This
week at Flashbak, I continued to focus on the upcoming 50th
anniversary of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek.
This time, however, I looked at the AMT Model Kits associated with the
program.
Here’s
a snippet and the url: (http://flashbak.com/build-favorite-starship-star-trek-models-61873/
).
“I’ve
written here before about the long years between the cancellation of Star
Trek in 1969 and the premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in
1979. Fans had the CBS Animated Series
in 1973 to enjoy, but that “lost” decade was largely made of up of reading
literary adaptations (or fotonovels), collecting Mego Toys, and -- last but not
least -- building model kits from AMT.
For
over a decade, AMT (later AMT/ERTL) held the license to Star Trek, and produced a series of model kits based on the
original series.
The
most important kit, of course, was the starship Enterprise. You could buy the
kit, and build Kirk’s ship, and then buy it again several more times and detail
it with the right “NCC” appellation to be ships such as the Valiant, the
Intrepid, the Constitution, the Exeter, and even Decker’s Constellation.
AMT
also produced kits of the Galileo shuttle, Klingon and Romulan ships too. There
was even a kind of mysterious “alien” ship from AMT, a redress of the Leif
Ericson Galactic Cruiser kit but as a Star Trek “Interplanetary UFO.”
As
the Star
Trek AMT line continued into the seventies, other offerings included
the K-7 space station, seen in the episode “The Trouble with Tribbles,” and an
exploration kit featuring a Starfleet phaser, communicator and tricorder.
Another
popular kit was a miniature of the Enterprise “Command Bridge,” replete with
plastic representations of Kirk, Spock and Scotty…”
Please
continue reading at Flashbak.
John nice AMT STAR TREK post. These model kits were a joy of my '70s boyhood both building them and countless hours of play with friends. They helped me survive the drought of new Star Trek between the original series and animated series until Star Trek:The Motion Picture.
ReplyDeleteSGB
The "Interplanetary UFO"/Leif Ericson was one I never saw but I did read about it as a teenager in an article by Larry Niven describing how it became an inspiration for The Mote In God's Eye. All I had to go on was the description of it there until the internet age dawned in my house and I found a page on it. As a kid I built the Romulan ship though.
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