The Star Trek Giant Poster Books were the first professionally published Trek magazines. Seventeen issues were produced between September 1976 and April 1978, plus a 1979 “Collectors Issue” devoted to The Motion Picture. Each delivered six pages of content plus the cover and back cover and folded out into a large poster.

I own the complete set and will cover each issue. The story of the magazine’s genesis is told here.

Here are highlights from issue three, published in November 1976, plus a scan of the magazine.

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This issue was devoted to “the humor of Star Trek” and that was a good choice. The show did funny really well, even though Gene Roddenberry famously did not want his creation to concentrate on jocularity. That is understandable in the context of the 1960s: science fiction in general and Star Trek in particular were struggling to be taken seriously, and pop sci-fi often did not help.

David Gerrold, writing in 1973 in his The Trouble with Tribbles book, said that as early as 1966 he did not want Star Trek to “fall into the same trap of fantasy and pseudo-science fiction that had claimed—oh, say…Lost in Space. Lost in Space was a thoroughly offensive program. It probably did more to damage the reputation of science fiction as a serious literary movement than all the B-movies about giant insects ever made.” 

But if Star Trek had to avoid becoming a full-on sitcom, it is also true that the funniest episodes — notably The Trouble with Tribbles and A Piece of the Action — are among the best loved. And this Poster Book focuses on both episodes, plus giving readers a set of screencaps from the blooper reels, in the days before you could just watch them on YouTube.

How to play fizzbin

Writer Anthony Fredrickson takes Captain Kirk’s line about fizzbin — “On Beta Antares Four, they play a real game.” — and builds a fanciful story about Saint Fizzbin and how the Antarians evolved the game to “earn the favor of the gods and win health, wealth, and longevity. Fizzbin is a way of settling debts, public and private. It is the basis of the Antarian court system [and] the most skillful Fizzbin players occupy Beta Antares highest government posts.” It’s a silly bit but suited to an article about an impossible game in an issue devoted to humour.

Fredrickson set out to write playable rules and did a good job of building some structure on Kirk’s improvisation, but you still can’t really play the game, and the text here is not quite perfect. In the episode, Kirk says that each player gets six cards, except for the player on the dealer’s right, who gets seven, but the magazine version has that as “except the dealer and the player to the dealer’s right, who get seven.”

Here is the dialogue from the episode, so you can compare the screened “rules” to Fredrickson’s version.

KIRK: Of course, the cards on Beta Antares Four are different, but not too different. The name of the game is called fizzbin.

KALO: Fizzbin?

KIRK: Fizzbin. It’s not too difficult. Each player gets six cards, except for the dealer, uh, the player on the dealer’s right, who gets seven.

KALO: On the right.

KIRK: Yes. The second card is turned up, except on Tuesdays.

KALO: On Tuesday.

KIRK: Oh, look what you got, two jacks. You got a half fizzbin already.

KALO: I need another jack.

KIRK: No, no. If you got another jack, why, you’d have a sralk.

KALO: A sralk?

KIRK: Yes. You’d be disqualified. No, what you need now is either a king and a deuce, except at night of course, when you’d need a queen and a four.

KALO: Except at night.

KIRK: Right. Oh, look at that. You’ve got another jack. How lucky you are! How wonderful for you. Now, if you didn’t get another jack, if you’d gotten a king, why then you’d get another card, except when it’s dark, when you’d have to give it back.

KALO: If it were dark on Tuesday.

KIRK: Yes, but what you’re after is a royal fizzbin, but the odds in getting a royal fizzbin are astro… Spock, what are the odds in getting a royal fizzbin?

SPOCK: I have never computed them, Captain.

KIRK: Well, they’re astronomical, believe me. Now, for the last card. We’ll call it a kronk. You got that?

KALO: What?

Watching the show as a kid, it always struck me that Kirk tells Kalo that a third jack would disqualify him but, when Kalo is dealt a third jack, Kirk says “How lucky you are! How wonderful for you.” What? I figured the captain was just making it up so it didn’t matter, but the script (at least the October 30, 1967 Final Draft) shows William Shatner flubbed the line. As written, Kalo was dealt a nine, and was told another nine would disqualify him. His next cards were two sixes, and Kirk says “That’s excellent.”

It appears Shatner improvised about half of his lines, but you can’t blame him, considering the script.

This is a fun article that by itself is worth the price of the magazine. 

Critiquing Tribbles

Fredrickson opens his episode analysis with an interesting statement: “Don’t search for any ulterior motives deep in the meat of The Trouble with Tribbles next time you see it, it’s strictly a “fun” episode…”  That opinion would surely have disappointed David Gerrold, who conceived the story as a commentary on invasive species. He told an interviewer in September 2016:

I thought, “We’re not going to recognize the danger with every alien we meet. The ones who are going to be the most dangerous are the ones we’re not going to realize are dangerous until it’s too late.” So I came up with the idea of these cute little fuzzy creatures. I was always fascinated by ecology, and I was inspired by the case of rabbits in Australia, this whole idea that they became predators because there weren’t any predators already there.

The last article is meant to be an examination of humour in Star Trek but it’s really just an “and then this happened” list of dialogue. If you’ve watched the show, you can skip this piece.

The issue closes with a pretty good trivia quiz, an ad for the Star Fleet Technical Manual and the Star Trek Blueprints ($6.95 and $5, including shipping!) and a description of Spock’s station on the bridge. Interestingly, the names assigned to the instruments are taken from the Technical Manual; they are never stated on screen.