A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

© 1973 Filmation and Paramount Television. STAR TREK © CBS Studios Someone on Quora asked this question: In Star Trek: The Animated Series, why was Chekov replaced by an officer with three arms as the ship's navigator? In 1973, when Filmation got the contract from NBC and Paramount Television (the entity that inherited the Star Trek intellectual property after Paramount Pictures purchased Desilu in 1967) to produce Star Trek: The Animated Series , it faced one of the main issues that dogged creator/producer Gene Roddenberry when he was making the live action show: budget limitations. Television networks are nothing but penurious when it comes to paying for production costs under most circumstances. They are, after all, a business entity and not a charity ward for actors, writers, producers, and directors, and they’re only willing to shell out top dollar for proven genres and well-known talent because, in the suits’ estimation, that’s what gets the audience to park its ...

© 2006 CBS Studios. Photo Credit: StarTrek.com On November 21, 2006, 40 years and two months after the premiere of Star Trek (or, as it is now known, Star Trek: The Original Series  or TOS), CBS DVD released Star Trek: The Animated Series: The Animated Adventures of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek  (also known as TAS) , a four-disc box set that presents all 22 episodes of the NBC Saturday morning cartoon series that continued the adventures of the USS Enterprise under the command of Captain James T. Kirk. The DVDs also feature audio and text commentary (on selected episodes), a behind-the-scenes documentary, a featurette about the links between TAS and other series in the Star Trek franchise, plus a timeline of the show. 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 executiv...

Victory at Sea (1952-1953) Directed by M. Clay Adams Written by Henry Salomon and Richard Hanser Narrated by Leonard Graves 2003 Introductions: Peter Graves Victory at Sea is a 26-part television documentary that focuses mainly (but not exclusively) on naval warfare in World War II from the Allied point of view. Produced with the cooperation of the U.S. Navy, Victory at Sea originally aired on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) television network from October 1952 to May 1953.  The series won an Emmy for best public affairs program in 1954 and became the template for such historically themed documentaries as CBS’s World War One (1964-1965)  and Thames Television’s The World at War (1974) Produced and co-written (with Richard Hanser) by Henry Salomon and directed by M.Clay Adams, Victory at Sea consists of 26 half-hour  episodes that cover major naval battles and land campaigns in the European and Pacific theaters of war. The series follow...

In almost every TV series which airs in any country at any given time - at least as far as I have seen, anyway - even the best of shows seem to have their off-par episodes and, sadly, even off-par seasons. Take, for instance, the recently-canceled  24.   It started out strong in the fall season of 2001 and was - for the most part - a pretty good series until its fifth season.  Then, when it introduced James Cronwell as Jack Bauer's shady father and had him teaming up with villainous Chinese agents against his own son, the show ‘jumped the shark" and caused its most loyal fans to start wondering whether it had run out of creative steam. And even during its great seasons,  24  had its fair share of eye-rolling moments.  Who can forget Teri Bauer's bout with amnesia in the first season, or the nearly-deadly close encounter between Kim Bauer and a mountain lion in the second? (Not to mention all the moles who managed to infiltrate the happily ficti...