Over the weekend I finished watching all the episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series.
I remember back when it originally aired on Saturday mornings in 1973 / 74. Yes, those dark days, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, and you didn’t even have VCRs to be able to record the episodes to watch later. You had to watch shows when they came on, or miss out. I was just a young lad back then.
The series was as bad as I remembered and not-quite as bad as I remembered.
First off, as bad as I remembered. I didn’t watch the series when it originally aired. I saw part of the episodes Yesteryear and More Tribbles, More Troubles and one other episode I can’t remember. At the time, my young self thought the animation was sub-par and the storytelling weak. It was a major disappointment to my younger self, not worthy of the legacy of Star Trek.
Filmation made many of their series by reusing stock footage as much as they could. So, you’d see the same close-up of Kirk, or Spock, or whoever multiple times in one episode, let alone the entire series. They used the same animation to show the characters running. If the characters were walking, it was a silhouette in the distance. I get that making animated episodes is expensive and time-consuming. The production company was trying to keep costs down. But they sacrificed the quality I’d come to expect from my Saturday morning cartoons and it put me off the series.
Shatner voiced his lines in many of the early episodes in a flat monotone with little inflection. Whether he thought doing a ‘cartoon’ series was beneath him, or some other reason, I would have expected more from him. Some of the later episodes weren’t much better when he was trying to put some emotion into the lines, but it sounded more like he was just trying to get through the lines. Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelly sounded much like the Spock and McCoy we all know and loved from the original series. Even Nichelle Nichols, Jimmy Doohan, George Takei, and Majel Barrett (Uhura, Scotty, Sulu, and Nurse Chapel, respectively) did a good job, and provided some of the voices of other characters (again, the producers cutting costs.)
Now, the not-quite as bad as I remembered. The stories, while not stellar, were not horrible ether. I don’t think any dipped quite as low in quality as say, Spock’s Brain from the Original series. I’m guessing they were mainly thinking this was a ‘Saturday morning cartoon’, aimed at kids, rather than an extension of the Star Trek canon. They could have done much more with the stories, given they had a ‘unlimited special effects budget’ through animation. They didn’t push the envelope, story-wise and kept things mainly sedate and not overly confrontational. One episode had a pre-cursor to the Holodeck in later Trek series. McCoy, Uhura and Sulu enter the ‘Rec Room’ and use a control panel to create a nice forest to walk through. This is one of the few times they really did use that ‘unlimited budget’ and create multiple environments inside the Rec Room. Doing that through special effects would have cost a lot for a ‘live’ episode.
One story did get a little ‘edgy’. The Magicks of Megas-Tu has the Enterprise encountering a pocket dimension where the laws of physics work differently. The main entity they deal with, Asmodeus, looks rather like a satyr and not quite unlike the Devil. Asmodeus is a demon in mythology, so that should give you some clue as to who the character really is. Asmodeus and his cronies visited Earth when humans were still a young race, but humanity rejected them. One thing leads to another, Kirk and crew are put on trial, as is Asmodeus, also known as Lucian, and they have to talk their way out of it. Ultimately, Lucien is going to be put to death, but Kirk argues that humanity had grown more compassionate since the days Lucien visited Earth and Lucien didn’t deserve to die. Then the Judge asks Kirk would he feel the same if he knew Lucien’s real name was … duhn duhn duhnnnn … Lucifer! Kirk argues that even Lucifer deserved compassion. That of course, was the answer the aliens are looking for and welcome Kirk and crew into the fold.
I can see the parents who later went on to lead the Satanic Panic (the movement that said media – comic books, rock and roll, and worst of all Dungeons and Dragons!, would lead our youth down dark paths to devil worship and worse) having a field day with the episode. Sympathy for the Devil? Can’t have that. (Nor the song of the same name by the Rolling Stones.)
Overall, it was worth watching just to keep track of the canon, but I don’t feel a strong need to watch these episode ever again.
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