If you believed the advertising hype, Star Trek: The Motion Picture was going to be the next Star Wars. Now, of course, we all know it wasn't, but that's beside the point - we still got some decent toys out of the whole thing.

Mego, who also made toys based on the Buck Rogers TV series and Disney's The Black Hole, (and had earlier based a 12-inch G.I. Joe-style line of figures on the characters as they appeared in the original series, opted for figures with no more articulation than the original Kenner Star Wars figures (whereas the Buck Rogers and Black Hole toys borrowed the nine-jointed design of Mego's popular Micronauts toys).

Star Trek: The Motion Picture figures (1979)
Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Scotty, Commander Deck, Lt. Ilia.

Wave one consisted only of Enterprise crew members, with Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Decker and Ilia, while the second wave - far rarer, with well-cared-for carded figures now fetching into the hundreds - consisted only of aliens, including the first toy depicting the then-new Klingon head ridges. Many of the alien figures were the only time any of those creatures ever appeared in plastic form.

Accompanying these figures was a nice scale replica of the new bridge of the Enterprise, though it had little detailing, molded entirely in white plastic. Thanks to that miracle of manufacturing known as "small pieces," few mint specimens of the bridge playset survive to this day. (If anyone out there has one, even if it's in a state of slight disrepair, a photo would be nice.)

A second, less successful series of figures was also launched by Mego, a 12-inch line (more or less matching their original series figures) including Decker, Ilia, and a few aliens, but these have become nearly impossible to find.

I rarely comment upon this element of toys, because so rarely does anything come along which demands comment, but the artwork on the packages for these figures was really nice. Not as sharp as the movie poster, mind you, and they didn't quite get the Enterprise's saucer detailing right, but nice nonetheless.

THE ORIGINAL CARDBACK

©1979 Mego and Paramount Pictures