As I’ve mentioned before, Star Trek was my first love. It was the first TV show I appreciated on a level beyond merely watching, the first one that really made me think about things, the first one I cared about enough to actually learn about. It was also the first one I “collected”; what that meant to me in those pre-home video days was, I asked for a copy of Bjo Trimble’s Star Trek Concordance (yes, the picture is of my copy, which I of course still own) and read it cover to cover, noting which episodes I’d seen and which I hadn’t. I also collected James Blish’s episode adaptations, and came to know some of the stories in print years before I ever got to see them on the tube. I knew the show backwards and forwards, and by the time I bought the DVD collections in the Oughts I had probably already seen every episode over a dozen times (and that doesn’t even count the ones I listened to on my TV band radio). So as you might expect, I tend to recognize actors who were on Star Trek when they appear in other 1960s and ’70s TV shows. In fact, it’s part of what I enjoy about watching those shows. I don’t just mean the regular cast, though of course it’s always fun to catch a Twilight Zone or Outer Limits with a pre-Trek Shatner, Nimoy, or Doohan. No, I mean that when we recently re-watched The Wild, Wild West, at least half of the episodes had an actor or actress who prompted me to say to Grace, “Hey, that’s the girl who played __________ in [episode X].” And now that we’ve moved on to Mission: Impossible (Trek‘s sister show, produced by Desilu on the next soundstage over), it’s even more so; there are few episodes that don’t have a guest star who appeared on Trek (and I’m not even counting Nimoy’s appearance as a regular in later seasons). Sometimes it’s more than one, and we recently watched one in which there were no fewer than five. I don’t really understand why it pleases me so to recognize the faces (or voices); I reckon it’s just the pleasure of familiarity, like going back to one’s home town. But just in case there was any doubt in your mind about my level of nerdiness, I hope this post has rectified that.
