Star Trek: The Motion Picture : The Photostory

Star Trek Fotonovel

by Richard J. Anobile (Editor), Harold Livingston, Alan Dean Foster

Join the Enterprise on its greatest adventure in hundreds of full-color, live-action scenes from Paramount's blockbuster hit!

Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty and the rest of the crew meet their greatest challenge--in all the brilliant color and excitement of the great motion picture hit!

Genres: Star Trek, Science Fiction, Graphic Novels, Fiction

160 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1980

About the author

Anobile pioneered the use of the movie frame blow-up technique to recreate entire films in book form. His books were valuable resources especially in a time before VCR's and DVD's and the internet. While they might be viewed as simplistic picture books now, they were an attempt at curating film at a time when it was often still an after-thought. Anobile has spent much of the rest of his life in film production.

Reviews

[Bev]

In the 1970s--before VCRs were common in most homes, twelve Star Trek fotonovels were produced, giving fans a chance to "watch" some of their favorite episodes again and again. Then when Star Trek The Motion Picture was released in 1979, Pocket Books produced another high-quality photostory of the movie. It tells the story of the mysterious, powerful force on a beeline course for Earth--destroying Klingons and a Federation monitoring station along the way. As per usual, the Enterprise is the only starship in range and then Admiral Kirk becomes a Captain again to meet the threat head-on. The Enterprise crew discovers that the threat has its source from Earth and must find a way to give V'ger what it wants before it destroys its home planet.

The photostory is beautifully put together and lovely to read. It does leave out a few moments that I'd looked forward to seeing, but overall it was a delightful look at a Star Trek movie I haven't watched for quite some time.

First posted on my blog My Reader's Block.

[Reesha]

It's much faster than watching the movie, that's for sure! But the photo quality isn't very good, even taking into account the age of the film.

If you just want a quick refresher of the film without having to watch Kirk drool all over the Enterprise in space dock for 15 minutes, this is an adequate method. Though, unlike the novelization by Roddenberry, this photostory doesn't add anything new to the experience.

[Charles]

Stays close to the movie story, as all these photostories do. However, the production wasn't as good here as it has been in some others, such as the Wrath of Khan photostory. The images and colors often seemed muddied and dark and I didn't feel quite as engaged as I have been with such stories previously. Still, glad to have it for my collection

[Benjamin Plume]

Still don’t love the format of these, but it’s cool as a collectible.

[Scott Williams]

This does a decent job of capturing the broad strokes of the movie. Unfortunately, there are a bunch of horizontally flipped frames and typos that pull you out of it a bit.

[Kristina Brown]

Hundreds of pictures from the film recapture the story in amazing detail. With the exception of a one notable scene, not essential for the plot, everything is here. A fast way to reacquaint yourself with the movie.

[Michael Hanscom]

A funny little comic-book style adaptation of the movie, using stills from the film. Nothing more, nothing less.

[Fangirl]

Loving the Star Trek fhotonovels from the late seventies I had to get this as well.
I wasn't really thrilled with the movie itself, but it was Star Trek. :)

[Art]

Reread July 1980.
Read April 1980.

[David Horton]

Took me 20 minutes to read cover-to-cover. Even with twice the photos and twice the text it would still be a more reasonable version of the actual film.