Oh wow.
Someone is selling their collection of Star Trek laserdiscs on craigslist.

There's only two episodes per disc!

It's not just TNG.
They've got TOS too

And DS9!

it's a big ol pile of star trek.
The worst part is that bottom-right disc, it's the TNG episode Interface and then the first part of the Gambit two-parter.

HALF OF A TWO PARTER ON ONE DISC? AHHHH!

They got the movies too, but that's boring. everyone has the movies.

Their total count is 53 TNG discs, 6 TOS discs, 7 DS9 discs, and 8 movies.

They want 225$ for it but that's exceptionally reasonable.
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/emd/d/san-mateo-star-trek-laserdisc-lot/7148398443.html

oh wow, memory alpha (the trek wiki) has a laserdisc section and it's weird.

So, Star Trek: Voyager aired 1994 to 2001, towards the end of the Laserdisc lifespan, right?
So the general european market and the US got two separate releases of the pilot, and nothing else.

Germany got the pilot and then 4 more episodes of season 1.
The UK got just the pilot and then the season 2-ending/season 3-beginning two parter Basics.

So the UK technically got TWO EPISODES across THREE SEASONS

Japan however got 10 box sets, containing all of seasons 1-5. (The show ran for 7 seasons)

So, DS9, which ran from 1992-1999, had a slightly different fate.
In the US, they released all of season 1, all of season 2, and then got 14 episodes into season 3 and stopped.

Japan (where laserdisc was far more popular), got ten box sets, again.
So that's 5 seasons for a 7 season show, again.

The UK got TWO EPISODES! The pilot was included in an all-the-pilots box set, and then they got the episode The Way of the Warrior.
That's a two parter from season 4!

And going back farther, TNG: It started in 1987 and ended in 1994, so it got lots of laserdiscs.

Although they didn't start until 1991... despite Laserdiscs existing since the 70s.

They released them over 8 years. Which means that TNG releases on laserdisc didn't end until 1999... five years after the show ended.

The best part of this? They didn't release season box sets.
They only released single-episode or double-episode discs, right?
They did it chronologically... ALMOST.

See they didn't want fans to have to wait until the very end to see a laserdisc version of the final episode of TNG, All Good Things...

So they released it out of order, in 1997 (3 years after it came out!)

and then FOR SOME REASON they released it again in chronological order, in 1999.

And although they skipped on doing season box sets, they did do SOME box sets in the US.
Like they released The Q Continuum, a box set containing 4 Q episodes.
(Q appeared in 8 TNG episodes!)

They also did a Borg Collective box set, containing 3 of the 4 TNG borg episodes.

They also did the Worf Return to Grace collection, which sounds like it should be an album.

The animated series got a box set, in the US and Japan.

The TOS releases are interesting because I learned something unrelated from them.
OK SO they released all the episodes in the US, starting in the 1984... but not with the first episode. Sorta.

So, background: Star Trek: The Original Series had two pilots. The first one failed, but for Reasons they made a second one with some re-casting, and that one caught on.

The second pilot is called Where No Man Has Gone Before, and is about Gary Mitchell getting God Powers and Going Mad. Kirk fights him, tears his shirt, it's all TOS as we know it.

But the first pilot was called The Cage. It's a great episode, but it's got Captain Pike, Dr. Boyce, and second-in-command Number One. If Spock wasn't there you'd guess this was an different series.

But this episode was expensive to make and they couldn't play it as part of TOS anymore because it has a whole different set of characters... so they wrote it into another episode.
So, in The Menagerie, Captain Pike shows up again, and he's been injured in an accident.

Spock basically kidnaps him and steals the enterprise, and Spock says he can explain if he shows the crew some important records... which turn out to be the events of The Cage.

So basically they took the footage of the unaired first pilot and wrote a framing device around it to make it make sense. They didn't use all of the episode though... even with two episodes (the only TOS two-parter) to fit the footage into, they left some parts out.

So there's an original unaired version of The Cage, and a later two-parter which contains most of the footage from it plus a framing story.

So why does this matter? well... here's the thing.

It turns out they edited together The Menagerie using the master negative of The Cage, and the parts they cut out? they tossed or lost them.

So when they wanted to release a home video version of The Cage in 1982 (for the 20th anniversary of Star Trek), they realized that... they couldn't.
Those parts were just gone, at least in their original form.

Roddenberry had hung onto a copy of the whole episode, but it was a black and white 16mm print, which had lower quality audio as well.

So when they released The Cage on VHS, Betamax, and Laserdisc in 1986 (not 1982, I typoed it), they had to edit together the color scenes from the surviving negative of The Menagerie with the B&W scenes from Roddenberry's B&W workprint.

But then in 1987, someone found the trimmed bits of the original color negative. The only issue? the soundtrack wasn't there.

So the next year, Paramount put a bunch of work into restoring it. They used the color scenes from the negatives of The Menagerie and the newly found trimmed parts, but with the soundtrack of the B&W workprint for the trimmed scenes.

They aired this as a two hour special, called "The Star Trek Saga: From One Generation To The Next"
Star Trek: The Next Generation had started in the meantime (and had a minor problem with a writer's strike delaying their second season), so Patrick Stewart hosted this special

The episode interviewed actors from the original series and the next generation,and explained some of the restoration work that had gone into restoring The Cage.

Apparently the mess with the original negative of The Cage happened because of a miscommunication:
Roddenberry loaned Paramount the original negative, assuming they'd duplicate it and return it.
Paramount assumed he wouldn't loan his original, and had given them a duplicate.

So the original got chopped up in the making of The Menagerie because the editors didn't realize it was the original, they thought it was a disposable duplicate.

The fun thing about this is that it now means there are now effectively SIX FUCKING VERSIONS of The Cage.

Seven if you count the footage in The Menagerie!

Those versions are:
1. The original pilot episode: Full color, no cuts, not ever shown to the public. This was shown to Paramount executives and then kept by Roddenberry when they turned it down, then cut up for The Menagerie later.

2. The footage in The Menagerie is effectively a second version
3. The B&W work print version that Roddenberry held onto, which was shown at some conventions but never released to home video

4. The hybrid version from the 1986 release, with some scenes in color and some in black and white.
5. The restoration from the 1988 special, later released on VHS

6. The 2001 DVD release. For this one they remastered the merging of the two sources, changing some music and voices (because The Menagerie had changed those and they used the higher quality version)

7, finally (SO FAR), the 2008 Remastered edition, where they went back and added CGI enhancements to the original episode (as the remastered versions did for all the episodes)

There's a huge forum post here which talks about a lot of this: http://theomegasector.com/index.php?/topic/20942-analyzis-of-the-different-versions-of-the-cage/

And before I finally shut up, here's one last thing.
How many video formats do you think Trek has been released on?

VHS, DVD, Blu-ray, streaming? so 4? Well, I've already mentioned Betamax and this thread was about Laserdiscs originally... So 6? Maybe 7 if there's one we're forgetting?

THAT'S LESS THAN HALF OF THEM.
STAR TREK HAS BEEN RELEASED ON 14 DIFFERENT MEDIA FORMATS!

So 11 episodes and the first movie were released on Super 8.

Movies 3 (The Search for Spock) through 7 (Generations) were released on Video 8

11 episodes and the first 3 movies were released on CED, RCA's video-on-vinyl format.

Fun fact: I bought a CED player with one of those episodes stuck in it and then I later shattered it! https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1267363395654651906

Along with CED, the other weird movies-on-vinyl format was VHD, a Japanese only format. And guess what: STAR TREK! They got the first 4 TOS films.

A whole buttload of Star Trek movies got released on VideoCD... As recent as Into Darkness!

And we got one Star Trek (The last TNG movie, Nemesis) on the PSP-only movie discs, UMD!

And in 2007 when the remastered TOS started being released, they put the first season on a DVD/HD-DVD combo set. We never got Season 2 HD-DVD because HD-DVD failed before that could happen.

The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray format (which isn't the same as Blu-Ray! They're not directly compatible) has gotten releases of the reboot films, with some plans to remaster the first two TOS films announced

So yeah. 14 different video formats:
1. 4K Ultra HD
2. Betamax
3. Blu-ray
4. CED
5. Digital
6. DVD
7. HD DVD
8. LaserDisc
9. Super 8
10. UMD
11. VCD
12. VHD
13. VHS
14. Video 8

I'mma stop here. I'm not gonna get these laserdiscs (way too much money, and I already have way too many laserdiscs) but I'm glad I saw them, they're very neat.

although I want to fix something I forgot while I was busy explaining:
The reason I went into the whole tangent about how The Cage got B&W and color releases? It turns out that there were two releases of The Cage on laserdisc, for that reason.

aha... I was going off the Memory Alpha wiki but it turns out they're missing at least one format, as pointed out by @gamescan...
DIVX! There was a DIVX release of First Contact at least

And there was a Video2000 release of at least Wrath of Khan!
from: https://www.flickr.com/photos/peterkatuch/10481419563
(Thanks, @Hellhound604)

And @AtmanRising pointed out that there were a few Trek releases on the CD-i Video subformat.
This is similar to VideoCD but it's not compatible with it, so it counts as a separate format. That's 17!

It looks like there wasn't any Star Trek release for the D-Theater (Digital VHS) format... but there was a GalaxyQuest release.
Does that count? No, I guess not.