Paramount Pictures has used this year’s Super Bowl as the perfect opportunity to kick off – pun very much intended – the television arm of the marketing campaign for Star Trek Into Darkness with a snazzy and explosive new TV spot.

You can watch it here below.

There’s a lot of mighty purty imagery packed into those thirty painfully brief seconds, a few swatches of which have not been released before. In particular we get to see Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and the movie’s villain John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) have a tense exchange, which is then followed by lots of explosions and people looking quite unhappy.

Amazon is offering up Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home for purchase for only $3.99 through their Video On Demand service.

This digital deal is only for today, Thursday, September 23, beginning at midnight PST and runs for 24 hours, so grab it while you can. The digital version is regularly $9.99, and the 24-hour rental is $2.99.

Visit the Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home product page to purchase the film.

Released in 1986, in this fourth film in the franchise, which was directed by Leonard Nimoy (who also stars as Spock), James T. Kirk (William Shatner) and the crew of the Enterprise go back in time to the year 1986 in an effort to save the Earth! People, there be whales in this movie!

To save Earth from an alien probe, Kirk and his crew go back in time to retrieve the only beings who can communicate with it, humpback whales.

Star Trek fans know that the planet Vulcan is the home world of Spock, the half-Vulcan half-human science officer on the U.S.S. Enterprise. For years, the city of Vulcan in Alberta, Canada, has enjoyed heightened popularity because of their name, and has embraced Star Trek fans with events and themed memorabilia throughout the city, including a Trek-themed tourist station. Vulcan even put in a bid to host the premiere of the J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek prequel.

This year, CBS (which owns the Star Trek franchise) approved the city’s status change to Vulcan: The Official Star Trek Capital of Canada, and on April 23, 2010, the city had a ceremony with honored guest Leonard Nimoy, the actor who played Spock in the original 1960s television series, as well as in seven feature films, including 2009’s Star Trek. The city presented a bronze bust of Nimoy and Nimoy gave Spock’s iconic “live long and prosper” handprint.

Today, Nimoy posted an image through this Twitter account of the poster that the city of Vulcan created in honor of his visit. The poster is based on the viral ‘Obama Hope’ poster, welcoming home Spock to Vulcan.

Check out here below the official images from the event here, courtesy of CBS, as well as the aforementioned poster and also video that was taken of the event.

Some depressing news for Star Trek fanatics worldwide. In an interview with The Toronto Sun, Leonard Nimoy apparently revealed that he now intends to retire from acting and even from all of those crazy conventions that have been such a huge part of his career.

Nimoy, who was finishing up his last episode as Dr. Bell on the popular J.J. Abrams TV show, Fringe, basically just explains that he’s been doing this longer than most of us have been alive, and it’s time for him to step away and enjoy his life.

CBS Consumer Products and Mad Science have officially announced that a brand new interactive stage show based on the world of Star Trek will make its debut at the Kennedy Space Center this June.

The show will present the best young recruits of the Starfleet Academy on their first day as they try and learn about space travel, living and working in space, and the science and technologies they’ll be using. The show will run 30 minutes and deliver a bunch of special effects, some interaction with the audience, and a lot of very cool space technologies we really use.