Whether you have crates full of Playmates action figures in your garage or just a few fleeting memories of owning Star Trek toys, there is much to be enjoyed from the Trek-centric episode of The Toys That Made Us, the documentary series by producer and collector Brian Volk-Weiss.

The show returns to Netflix today with four new episodes, including one that boldly goes where no toy collection has gone before!

If you missed it, be sure to check out our interview with Brian!

I come to this show with a lot Star Trek toy experience. My own toy journey starts young – I became a fan around the age of five or six, while The Next Generation was at its height and Playmates Toys was beginning to distribute the first set of what would go on to be over four hundred action figures. For my sixth birthday, I coveted — and received, hooray! — the Playmates bridge playset for the Enterprise-D. I’ve been hooked ever since.

If you’ve seen any of the previous episodes of the series, they are roughly hour-long episodes telling the toy history of various franchises; the first run of episodes which debuted in December touched on Star Wars, Barbie, G.I. Joe, and He-Man.

The Star Wars episode in particular is worth a watch for anyone who’s ever had an interest in that franchise and the merchandising it has spawned — and while the Star Trek franchise has never reached the giddy heights of Star Wars merchandising, there’s a great story to tell about Star Trek toys that, while frustrating, gives significant insight into the history of the franchise.

The story of Star Trek toys is not the triumphal story of the little company that could, in the case of the smash success of Kenner in launching their Star Wars toy line. Instead, the Star Trek story is one of varied successes, failure, and a lot of missed opportunities — but one sharply edited and told in a quite compelling fashion. Plus, unlike many Star Trek documentaries, it’s full of licensed Trek footage from both television and film entries in the franchise, along with several vintage Trek product commercials.

The episode focuses significantly on the first three decades of Original Series merchandising, from the first products released by AMT and Remco, through the Mego years, and the lead-up to the beginning of the Playmates run. The licensees that became known to Trek collectors starting in the 1990s — from Galoob, Playmates, and Art Asylum, to this decade’s Eaglemoss and McFarlane Toys –are only featured in the last ten minutes of the forty-odd minute episode.

The episode takes a long look at those products released in the earliest years of the franchise, starting in the years after the show had become a success, but before licensees were required to make products that bore even a passing resemblance to the show. Unlike today’s tightly-managed product line managed by CBS Consumer Products, this early era led to such tie-in absurdities as the infamous “Spock helmet” and other products with Star Trek labels that had nearly no connection to the franchise.

Companies like Remco re-purposed their existing products with Star Trek labels to clear inventory from their warehouses, a practice known as “label slapping,” resulting in a decade’s worth of ridiculous products bearing the Star Trek name. It is a lot to fun to learn about these products, what they were, and how they came to be.

The primary focus of the episode focuses on mid-1970s licensee Mego, the first company to produce Star Trek action figures and play devices that bore at least a passing resemblance to those on the show. Mego, and its colorful owner Marty Abrams, saw the potential in the Star Trek license and capitalized on it for much of the 1970s. If you ever owned Mego products, like the large action figures of the crew of the infamous Mission to Gamma VI playset, you will find a lot to love about this episode.

The story of Star Trek toys is also a story of failures and missed opportunities, and it’s tough to come away from this episode with the same sense of triumph as with the Star Wars episode. The episode includes a look at the inability of licensees to time the release of Star Trek toys with the popular movies — famously, there were no toys for The Wrath of Khan — along with the Mego bankruptcy, and the failure of Galoob’s Star Trek: The Next Generation line (something we also explored in our 2013 interview series), and the subsequent shift to serving the Star Trek collector market.

As a result, there’s a strong sense of wistfulness and a “what might have been” feeling that underpins much of the episode. But even with the focus on the franchise’s merchandising failures, The Toys That Made Us’ feature on Star Trek toys — and the series at large — remains an engaging, polished, zippy trip through the history of some of the favorite toy lines of days gone by.

While some of you more hardcore collectors might be disappointed that there aren’t many closer examinations of some of our favorite products from Trek‘s past — my treasured bridge set appears only briefly! — you won’t want to miss this thoughtful examination of the successes and failures of Star Trek toy history.

All eight episodes from the first production year of The Toys That Made Us are streaming on Netflix now (presented as ‘Season 1’ and ‘Season 2’), with today’s newest batch of specials covering Transformers, Hello Kitty, Lego, and of course, Star Trek.

The series has also been picked up for a second production run, sure to cover many more of the famous toy lines of years past, in a future release.