Here’s today’s flashback:  From mid-1978, Seventeen magazine presents some behind the scenes looks at the new Star Trek movie.  Funny, I was 17 in 1978, and yet, this was the first Seventeen magazine I ever bought!   Maybe if I had bothered to read the OTHER articles in there I might have had one stinkin’ date in High School! (But the geek in me won out and  wouldn’t get a date ’til college.) No matter, but you gotta love the dated references in headline paragraph: Travolta, Annie, Affirmed and Bee Gees!  Yep, these were the glorious disco days, and even though I loathed disco and stuck with my Beatles, I’d still go with the gang from my high school Drama Club and school paper to go dancing at The Bachelor Button, so my teenage social life wasn’t a total disaster… and a lot of fun.         Note the highlighted quote from the article on the third page:

Star Trek movemakers are bent on eclipsing recent science fiction hits as Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind…

And therein lied the rub about ST:TMP, as the production poured more and more $ into special effects, it lost sight of keeping it’s script tight and exciting.  The result was a very pretty, if immensely boring, snorefest.