If you were regularly watching The Original Series when it was first being broadcast in the late 1960’s, and you wanted to find out what the upcoming episode was going to be about, you generally had to grab your local newspaper or TV Guide and thumb through it until you found the page that had the entry for Star Trek. Those entries, also called log lines, story lines or program highlights, were short descriptions of the upcoming program – generally only a sentence or two in length– and they were sometimes accompanied by a photo. Those little snippets were usually good enough to convey the essence of the story, but just barely. And at the time, of course, you really had no choice but to rely on those tiny spots for information. They were all you had to judge whether Star Trek, and the upcoming episode, would be worthy of your attention.
Often, the local newspapers and magazines used the material in the press kits directly to write their log lines and advertisements. Every once in a while, however, they paraphrased the releases and snipes, and, when coupled with photos that showed TOS’ unusual images, their interpretations of the upcoming episodes resulted in odd and/or humorous log lines.
