TV Series/DVD Set Review: 'Star Trek: The Animated Series'
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| © 2006 CBS Studios. Photo Credit: StarTrek.com |
TAS was created in the early 1970s by Gene Roddenberry at the request of NBC, the U.S. television network which had broadcast the original live-action Star Trek series from 1966 until its premature cancellation in 1969. In an ironic twist, the same executives that had axed Star Trek due to low Nielsen ratings changed to a different audience-rating system in 1972 and were dismayed that the show had reached the audience the network prized the most: young adult males in the 18-45 age bracket. Also, NBC and Paramount were still getting fan mail asking them to revive the series.
NBC's original hope was to revive the live-action show, but to its dismay, Paramount (which had bought Desilu in 1968 and all of its intellectual properties) had sold or destroyed most of the sets and other assets necessary to produce the series, and the cost of recreating them was prohibitively expensive. The network wasn't willing to spend a lot of cash on a revival of a series it had canceled, but eventually, someone at NBC asked Gene Roddenberry if he was willing to continue the Enterprise's five-year mission as an animated series?
The full story of how Star Trek: The Animated Series came to be is too complex to cover here; suffice it to say that in 1973 Gene Roddenberry, D.C. Fontana, and several writers who had written episodes for the live-action series teamed up with Lou Scheimer and Norm Prescott's Filmation studio to create 22 half-hour (24 minutes of content plus commercials ) episodes that aired between September 8. 1973 to October 12, 1974. (NBC kept airing the series on Saturday mornings in reruns until 1975.)
Star Trek: The Animated Series starred all but one of the cast members of TOS; at the time it was one of the most expensive animated shows because William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, and Majel Barrett provided the voices for the iconic characters they portrayed first in the 1966-69 Star Trek series, and later reprised in six theatrically released follow-up films from 1979 to 1991. To cut costs, Doohan, Nichols, and Barrett lent their voices to other characters seen in TAS; Walter Koenig, who played Pavel Chekov in TOS and the feature films, was not hired due to the show's already tight budget. Nevertheless, Koenig contributed to the series by penning the episode The Infinite Vulcan.
My Take
Although TAS was produced as an animated series and aired on Saturday mornings, Roddenberry and co-producer Dorothy C. Fontana (known professionally as "D.C.") insisted on treating the new series as a continuation of The Original Series. They commissioned scripts from writers who had written for the live-action show, including David Gerrold, Margaret Armen, and Fontana herself. Many of the scripts, including Gerrold's "More Tribbles, More Troubles" were derived from teleplays originally intended for the fourth season of The Original Series but were put away when that show was canceled.
The executive producers also took advantage of animation's ability for Star Trek to show exotic aliens that would have required makeup and costumes that were not affordable or practical in the live-action show. TAS introduced the three-armed navigator Lt. Arex (voiced by James Doohan) and the Caitian operations officer M'ress (voiced by Majel Barrett), characters which at the time could have only been rendered in animated form. The new format also allowed TAS to add features to the Enterprise not seen before, including a second turbolift exit on the bridge and a recreation room similar in concept to the holodeck seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation. TAS also introduced an aqua shuttle and life support belts that generated a force field, thus freeing Enterprise crew members from having to wear space suits.
The series earned a reputation for being "real" Star Trek despite airing on Saturday mornings as part of NBC's "kid-vid" programming block. After all, most of The Original Series cast lent their voices to Capt. Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, Mr. Scott, Lt. Sulu, Lt. Uhura, and Nurse Chapel, plus Gene Roddenberry was directly involved, even though the showrunners were Filmation's Lou Scheimer and Norman "Norm" Prescott. (Prescott, using the alias "Jeff Michael." co-wrote the series' theme with Ray Ellis, who used his wife Yvette Blais' name as a pseudonym.) Until 1988, TAS was considered canonical by Paramount Pictures, the studio which owned the Star Trek brand, but for business reasons, Star Trek creator asked that The Animated Series be removed from canon with the exception of a few biographical details about Spock's childhood.
Despite these superlatives, and in spite of the fact that the series earned an Emmy Award for outstanding children's programming in 1975 (the first Star Trek show to win an Emmy), The Animated Adventures of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek is not without flaws.
The series' writing, of course, was far better than that found in most of the other animated series of the time. Roddenberry and Fontana never approached Star Trek: The Animated Series as either a kids' show or a "cartoon." From a storyteller's point of view, the only differences between TOS and TAS were that episodes were shorter in The Animated Series and that writers were no longer bound by the restrictions of what could be done on a live-action set with the budgets and technical tools they had at the time.
But if animation gave free rein to the creative team to depict truly out-of-this-world aliens and exotic planets, the quality of the work by Filmation leaves a lot to be desired. The Reseda (California) production company was chosen not just because it was a well-established player in the industry but because it used an inexpensive method known as limited animation.
I'm not going to get too detailed about Filmation's style or technical processes. I will say that even though Prescott and Scheimer insisted on giving viewers better-animated programs than their competitors, they needed to use methods that saved the company both time and money, especially since Star Trek was just one of many shows Filmation was making.
As a result, The Animated Series often reuses many of the backdrops for alien planets whenever the producers and the show's two directors, Hal Sutherland and Bill Reed, felt it was expedient. (This was a "cheat" that Filmation was famous for; in fact, the company reused most of Star Trek's alien-world backdrops on later shows, including He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.) The directors would often reuse footage of the animated characters and, if it didn't hobble the story, use voiceovers while showing exteriors of the Enterprise, thus eliminating the need to create new animation cels for individual scenes.
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| Klingons...in pink? The animated version Captain Koloth in More Tribbles, More Troubles. © 1973, 2006 CBS Studios |
There are also many visual flubs, most of them caused by the need to get the episodes made on time and on budget. Viewers will occasionally see characters wearing the wrong color of Starfleet uniform shirt, or there will be inexplicable reversed colors on Enterprise crew gadgets. The oddest visual inconsistency is the presence of the color pink in many items that aren't supposed to be in that color. This was because Season One director Hal Sutherland was colorblind, so to him, everything that was light gray was pink.
Still, many Star Trek fans and many of the people behind the scenes (including David Gerrold and Dorothy Fontana consider Star Trek: The Animated Series to be part of the franchise's continuity. Many story plot points and place names established on the show were later incorporated into later TV series and even the Kelvin timeline Star Trek feature, and some fans have interpreted the release of TAS on DVD and Blu-ray as evidence that even Paramount and CBS (which owns the TV shows) consider The Animated Adventures of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek to be, well, real Trek.
The DVD Set
Released on November 21, 2006, Star Trek: The Animated Series - The Animated Adventures of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek consists of a four DVD set that presents all 22 episodes of the 1973-1974 series. The original Region 1 packaging included a uniquely-shaped outer case that contains a four-disc plastic jewel box and a booklet that lists all of the episodes, the extra features, a brief history of the series, and the essay "Animated Trek: Real or Not?"
The series' 22 episodes are presented thusly:
DVD 1:
- "Beyond the Farthest Star"
- "Yesteryear"
- "One of Our Planets Is Missing"
- "The Lorelei Signal"
- "More Tribbles, More Troubles"
- "The Survivor"
DVD 2:
- "The Infinite Vulcan"
- "The Magicks of Megas-Tu"
- "Once Upon a Planet"
- "Mudd's Passion"
- "The Terratin Incident"
- "The Time Trap"
DVD 3:
- "The Ambergris Element"
- "The Slaver Weapon"
- "The Eye of the Beholder"
- "The Jihad"
- "The Pirates of Orion"
DVD 4:
- "Bem"
- "The Practical Joker"
- "Albatross"
- "How Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth"
- "The Counter-Clock Incident"
- Special Features
The extra features include:
- Commentary on select episodes
- Text commentary on select episodes
- Drawn to the Final Frontier: The Making of Star Trek: The Animated Series
- What's the Star Trek Connection?
- Storyboard Gallery
- Show History
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