"Edith Keeler must die!": Star Trek romance music

I found a lovely YouTube video of all the romantic music from the original Star Trek (as if there were any other Star Trek!) - but it was marred by the most HORRIBLE thumbnail I have ever seen. Totally inappropriate. It screams of clickbait, since people are more likely to click on a cheesy picture of Kirk and the Gorn than on Kirk kissing Edith Keeler.  These are such incredibly beautiful images, capturing the romantic essence of the series (which was, in case you didn't notice, very romantic indeed), making me wonder why on earth someone would ruin it with a stupid Gorn image with an even stupider caption.

I took some screen shots and made a slide show from the images in the video, then realized it was sort of redundant because the whole video IS a slide show. Mine is Spock-heavy, but that's not just because I favored Spock back then (and now!) - it's because Spock's romances were more intense, more significant, and much more tortured because they went against his Vulcan nature.

The music for the Jill Ireland episode (This Side of Paradise) was borrowed from Shore Leave, in which Ruth, Kirk's old flame from the academy, suddenly pops up out of nowhere, but she doesn't do very much except stand there in her prom dress. The Spock romance is wrenchingly poignant, the music heart-perfect - and Ireland, who died tragically young from breast cancer, stands in front of Spock with real tears streaming down her face: "And this is for MY good?" It is one of the most compelling moments in the entire series.

So please enjoy this, but don't pay any attention to the awful thumbnail because it is fake news. Or whatever. But the rest of the visuals are stunning, and the music more romantic than Tchaikovsky.

These are my personal favorites.

Monsters of The Outer Limits: Best in Show

This is not the time for this, or maybe it is, with global threats everywhere: climate change, intractible human hatred, an astoundingly stupid leader of the free world, and nuclear war. Like everyone else, I have to cope with all of this every day and try to keep smiling, or at least keep my sanity and preserve and defend my joy in living. 

These aren't really new gifs - you can tell by the cheesy Gifsforum logo in the corner. I didn't want to make new ones, even though they'd be technically of better quality. But since when did The Outer Limits have high-definition picture quality?

Maybe what brought this on was noticing KVOS was running episodes, two back-to-back, on Saturday night. I have been enjoying them immensely. I find that in some ways, this series was much more disturbing than The Twilight Zone, which was more of a psychological drama. This is a good-old-fashioned creature feature thing, but never losing sight of what lurks behind the monsters. Nimoy and Shatner and a host of other soon-to-be famous actors pop up, which is always a joy. As a kid, this series scared me so much that I barely watched it at all.