Greg Herringer

Blue Dogs from Venus: Production Still

"A long, long time ago..."

In the summer of 1977 everything changed in the world of science fiction entertainment. A quirky, cliched movie simply entitled Star Wars launched a new movie genre and re-ignited interest in all things space-based and futuristic. Roddenberry and Paramount saw an opportunity to salvage "Blue Dogs from Venus", possibly using it as a vehicle to launch a movie property with either the original crew or with new talent. But just as planning was underway for a "Blue Dogs" revival, Paramount's archive suffered a devastating fire, destroying the original film and all known video copies of the musical episode as well as the disassembled set pieces and spaceship models. The only thing remaining were several copies of the original script kept by the production crew, a handful of production stills of titles and effects shots and some of the soundtrack and songs masters that had been kept by the recording studio.

As Paramount launched production of "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", a small team worked with Columbia Records to publish a single version of Leonard Nimoy's solo song. "It's Logical", with the revised Star Trek theme on the B-side, was released in the fall of 1977. It made AM radio top 40 in both the West and East coast but made very little impact in the American Midwest. Buoyed by the market reaction and the popularity of the Star Wars Soundtrack, Columbia prepared and released this full length LP featuring all the surviving tracks as recorded by the original artists.