Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Billy Blackburn's Rare Home Movies

Here are a bunch of home movies shot by original STAR TREK series regular Billy Blackburn. If his name doesn't ring a bell, then that's OK. Frequent viewers will know him as Lt. Hadley, the bridge navigator.

"They would pan past me to Shatner," he says. As soon as I saw his face, I recognized him as one of the stock background actors in the series.

And stock is right. He started as DeForest Kelley's stand in, and then one day was told to sit in the navigator's seat on the bridge. "That was before Chekov," he reminds us. He played a Gorn, an Organian, a NASA employee -- to name a few. And he always carried an 8mm or Super 8 film camera with him. It was only in the past few years that Blackburn chose to share these behind the scenes, candid movies of the original (The Old Show) STAR TREK cast and crew. I remember reading about it a few years ago and I saw a few stills. Amazing stuff. And even more amazing how well they were cleaned up and presented.

The movies were spliced together as an extra to the CBS TOS DVD set. Here they are.

Season 1 Part 1



Season 1 Part 2



Season 2 Part 1



Season 2 Part 2



Season 3 Part 1



Season 3 Part 2

3 comments:

Mark Anderson said...

Oh man, look slike I've got me some watchin' to do this afternoon...

Mike Lynch said...

I'm only half way thru them myself.

Brian Fies said...

Billy seems like a wonderful guy who appreciates and cherishes his little role in television history. The whole time I watched, I wondered what he would have thought 40 years ago if you'd told him that people in the year 2009 would be seeing his 8-mm movies on their home computers. Now THAT'S science fiction....