Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our show is about to begin.

The music team behind Star Trek The Original Series still have to cover about 16 episodes in season one,

but they only have a musical budget for maybe four more.

This is the soundtrack show. Oh, Oh, Welcome back to the soundtrack show. I'm your host David W Collins and this is our final look

at not only Star Trek The Original Series 1, but a process that

is typical of mid-century TV music production in general.

The small budgets, the stretching of musical material across hours and hours of television,

cleverly reusing and re-editing existing material to make it fit multiple dramatic situations.

But while these were typical methods of music production, we should remember that

Star Trek itself was anything but typical.

It was so ambitious, with its wildly different storylines and fantastic characters and settings.

It's not like you could just go over to props and be like, hey, get me a tricorder, or go over to sets,

and be like, hey, get me that weird planet, go over to costumes and hey, get me a gorn.

You know, this stuff had to be built. Everything was custom. So ambitious.

And that made for some very memorable music, music that still lives on in our culture today.

Indeed, the longevity of Star Trek is even more amazing once we familiarize ourselves with the conditions under which it was made, the time crunch,

the accidental discovery of budget saving and time saving tactics that led to things like the

transporter in the show.

Oh, we can't afford to show a shuttle leaving the enterprise going down to the planet.

That's a very expensive VFX shot.

Let's just have this thing where they transport and we can just cut straight down to the planet.

Or in our case, the reuse of music cues,

...