Most of us who are Star Trek fans know there are a set of blooper reels from Star Trek TOS. They were shown often at conventions in the 1970s & 80s, and really terrible copies of them wound up on VHS bootlegs later, followed by DVD copies of these same terrible quality bootlegs.

So the question is this: what happened to those blooper reels and why have they never been released? Short clips from them have shown up on some documentaries, but the DVDs and then the Blu-rays and then finally the Roddenberry Vault releases contained not even a scrap of the blooper footage. Why is this?

Additionally, as far as preservations go: what is the best copy of the bloopers out there that one can currently get their hands on? I have numerous copies in varying poor quality, but nothing that is remotely satisfying. We were able to pinpoint here a select few copies of the Star Wars Holiday Special that were of exceptional quality…can we do the same for the ST:TOS bloopers?

–SKot