The James Bond movie “You Only Live Twice” came out in which the fictional NASA spacecraft Jupiter 16 is hijacked in orbit by an unidentified spacecraft. James Bond fakes his own death so that he can investigate the disappearance in secret.  The movie had one of the coolest gadgets ever, a one man gyrocopter named Little Nellie that gets delivered in a, abet large, suitcase which then Bond uses in a dogfight to shoot down several much larger enemy helicopters.  Another spy comedy movie, “Casino Royale” came out but not with James Bond although it did have the first Bond girl Ursula Andress in it.  It would take forty more years before the James Bond movie “Casino Royale” would come out. 

War movies were still popular, and “The Dirty Dozen” was released in which an army major is ordered to take a bunch of the army’s worst prisoners, train them, then take them on a suicide mission behind enemy lines from which only two survived.  There was the movie “Cool Hand Luke” starring Paul Newman which was about a prisoner working on a chain gang in Florida who fights the system.  Occasional when we were in the car driving somewhere we would see the prisoners working on the side of the road in their striped uniforms with armed guards standing watch and I would think of Luke.  The movie “The Graduate” came out but I wouldn’t see it until a few years later but the movie’s theme song “Mrs. Robinson” was played a lot on the radio.

There were many good songs on the radio in 1967, top of the charts was “To Sir With Love” from the movie with the same title in which a black high school teacher played by Sidney Poitier inspires his students. Two of my favorites by The Association were “Windy” and “Never My Love”, both of which were on the second album I bought.  Other songs I liked included “Groovin”, "White Rabbit", "Snoopy Vs. The Red Baron", and "Happy Together".

On TV our family continued to watch most the same shows, Bonanza, Andy Griffith, Bewitched, The Beverly Hillbillies, Lassie and so on but the best was the new show Star Trek which started in September, and I loved it.  Opening with the Star Ship Enterprise sailing though space and the opening phrase: 

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Star Trek told stories of the voyages of the starship Enterprise with Kirk as captain, Bones as the doctor and my favorite character, the alien Spock, with pointed elfin ears, as the always logical science office, and then the best engineer in the galaxy, Scotty.   The show was one of the first on TV with an interracial cast with a black communication officer named Uhura, an Asian helmsman name Sulu, and a Russian navigator named Chekov.  

Star Trek Crew

Then there were the gadgets and technology starting with the starship Enterprise itself that could travel faster-than-light using warp speed, had artificial gravity, inertial dampeners, shields, phaser beam and more.  All things I had read in one science fiction story or another but had never seen in a TV show before.   Then were the gadgets, the tablet and the communicator.  Instead of paper the Star Trek had tablets which would occasionally be passed to Captain Kirk to look at or approve but the communicator was the most amazing, a handheld device about the size of a deck of cards which the crew would flip up the cover to communicate with the Enterprise in space, both devices to become real thirty years later.  The transporter was amazing, the crew would stand on a platform inside the Enterprise which would turn the person into particles which would then beamed them to the surface of a planet and the person reconstructed or beamed from the surface to the Enterprise making famous the phrase, “Beam me up Scotty”. After watching the 1958 move The Fly in which a man and a fly enter a transporter he is testing, the man comes out with the fly’s head on the other end.  [photo ] The fly is later shown with a little man’s head, calling out in a tiny voice, “Help me, Help me!” before getting squished by a rolled up newspaper.  Well, it was it was good to see that Start Trek had that problem worked out, well mostly, there was the time while using the transporter, Captain Kirk got split in two, a good Kirk and a bad Kirk.  Fortunately, they were able to get both Kirks back into the transporter together beaming him whole again. 

The world of television would be forever changed by Star Trek but in the real world, in November NASA flew the Apollo 4 mission using the new Saturn V rocket for the first time carrying an unmanned Apollo capsule. The Saturn V was massive, standing 363 feet tall, 58 feet higher than the Statue of Liberty, 33 feet in diameter, weighed 6.5 million pounds and carry 450 tons of equipment to the moon.  Being one of the few night launches past my bedtime, I watched the liftoff on the news the next day.  It was spectacular even on our black-and-white TV, the gleaming white rocket rising up into the night sky on a pillar of flame as long as the rocket was tall.

Updated: 10-05-2022

Christmas