Star Trek Blooper Reels
| Title: | Star Trek Blooper Reels |
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The first blooper film was the blooper reel for Star Trek: TOS. It was originally compiled for the amusement of the show’s stars and creators. It contained some humorous outtakes from the filming of the series that were spliced by the production crew after each season.
It was called a "reel" due to the nature of photography of the day.
See Blooper Reel for other examples.
View the original blooper reels here [1]
Much later, fans created gif sets of some of the Star Trek blooper reels and posted them on Tumblr. Some examples.
First, Only One
Originally there was just one Star Trek blooper reel.
There is only one official copy of the Blooper Reel in existence. It belongs to Gene Roddenberry and cannot be gotten legally from any other source. Mr. Roddenberry occasionally brings it along with him to conventions he attends, or sends it with Dorothy Fontana or Susan Sackett. [2] This original reel was broke up into sections, as a fan in a 1975 zine recalls: “Noteworthy are the eight pages of Cory Correll's 'Star Bleeps.’ (only a few of which have been printed before, in Star-Borne). It is a partial transcription of the main ST blooper reel…" [3]
Monetized and Promoted
Bjo Trimble took credit for the widespread viewing of this first blooper reel. In 1974, she said:
The Blooper Reels were first put together for a Star Trek cast party. Then the Trimbles saw them, and talked Gene Roddenberry into letting fans enjoy them, too. GR was worried that fans would not like to see their Heroes fluffing lines, and in general, showing that they were human. But when the first reel was shown, the fan reaction was so good that we've shown them many times since at various conventions.... Actually, the reels are all on one reel now.[4]
The blooper reel was often one of the highlights of a convention, and where the blooper reel went, money followed.
From 1974:
The first major convention in Britain was help in Leichester on the weekend of September 28/29 1974... The guests were George Takei and James Doohan, who brought over the blooper reel (the bloopers weren't seen again in this country for several years). Jenny had hoped for the banned episodes, too, but Paramount didn't oblige. [5]
A fan in 1975 wrote to The Halkan Council:
4000 people showed up to hear Gene Roddenberry speak at Michigan State University (they had to turn 1500 away at the door), that he brought an episode on film and the blooper reel.... Roddenberry now gets $2000 an appearance.[6]
Gene Roddenberry introduced the blooper reel to an audience at Stanford University on January 28, 1975:
I'd like to open tonight with a confession - the truth is I open my talks with the bloopers to judge the level of the audience's intelligence and judging from the wild laughter I heard, I can see I'll be talking to a group of intellectuals. I'm being quite serious, the biggest laughs we get from those reels always come at universities and colleges, showings for astronauts or NASA. The only place those reels never received a laugh was at a showing for television executives, which I think shows there is a correlation between sense of humor and intelligence....[7]
Speaking of a lack of a sense of humor, according to the March 1978 issue of A Piece of the Action, there was a lawsuit regarding the Star Trek Bloopers: "The Screen Actors Guild' has filed suit against Gene Roddenberry, Paramount, and Norway Productions to prevent the showing of the ST Bloopers. It's asking $25,000 damages for 'embarrassing the actors'." It is unknown the results of this suit.
In 2009, a fan wrote about how the tapes were a hot commodity:
These Blooper Reels became black market commodities and highly prized collectibles. Fans would attend showings of the Blooper Reels and film them (in pre-video recorder days), later making them into video tapes. Eventually, they were released professionally in 1997 in order to stop the underground economy in illegally made and distributed video tapes. Like the clips, the blooper reels were made from rejected footage and for that reason did not ever appear to be the property of Desilu or Paramount Pictures. They were rescued from dumpsters outside the Paramount facilities and therefore became the property of the finder. In this case by Gene Roddenberry, and he brought them to conventions and shared the footage with fans.[8]
Other Blooper Tapes and Reels
Bloopers for Other Treks
[need info]
Fan Comments
1984
At least one fan found the blooper reel very educational as per this ad for a zine in 1984:
Feel like reliving those golden days when con was synonymous with NYC, when we learned to swear from the bloopers, and the ST movies were only a gleam in the Great Bird's eye? Or do you just wish you were there? Well, journey on back with LIAPITA through a collection of fan fiction as old as Trek itself and as new as today.[9]
1986
One fan shares her memory of the blooper reel:
[A fan] told me she was in possession of something called a 'blooper real' and would I be interested in seeing it? Silly question. The only problem was, we needed a projector. And the solution proved to be rather simple. Eileen was a mass communications major... We got permission to use one of the college's rooms and projectors, and we put up flyers around the buildings. Well, the school only provided a small room -- and I mean small, big enough for maybe 25 people. We squeezed everyone in until they were practically hanging from the ceiling, and we still had to run it twice. And there were people who still didn't get in. So we made arrangements to show it in a bigger room. This time we got an auditorium. But the word had spread like wildfire, and there still wasn't enough seats. Finally we hit the school up for their biggest auditorium and squeezed them in like sardines.[10]
2007
Nancy Kippax remembers:
[We’d] sit for hours in the frigid film room, watching whatever episode was being shown, even if it was one we liked the least. But of course, they always showed our favorites – Trouble with Tribbles, Amok Time, Journey to Babel. . . And the blooper reels – oh, yes, the blooper reels! [11]
- ^ [1], Star Trek Prop Authority, accessed 9.7.2011
- ^ from The Fan's Little Golden Guide to Throwing Your Own Convention
- ^ from the zine Rigel
- ^ from an Equicon progress report
- ^ from IDIC #2
- ^ The_Halkan_Council/Issues_01-10 from an early issue of The Halkan Council
- ^ from Archives' Log v.2 n.2
- ^ effect of commercialisation and direct intervention by the owners of intellectual copyright : a case study : the Australian Star Trek fan community, Archived version, by Susan P. Batho (2009) (an academic paper which studies the effect of the Viacom Crackdown and Australian fan clubs)
- ^ from an ad for Logic is a Pain in the Ass
- ^ from Comlink #28 (1986)
- ^ Reminisce With Me: Conventions (2007)