with the final Gold Key-published Star Trek title being issued in March, 1979. In this period, Gold Key experimented with digests with some success. In a similar manner, to explore new markets in the mid-1970s, it produced a four-volume series, with somewhat better production values and printing aimed at the emerging collector market, containing classic stories of the Disney characters by Carl Barks and Floyd Gottfredson (Best of Walt Disney's Comics). In the late 1970s, somewhat higher-grade reprints of various licensed characters were also aimed at new venues (Dynabrites), plus Starstream, a four-issue series adapting classic science fiction stories by authors such as Isaac Asimov and John W. Campbell. Golden Press released trade paperback reprint collections such as Walt Disney Christmas Parade, Bugs Bunny Comics-Go-Round, and Star Trek: The Enterprise Logs. In the late 1970s, the distribution of comic books on spinners and racks at newsstands, drug stores, and supermarkets continued, but Western Publishing also sold packages of three comics in a plastic bag to toy and department stores, gas stations, airports, and bus/train stations, "as well as other outlets that weren't conducive to conventional comic racks". The newsstand comics were returnable; the dealer could return unsold copies to the distributor for a refund, but the bagged comics were not. To discourage unscrupulous dealers from opening the plastic bags and returning the nonreturnable issues, Western published the newsstand versions under the Gold Key Comics label, and put the Whitman Comics logo on the bagged versions, although otherwise the issues were identical. Western, at one point, also distributed bagged comics from its rival DC Comics under the Whitman logo. Former DC Comics executive Paul Levitz stated, "[The] Western program was enormous — even well into the 1970s, they were taking very large numbers of DC titles for distribution (I recall 50,000+ copies offhand)." In 1979, Western ceased to be an independent company when Mattel Inc. purchased the company. The new management stopped selling returnable comics at newsstands, preferring the nonreturnable bagged comics sold at toy stores. In a 1993 interview, Del Connell, the managing editor at Western's West Coast office in the late 1970s, recalled, Eventually, arrangements were made to distribute these releases to the nascent national network of comic-book stores. Western also prepared a prospectus in the early 1980s for a deluxe Carl Barks reprint project aimed at the collector market that was never published. In December 1983, a struggling