Merch 3: Persistence.

As per my previous two Merch posts, February was a pretty good month for filling gaps in my collection of geek schwag.  Happily, I was able to complete the hat trick by buying a couple of four-poster sets of Star Trek: The Original Series movie posters by Juan Ortiz, a leftover from my 2016 seasonal wish list.

I originally stumbled across these retro-styled limited edition* prints at the Museum of Popular Culture (aka MoPop) online gift shop while doing research for my annual gift suggestions in 2016.  Ortiz produced 80 of these unique posters, one for each of the Original Series episodes.  Sadly, it turned out that MoPop doesn't ship to Canada, so that particular gift option regretfully left the table.

However, when Karli and I decided to plan a February weekend in Seattle which would include a visit to MoPop to see the Jim Henson exhibition, I thought to myself, "Hmmm, I wonder if they have those posters in stock at the gift shop?" Logically (no Spock joke intended) there would be no reason for the two on-site shops to share stock with the online fulfillment inventory, but it was certainly worth checking while we were there.

In the fullness of time, we headed south to Seattle, and made our way to the MoPop on the Saturday morning.  When we'd finished at the Henson exhibition, we headed over to the science fiction gift shops. There was no sign of the posters in their shelf inventory, but it turned out that they still had some left in the back room, a random selection of eight or nine of the four-poster sets from the original 20 sets that were produced.

Because there was no visual guide to which posters were in each set, the clerk very kindly offered to let me look at the poster options online, but the pages were loading ridiculously slowly, making it a painful process.  As a result, I just randomly selected two of the sets rather than tie up too much of the man's time.

(He was also kind enough to give me the online sale price of $25.00 rather than the sticker price of $34.99, which is significant when you're looking at an exchange rate of about thirty cents on the dollar.)

So, what did I get in my random selection?

I'll be honest, I don't love all the posters in any of the single sets.  Each set has something I like, and each set has something I don't like, such is the nature of individual taste. In the case of these two sets, purely by chance I ended up with two of my favourite posters from the 80 options:  The Conscience of the King from Set 16, and Errand of Mercy from Set 17.  The other posters are certainly well done, but these are certainly two of the best looking designs by my standards.  They're very nicely printed on a matte finish 100 lb stock, and, based on the halftone screen, run on press rather than digitally. 

The good news is that, because of my preference for two of the eight prints, I would only want to get those two framed, at least in the short term.  Given that it could easily cost two or three times as much as my entire purchase to get just one of them put into a nice frame, I certainly appreciate the silver lining of not loving all eight of the posters. 

  - Sid

P.S. If you're a Star Trek fan in the British Columbia lower mainland who's interested in the other posters, leave a comment, we may be able to do business.

* To be honest, I'm not certain that these are officially a limited edition run as per the formal definition, it may well be that they will simply not be doing a second print run.