The Animated Series

Chrtoistopher: I was very careful to say I agreed with you, and that I was simply explaining the difference to those who might not be in the know on such matters. Don't be so quick to play the "I don't see the point" card.

A point of correction: re-use of stock animation does not free up animators to paint backgrounds. Animators animate. Background artists paint background. The animators get shifted to other shows when they're freed up.

 

Good for 1973 morning animation. Horrifically, laughably bad by any absolute standard of animation. Almost an unintentional parody of bad animation. My kids have loved TOS for years and THEY laugh at TAS. My daughter thinks I'm nuts to watch it occasionally. When something is flawed, best to fess up and admit it or one sounds like a blind acolyte, a knee-jerk apologist.

I would welcome someone taking a crack at well-animating a few of the stories. As an option. Leave the originals as they are though. I hate tinkering as in the TOS-R effects, very distracting.

 

Everything is flawed in some way. It's just a matter of setting one's expectations to fit the context. I wouldn't criticize a live stage play for failing to create a convincing sense of a vast, sweeping environment or for failing to have sophisticated special effects. I wouldn't criticize a 1940s live radio show for having all its music played on an organ or having the actors fumble their lines occasionally. It's a matter of recognizing the limitations of a medium or an era and setting your standards accordingly. It's about not being spoiled and demanding that works from decades in the past have to be up to modern standards. Some people refuse to watch black-and-white movies or TV shows because they demand color. Some people refuse to read books because they want to see pictures. I think that's their loss. I think I'm able to enjoy more things than they ever will because I'm not so judgmental about works created in an earlier state of the art.

TAS was about as well-made as any reasonable, informed person could expect any animated television series from 1973 to have been. Far from being cheap, it actually had a fairly high budget for a Filmation show (although a lot of that went to the actors). It's simply a matter of being realistic, of understanding what was possible at the time. If it had been incompetently made or atypically cheap for the era, if other works of the same type from the same period had been done better and this one just hadn't measured up, then it would be legitimate to criticize it. But they did the best they could with what they had, and some of what they did was beautiful despite the severe limits they were under, and I think that deserves respect.

 

I grew up with a lot of repeats of Filmation animation (as well as new productions) in the early 1980s, so I got use to it. However the similarly aged Star Blazers (Japan's Space Battleship Yamato) does as good, if not a better job with the animation, even thought there are about as many errors due to the even more rushed nature of that production in 1974 abd 1975. (Yamato and TAS overlap in episode transmission in October of 1974. They also produce a few similar concepts that were made independantly of each other. The holodeck concept was show on Star Trek only a week or two before it appeared in Yamato, and the two could not have been copying each other due to production ability.)

 

Case in point: I had a girlfriend who refused to watch (brace yourself) Citizen Kane for that very reason.

 

Here's a question, just sort of jumping off your idea here. I've often wondered if it would be a good idea to take the audio (recorded by the original cast) of the point-and-click adventure games '20th Anniversary' and 'Judgment Rites' and adapt them into new animated series episodes, templating those episodes on the style and art of the original animated series. While the dialogue readings are pretty stilted, there is some great banter between Spock and McCoy and the plots are generally pretty good (assuming you edit out all the game specific banter).

The entirety of Judgment Rites can be viewed on Youtube here (and thinking about it, would also be a no-brainer to put these on iPad already):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcgE3qZ9uws

 

Actually I revisited Star Blazers not that long ago and was struck by how much cruder the animation was than I remembered it to be. It's certainly more fluid than what Filmation was doing at the same time, but it also had a lot of repetition of its own and, as you say, a lot of errors and sloppy art. When I first saw it, I thought it was a revolutionary improvement over the limited animation I was used to, and in some ways it was; but in retrospect, I'm more aware of its limitations and flaws compared to more modern anime.

As for the "holodeck" or virtual-environment idea, that had been around in science fiction since at least Arthur C. Clarke's The City and the Stars in 1956, so it's not as if either show pioneered it.

 

Star Blazers' remake Star Blazers 2199 (made from 2012 to 2013, with a new film coming out in December 2014) does a lot to make the old show fit into the modern animation styles while staying true to the orignal concepts.

It has been considered the best remake of any kind. (To the point were people tend to say "See this Hollywood? This is how you make a remake") Keeping true to the original in spirit while also fixing problems with the plot and using animation errors or various in-show recons (the staff changed their mind about what color the aliens should be a third of the way through production in 1974) to their advantage in storytelling.

 

I should probably take a moment to state that while I've *always* been in discussions involving TAS in which someone criticized the animation that doesn't necessarily reflect *MY* opinion.

Having grown up on Masters of the Universe, I have no problem with the animation, though it is dated and has not aged as well as, say, the Fleischer Superman cartoons.

(Christopher, respect him as much as I do, seems to be assuming these discussions I've had are relegated to Internet fan boy bitching, but that's not an accurate assumption. I've experienced TAS animation criticism even as far back as grade school.)

That would be AWESOME!!!

I was always struck by how authentic the 25th Anniversary game and Judgement Rites felt. They really did feel like an extension of TOS.

I miss playing those games.

 

Speaking of Star Blazers, I always got a kick out of the scene where the Gamelons' skin color changes from flesh-colored to blue. It's like the producers weren't making any excuses for the retcon, they just did it right in front of us, mid-scene. It would be as if during TMP, a Kor-like TOS Klingon started walking down a corridor, only to have the scene dissolve into another scene showing the same actor in full TMP Klingon makeup, then acting as if that's the way the Klingons looked the whole time.

I have some vague notion that the scene in which Desslock's skin changes color was staged to make it seem as if he were stepping out of the shadows and showing for the first time his "real" skin color in the light of day. I may be wrong about that though. I haven't seen SB since I was a kid. Maybe you could confirm that, Christopher?

 

Methinks you doth defend too much.

See, old time radio is still good drama, often with great production values in its own unique way. I listen on XM still. But if we had 100 years of old time radio, there'd probably be an era or style that I would agree sucked relative to most of it.

Just like '70s Saturday morning "animation." 1970s TV animation sucks as animation. It is barely "animated." More like coloring book pages whose lips move.

You love Filmation, I get that. Love it. I love the Tigers. But there are some years (decades) they suck and I just have to admit it. There are reasons for the suckishness; they might be trying hard, limited by an owner's budget, whatever, but they still suck.

I like really bad, manufactured pop from the late '60s and '70s. The Cowsills for God's sakes. Davy Jones. Bobby Sherman. I love it, but freely admit as a musician it is awful dreck.

TAS is a GREAT 70s Saturday toon show. (I said I watch it, remember.) The backgrounds are all trippy; as we noted before there is little to no fighting or space kissing; the stories are often more sci-fi than TOS; there's The Magicks, which is amazing, for Saturday morning. Et c.

BUT the animation, seriously, woof. So I and others of my ilk would at least like to see some of the stories animated better. You asked "What would be the point?" I think. Well, what's the point to anything? Because I like animation and think it would be kind of cool to see it done better.

Ain't gonna happen.

Love, peace and well-being to all. Thanks for the discussion. I'm off to watch Magicks, I think. . .

 

Hmm, I definitely see what you mean.

I love Supergirl, Superman III, Jaws: The Revenge, and Masters of the Universe (the Dolph Lundgren movie).

Yeah, they're not "good movies" but I love them anyway.

 

One thing that's really neat about voice recordings of the actors as they got older, is to play the videos/audio back at a slightly increased speed, and they sound remarkably TOS-like in their pitch and energy. Sometimes so much so, it's creepy!

 

TAS's limited animation could have been much, much worse.

But if they're gonna go to the trouble, why wouldn't they just give us new stories? TAS is what it is.

 

I think the only reason would be: you already have the TOS cast's voices.

If you do new adventures, you have to get new actors.

 

I can confirm the skin change of Desslok. About episode 10 the producer told the art department he wanted the Gamilons to have blue skin so that the audiance wouldn't identify with them as much as if they were a more human skin tone.

The art department, being Japanese, could not actually protest, but they decided to attempt to make it logical that the more pale skin color and brown hair Desslok sports before episode 11 were due to bad lighting, as they have him change color before our eyes as the lighting improves, until he is blue with blonde hair. The on screen change was the art department attempting to make an on screen reason for the skin color change ordered from the higher ups.

In Star Blazers 2199, the production staff decides to use that by making the pale skinned Pluto Base Gamilons as part of a conquered race (second-class citizens of the Greater Gamilas Empire from the planet Zaltz.), while Desslok and the majority of his officers are blue skinned first-class citizens of his Empire. Though on his first appearance, Desslok goes though some poor lighting and briefly shift color slightly as nod to the old art staff.

 

Yeah, I think the only argument for it is that many people are driven away from TAS because of the poor animation (whether it was cutting edge at the time or not, it's generally *considered* [rightly or wrongly] bad today) but they might actually enjoy the same stories, with the original cast, if it were animated to contemporary standards.

This is not *that* dissimilar to the re-done effects in TOS. They didn't try to recreate the effects precisely at they were in the original airing, they tried to recreate them to match the spirit of what was perhaps intended. If the budget of TAS did indeed lead to animation problems that make it feel budget, there's no reason not to think they might not have done a better job- with a better budget. Not thinking this would happen in a million years, but I'd watch it if they made it.

 

This isn't really a fair comparison either. I am a fan of TAS, Max Fleischer Superman cartoons and Msters of the Universe. In fact I have them all on my DVD shelf.

We have to remember that those old WWII era cartoons were not kid stuff. They were produced as shorts to be run with movies in theaters and were written with adults in mind more than children. I watch these cartoons now with my five-year-old. He loves the action and cheers Superman on when ever he shows up, but the political stuff about sinking Japanese warships or fighting the Germans goes right over his head.

Thirty years later, when cartoons are being made for television with an overall cultural shift towards "cartoons=kiddies" cheap fast "crank-it-out-for-the-next-week" animation reigned supreme. Filmation v. Max Fleischer is apples and oranges.

Another part is the writing. There was a writer's strike on when TAS was in production, so the regular crew was out, freeing up space for authentic sci-fi authors to come in and get a check for writing the show. This is why the stories are pretty high-bar stuff for the most part.

I'm not sure how much it effected TAS, but I know that years later for He-Man the writing suffered from the rules imposed by the suits who were intent on making a children's show. This is why Skeletor was always such a bumbling idiot, as if he had any good ideas in might make the good-guys look dumb. But some of my favorite genre writers worked on that show and I know they had more talent than they were allowed to use. As much as I like He-Man I must admit, when I watch it, I'm watching it for what it so close to being more than for what it actually is.

--Alex

 

Chuck Jones decreed TV animation "illustrated radio". Largely, he was right.

 

I would love that! I love the 25th anniversary game,
(although I've never yet beat that lousy fake Enterprise )!

I bought the wrong version of Judgement rites so I haven't played that one, yet.

Don't forget Flash Gordon and Dolph Lundgren's Punisher! Oh, and the 13th Warrior, I love that one. And Soldier with Kurt Russel. Maybe I better quit this to another thread.