Although I try to limit the majority of my thrift store purchases to comic paperbacks and books for my classroom lending library, I am not made of stone. When I encounter something especially weird, baffling, geeky, or otherwise neat, I will pick it up. Such was the case with Star Trek: The Motion Picture: The Pop-Up Book!
What a name!
Confession time: I am not, nor have I ever been a fan of Star Trek. I did have relatives who were into the show however. My maternal grandmother was a dyed-in-the-wool Trekkie. She read every Star Trek paperback she could get her hands on. She watched Star Trek: The Next Generation. She collected Star Trek plates from the Franklin Mint! Grandmas and Star Trek don’t normally go hand in hand, but mine did.
I don’t think Grandma’s love of Kirk and company affected my own interest in Star Trek either way… it was just something I never got a handle on. I tried to watch the TV show multiple times to no joy. All I could see were cardboard sets. When Star Trek: Deep Space Nine premiered in 1993, I literally FORCED myself to sit down and watch it every week for like a month and a half because, as a kid who liked comics, Star Wars, Monty Python, and all other matter of geeky ephemera , it just seemed like the type of thing I should be into. I just wasn’t.
It’s only been in this past year or so that I’ve gained any real appreciation for Star Trek. I truly enjoyed the rebooted Star Trek that was in theaters last year; it was a terrific popcorn flick and I liked it so much that I saw it twice (once in the theater, once as a double-feature at a drive-in). Enjoying that movie lead me back to some of the earlier films like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan which, to my surprise, was a truly awesome movie even independent of its Trekker origins. Some of the other Star Trek movies I’ve sampled since then… eh, not so much.
BUT, you say… if you’re not into Star Trek, why did you even bother to buy this book? I’ll show you why in a second, but before that let me just say something about pop-up books.
Generally, I am anti-pop-up-book. They are sometimes really clever and certainly Robert Sabuda deserves some kind of medal for the amount of craziness he’s figured out how to pour into his pop-up creations… but I have a two year old son. Pop-up books last about three, maybe four days in this household before you’re simply staring at a book full of torn pages and glue smudges. Most of the pop-up books we encounter in the thrift store are similarly afflicted. When I looked at ST:TMP:TPUP (awesome acronym), ALL the pages were in great condition. Whoever owned this book before it ended up in the thrift shop, it wasn’t a toddler. All the pages work beautifully from the transporter room
to the Enterprise coming out of drydock
and then you get to this page which made me laugh out loud. It has to be the most boring use of a pull tab ever employed in a pop-up book. I’m going to switch over to video to do it justice.
The copy on the page says: Mr. Spock reacts to all the excitement in his usual way.
There you have it. Star Trek! The Motion Picture! The Pop-Up Book! Eight pages of eyebrow raising fun.
Teachable Moments 