Star Trek: The Lost Missions - Episode 1

I should have known better than to come up empty-handed when I searched for information on the eleven Star Trek audio adventure stories that were released on Peter Pan/Power Records back in the late '70s -- after all, they are Star Trek collectibles, and anything Trek that has ever existed has got to have decent coverage somewhere or other in cyberspace. Well, I would like to have known who the actors were that voiced the characters in these stories (some of them did pretty darn decent imitations of the original actors, I've gotta say), but at least I found out that most of the tales were written by veteran sci-fi writer Alan Dean Foster, with one other written by Cary Bates and Neal Adams. Unfortunately, the writers of three of the stories are unknown ... come to think of it, it's probably for the best, as two of them were kind-of sucky.

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, Peter Pan Records was a label known for producing kid-friendly story and song records for many years, including stories based on comic book heroes such as Superman and Batman, and sci-fi/fantasy series like Space: 1999 and The Six Million Dollar Man. Back in the mid '70s they produced a series of seven original Star Trek stories and released them both individually on 7-inch records (usually accompanied by a read-along comic book) and in collected volumes on 12-inch LPs. The release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979 provided them with the opportunity to not only re-release the existing stories, but to add four new tales to the library. Unfortunately I have only the three ST:TMP re-release LPs (whose jackets are decorated simply with stills from the movie) rather than the original releases (which, aside from being more rare, have semi-cool original artwork on their jackets, from what I can tell on the web).

But anyway, these story records seem to have a bit of a following, so their existence might not be new to as many of you as I'd hoped ... but nevertheless I'm going to start posting them in MP3 format. I'll be posting them in what I believe is their original order of production (following their order of appearance on each LP, in the albums' order of release). A few years ago, I ripped them and burned them onto two CDs which I called "Star Trek: The Lost Missions" volumes 1 and 2, and that's what the MP3 tags will correspond to. (I had to shuffle them around in a rather specific order so that they would fit -- and they just barely did -- on two discs!) For your amusement, when I'm done uploading them all (about one every other week is the plan), I'll then follow up by uploading the artwork I created for the two CDs, should you decide to burn your own set.

I trust that these stories are old and obscure enough, not to mention completely out-of-print, that nobody will particularly care that I'm posting MP3s of them ... but, if the creators insist, for whatever bizarre reason, that I cease and desist, then I invite them to email me, stating their credentials, and politely ask me to do so. I hope not, 'cause they're a really neat little curiosity for Trek fans out there.

First up: "Passage To Moauv" (written by Alan Dean Foster), a cute story about a dignitary's pet that, when brought aboard the Enterprise for transport, causes chaos aboard the ship, but not quite in the way one might expect....

By the way, not only does Memory Alpha have an entry regarding these Trek story records, but here's a really cool web resource, from which I found quite a bit of info about them that I hadn't known before: Guide to the STAR TREK Story Records