started looking at selling out completely in the name of profits.
The idea that WarnerBrothers, who have completely and utterly gutted DC Comics and consistently put out worse and worse movies based on those iconic characters, could own Star Trek, terrified me. It still terrifies me.
So for the first time in my life, I went out and bought Star Trek shows on BluRay. Specifically:
- Lower Decks seasons 1-4
- Discovery’s complete series run
- Picard’s complete series run
- Strange New Worlds seasons 1 & 2
- TOS’ complete series run
This is how I found out neither Voyager or Deep Space Nine are on BluRay. Because they haven’t been upscaled to HD, and probably won’t be. Which suuuucks. And is a post / rant for another day. Enterprise is in HD on BluRay, but, I can’t… I just didn’t get into it.
Anyway. Now I own them and I feel good about it. If something happens with Paramount – and the odds are, it will – I at least have those shows on physical media.
Which is kind of becoming a thing with me again…
More on that later. Probably.
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