The Wall of Star Trek Tapes
Eventually, they moved in with us
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| Photo by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash |
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about some of my Christmas memories.
Since then, I’ve been thinking some more about the first encounter I had with my late wife’s parents, which I mentioned when writing about the unusual sandwich.
The TV was on, and I was sitting on the sofa in their living room. When I looked around, I couldn’t help but notice something. The longest wall contained some shelving. Well, not just some shelving. More like a lot of shelving.
About half the wall was filled with VHS videotapes. It was almost like a small library — every episode of the original Star Trek series was there, along with a small selection of other shows.
At that point, I hadn’t really watched Star Trek. My sister’s boyfriend had sometimes watched the movies when he was at my parents’ house, and she’d handed him the TV remote. But I was only vaguely aware of it.
Back then, I didn’t even know the difference between Star Trek and Star Wars! That doesn’t make much sense when I think about it now, because I grew up watching Space 1999. And in later years, I watched reruns of shows such as UFO and Lost In Space. So I’m not sure why Star Trek seemed to pass me by.
I wish I could remember which episode we watched during that Christmas evening in 1992. But whichever one it was, at that moment, I felt as though I’d been inducted into a new world.
* * * * *
Around that same Christmas, my relationship was moving quite fast — we were already looking at moving in together.
That’s when it hit me: I would have to accommodate all those VHS cassettes one day!As the months went by, we moved in together, and got married.
It’s hard to remember all the details now, but I think most of the VHS tapes stayed at my in-laws' house for quite a while.
Eventually, I constructed some shelving with sufficient capacity to hold them all. And almost as soon as we’d collected them, my father-in-law dismantled the empty shelves in his living room!
Although we did watch quite a few of the episodes on those old tapes, many of them remained on the shelves. One of the most memorable episodes was probably The Trouble With Tribbles.
With us both working full time, and living in an old house that needed (and still needs) fixing up, there wasn’t quite so much time for watching TV. And when we did watch something, there were so many other sci-fi shows competing for our attention, such as The X Files, Babylon 5, Dark Skies and Earth: Final Conflict. (And we didn’t just watch sci-fi.)
As time went by, the tapes hardly got touched. DVDs were taking over, and cable TV channels showed reruns of Star Trek, along with the various spin-offs.
My wife finally got rid of most of her old tapes several years before she died. The shelves didn’t go unused though — she soon filled them with books!
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