As I was sorting through some stuff in my basement, I came across this beautiful, flat cover from CUE magazine, dated Dec 7 1979. New York CUE was a weekly city entertainment guide. (You know, the analog age!) As its focus was the latest in city culture and big time movie and TV releases, it makes perfect sense that our dear Mr. Spock was on the cover! Star Trek: The Motion Picture was just about to be released and the anticipation was high!
I guess I must have bought the magazine solely for the beautiful publicity shot of Leonard Nimoy and his melting brown eyes. “Spock Has the Right Stuff” indeed. Alas, I did NOT keep the rest of the magazine! I was happy to find this cover in beautiful condition though.
Eager to read the contents of the article, I scrubbed the ‘net for a copy of the article, and fortunately, found these images on eBay. (If you’d like to bid on/buy the whole magazine, here’s the link.)
Excellent article “Star Trekking to Hollywood” by Michael Musto. It includes quotes from Nimoy, Shatner, and Roddenberry, and Robert Wise credits his wife with saying “With no Spock, there can be no Star Trek!”
She was right at the time, of course. But I bet they never realized that this movie would launch a fleet of even newer voyages in Roddenberry’s Universe. Although at the time I was not too thrilled with the final product, in these 41 years since (!) I have found the story of ST:TMP as true to the original source material as it could have been: To explore strange new worlds , one often ends up discovering Themselves. I’m very thankful that ST:TMP was made, it gave Trek to a new generation, and marked it in the foundation of American Pop Culture.
If you’ve never seen it, I highly recommend it! (just fast-forward through the overly long close ups of the Enterprise). The only thing I couldn’t get past were the jumbo onesies on the crew; so glad it was changed to something more sophisticated and flattering in Star Trek II!
There’s a bonus side bar by Daphne Davis about the other blockbuster hitting the screens that year too – The Black Hole.
TrekkerScrapbook 
> just fast-forward through the overly long close ups of the Enterprise
What? No, no, no. Revel in those beautiful sequences and wish they went on longer. Watching the movie today, the Enterprise looks fantastic, but remember that when we were sitting in movie theaters in 1979 we had only seen the Enterprise on small, low-res TV screens. She looked fantastic on big movie screens.
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Yes it was stunning! Thank you 🙂
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She was beautiful before the upgrade, too.
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