New Digital animation for TAS- would you want it?

I don't know how they could upgrade it, really without re-drawing it entirely.

Then it would indeed lose its charm.

 

I'm a huge TAS fan from 'way back, so it's odd that I'd say this:

But I'd be totally in favor of a full-CGI re-working of TAS, with the following provisos:

Retain the original sound track (music, dialog, sound effects, etc) as a separate, non-default audio track.

For the main audio track:

The original master dialog recordings should be given a full HD/Director's Edition/Remastered treatment. When finished, they should sound pristine on a modern stereo system.

The music for the original scores by Ray Ellis and Norm Prescott (aka Yvette Blais) should be turned over to a modern composer to use as the basis for new, individual episode scores.

I love the TAS music ... believe it or not, I've had a long-term, about 10-year project, now to extract isolated music from the extant episode and piece it together. Eventually, I want all the music cues intact, without any dialog or sound effects to interfere.

Unfortunately, what you find if you do this is that the audio tracks, even on the DVDs vary so dramatically that it's difficult to process multiple clips to make it sound cohesive.

Also, just because Action Cue #3 sounds really cool doesn't mean it should be used at least twice every episode.

Hire a composer with an understanding of Ellis' style to compose new episode scores using Ellis' originals as the basis. Then record it with the London Symphony Orchestra.

Then release a soundtrack CD: Track 26 will be a bonus track of original Ellis TAS cues performed by the London Symphony. Perhaps put together to form "The Star Trek Animated Suite".

Same treatment with sound effects, maintaining most but returning to a few of the originals that were changed in TAS. There's no reason the viewscreen effect shouldn't be the same funky "ping" sound as TOS, for example.

Put it all together and CGI the frak out of it. Don't be afraid to occasionally take risks with slightly altered pacing. Sometimes the episodes jammed a lot of story into 30 minutes -- David Gerrold has said that they wrote the same 60 pages they did for TOS, it just played faster in animation. It's not a bad idea to slow a few things down and speed a few things up: the stories would play better.

If they did that, I'd love it. I'm told, however, that the original dialog, music, and sound effects tracks for the entire Filmation library were intentionally incinerated by Hallmark after they purchased it.

Not just the audio tracks, either. Reportedly, they destroyed everything: scripts, storyboards, artwork, sheet music, you name it ... it all went into an incinerator. They only thing they kept were original prints.

I don't know if that's true, but it's just the kind of short-sighted business decision huge corporations companies make.

What survives is now mostly for TAS from Roddenberry.com, is in the hands of private collectors or university libraries, or is sitting in some grand-nephew's attic.

If true, it means that whatever audio tracks exist now are the only audio tracks that will ever exist. It might be possible to extract dialog from the full track, but isolating it would be an enormous chore. You might end up with a dialog track that's more samples and processing than original recording.

Regardless, I do wish some bright composer with a great ear would sit down with a copy of my extracted music clips and re-create the music score. If that were available, it would at least be possible to re-record the music some day.

It's not that much music, either -- all told, ten minutes tops. Maybe fifteen if you include a couple of variations on the main theme.

Dakota Smith

 

You can't really separate the dialog from the music unless you have the separate tracks, and my suspicion is that those aren't around.

The "charm" people claim the show has is purely nostalgic. The show has a very bland, pedestrian design style, and only the backgrounds give it any oomph.

 

I'd rather see NEW Classic Trek animated episodes, not a rehash of what we've already seen.

 

Me, too, actually, Rod. For me, any motivation for "Re-Envisioning" TAS would be based on the original dialog recordings.

TAS had some really nice stories, and a lot of times this is obscured by the limitations of the 1970s Saturday morning animation.

It was certainly some of the best 1970s Saturday morning animation. If NBC had given it a real budget, it could have been a prime-time show, at least in terms of story. But it suffered from a low budget spent mostly on scripts, so there was endless stock footage, endless stock music, endless tricks to avoid animating in a shot ... all because they didn't have the money.

It wasn't that they didn't want to: I recently got a bootlegged copy of Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure Of All, and it's nothing less than Filmation's masterpiece. The studio really could do top-notch, full-animation, high-quality work when they had the money.

It showed in TAS, too: they put the money where it would do the most good, into background panoramas and vistas. Those tended to be spectacular while the rest of the show used stock footage with animated lips for almost everything else.

I guess I'd just like to see that kind of work applied to TAS's stories. However, if they can't get the original dialog recordings, there's little point in bothering. The only selling point would be the voices of the original cast. If it didn't have them, I wouldn't even want to buy the episodes.

But a new TAS, yes, that would be awesome. I'm available for either Scotty or McCoy -- I've been successfully mimicing them for years.

Dakota Smith

 

That's still limited animation. It's just less-limited than what they did for Saturday morning. The characters typically strike poses and there are limited head turns, mouth and jaw movement, and blinking. It's not full animation by any long shot.

 

You're correct that by the standards of feature films, it's not full animation. I should have been more specific in making my point.

The Greatest Adventure is Filmation's masterpiece. It comes as close to full animation as Filmation could have come given the budgetary restrictions and the fact that this was a TV movie/pilot. Compare The Greatest Adventure to the TV series that it spawned. There's a world of difference.

No, The Greatest Adventure isn't Fantasia. I hope I didn't make it sound like it was. It is, however, significantly more detailed and realistic than anything else Filmation produced. Scenes are lit, there are often shadows, the framerate is very high. The characters actually emote rather than sit with immobile faces.

It's not Fantasia, but it proves that Filmation could do good work when they had the time and money to do it. They weren't hacks, but artists trying to do the best job possible under trying circumstances.

Dakota Smith

 

The person who would know best what's still around and what got trashed is Lou Scheimer. Any idea how to get ahold of him?

 

I don't know, but I'd really like to research and develop a Ray Ellis Filmation soundtrack CD, if the original music masters still exist.

Based on my reasearch in TAS, Ellis probably scored about 10 minutes of original music per series. They were different in tone, but formulaic because that was how he had to work. He had absolutely no idea what the stories might be, nor where the music actually be laid down or edited.

For an action show like TAS, he produced about three outright "action" cues (each slightly more evocative of a particular situation) and a couple of "suspense" cues.

I have a deep suspicion (based on nothing but listening to the music) that Norm Prescott scored the "love" cues for each of the show. This would explain why he was part of the "Yvette Blais" duo:

Ellis' music is usually specific within a given show. For example, the music he wrote for Lassie's Rescue Rangers contained common motifs and themes. The music for Star Trek similarly had common motifs and themes, but TAS' were totally unlike those produced for Lassie.

The "love themes" for each given show are totally formulaic. If you've heard one, you've heard them all. It takes Ellis' major musical motif for any given show, slows it down, changes the major instrument to flutes and woodwinds, and just plays it. That's the love theme every single time. It frankly feels like someone other than Ellis wrote them.

The reason Filmation's music got to sound so repetitive is that by the mid-1970s, the studio had a a pretty decent library of cues from which to draw. Action cues originally written for Lassie show up in Star Trek. Cues written for Star Trek showed up in every later show Filmation produced.

I don't know what that adds up to in terms of material, but I bet you could get a single CD out of the collection. I really, really hope it exists, though from everything I've been told, the originals are long-destroyed.

I would dearly love to get all the originals thoroughly digitized, categorized, and eventually published. Along with the "Star Trek Animated Suite," of course: Ellis' TAS cues orchestrated into a single piece performed by the London Symphony.

I absolutely volunteer to do the work. It'd be a dream come true.

Beyond TAS, of course, I'm fascinated by the music for Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure Of All. It's the only time Ellis ever really had the time, money, and planning to write some level of true film score. The music in The Greatest Adventure tells a story, and specific cues are scored for specific sequences. The movie used no stock music from other shows (though it does re-use music within itself -- on one occasion to extremely detrimental effect).

It's still bombastic as hell, and it's still obviously occasionally edited by someone with a rather heavy hand. But it's different from the other music he did for Filmation because Ellis had the luxury of writing music for the action, rather than generic cues intended to be inserted almost anywhere.

What's Scheimer's phone number, and can anybody spare the backing money for a project like this?

I'll need myself for the research and producing chores, and at least one really top-notch sound engineer. And studio time, if necessary. For a studio like CBS/Paramount, the expenditure is pretty low. It should be a decent ROI, even given that few people are as nutty on the subject as I.

Still a chance to slap the ol' Star Trek name on something new. Time it to release the CD say, six months in advance of the next movie ... ?

Of course, if the masters were destroyed as I suspect they were, the whole thing's off. With a couple of really, really good sound engineers, you might be able to piece together the music. But I know from doing it that it's messy work: sound quality varies a lot on the existing tracks, whole portions of the sound spectrum simply don't exist. There are a couple of really pristine audio tracks, but unfortunately the music tends to occur with dialog and sound effects, so it's unusable for this purpose.

In short, I expect to spend free time for the next ten years or so getting my cues in shape. A really top-notch engineer could do it, faster, but I still wouldn't envy them the work.

I'm not sure what the ROI would be for that: again, the expenditure wouldn't be horrific, but the result would be more the sound engineer's masterpiece than anything else.

Dakota Smith

 

Start checking some industry sites. Lou Scheimer Productions is probably a good place to start, but the website louscheimerproductions.com is kind of a dead end.

 

I'm sure there were more cues in use than that, though some of the music on TAS was recycled from earlier shows.

Actually Filmation's music was credited to Yvette Blais (the name of Ray Ellis's wife) and Jeff Michael (the first names of Norm Prescott's two sons). The only shows credited solely to Blais are the ones from later years, when Prescott left but before Ellis stopped working for Filmation.

Actually I was going to cite Lassie as the source of some of those recycled cues. There's one in particular that begins with a two-note "ping-ping" ostinato, then adds a rising and falling string glissando, then repeats that and adds horns and such to make it more intense, then reverses the process in the final half. I believe that debuted in Lassie, but it was used in multiple other Filmation shows including TAS, Tarzan, Shazam, Isis, etc. A bunch of Lassie music was reused in Shazam/Isis.

And while the TAS cues specifically using the TAS theme as their melody were used only in that show, there are other cues composed for TAS that I have heard occasionally used in other Filmation shows from the '70s. In particular, I'm pretty sure I recall the famous TAS "Dahhhh, dah-dahhhh! (harp glissando) Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh" cue being used in a Batman episode involving a visit to Bat-Mite's dimension of Ergo. It stood out to me precisely because it was unusual to hear that cue on that show, and I figured it was used because it was "space music."

Well, that's splitting hairs, since that's not writing so much as arranging or orchestrating. The composer credit would still go to the person who created the melody.

What would be useful is to compare the "Yvette Blais-Jeff Michael" music with Ellis's scores from other shows. For instance, Ellis did the first season of the '60s Spider-Man cartoon, the one with the famous theme song (though he didn't write that). Its music did resemble Filmation's action music in a lot of ways, but I don't recall any cues that resembled the "love theme" style, as you put it, of Filmation's music. Or, for that matter, the comedy cues (many of which I hate).

I used to think that, but I was surprised to learn that wasn't the case. I bought Space Academy and Jason of Star Command expecting to hear a bunch of TAS cues, and there were some in the first season of JoSC, but nothing in the rest. And there was no TAS music in Flash Gordon, Blackstar, Space Sentinels, or the other Ellis-era Filmation shows I've revisited lately. Instead, the later shows had their own largely or entirely original scores. So if anything, I'd say there was less reuse of music between shows as time went on, not more.

(By the way, if you're in it for the music, avoid Space Sentinels. It was one of the few Filmation shows on NBC rather than CBS, and NBC must've given it a microscopic music budget, since it's mostly just a very few, very annoying electronic cues that are reused incessantly and very choppily edited together. Although there's one jazzy melody that sounds so strikingly like the TOS theme that I wonder if it was a rejected theme for TAS.)

That Starship Farragut fan film that recreated the TAS style uses a lot of TAS cues that are evidently complete and in the clear. You might want to track down its creators and talk to them about how they obtained them.

Yeah, that was a fabulous score. There was a definite influence of Holst's "Mars, the Bringer of War" in a couple of places.

 

As always, Google knows all:

Lou Scheimer Productions

Complete with address, phone number, streetview, and GPS coordinates to shoot to my Droid.

Google continues to amaze me.

I just friend-requested him on Facebook, for what it's worth ... we both share David Gerrold as a friend ... lol ...

Dakota Smith

 

Well, if you're talking individual cues, I've been able to identify basically five. There are a couple of variations. What I call the "chase cue" has this strange, considerably jazzier variation that I could only find used in "The Jihad."

But in terms of just raw, identifiable music cues, it really narrows down to about five.

Now, they edited the frak out of them: pulled pieces from the intro of one cue to form an intro for another. Cut a cue at the end of a motif and put it together with another cue to attempt to match action.

There was a ton of that, a lot more than is immediately apparent ... unless you've been an idiot like me and actually ripped all the DVDs' audio tracks and eliminated anything that's got dialog, sound effects, or silence. Then you hear all the tricks, and they were legion. To be honest, I'm extremely impressed with the music editor, because in those days it wasn't a matter of finding a precise position where a waveform ended and hitting DEL. You sat with headphones and listened for the end of a sound, then chopped out the piece you wanted with what amounted to a knife.

In the context of the amount of work the music editor did, it's positively frenetic. I'm sure whomever it was was constantly praying for new music, because there were only so many ways you could cut these together.

Yep, total agreement. Where TAS used stock cues was sparing, to be sure -- and what little there was tended to come from Lassie. It was an adventure show and the music had an adventurous feel to it that could work for TAS.

Captain Marvel loved Lassie. The moral of the story every week the first season had Jackson Bostwick flying in as Captain Marvel to a Lassie theme, for example.

(There's another track I'd dearly love to get my hands on: the original masters for the theme from Shazam! I've sort of pieced together a track from an Isis episode where the theme backs Marvel pulling a boat to port. Combined with the end titles from the animated series a couple of years later, it sort of works.

(But it sounds like crap, because there's no good audio anywhere for it. However, the fact that it exists at all in a 60-plus second version for the end credits of the animated show hints at what must have been recorded.)

I know what you mean. What I've come to think of as TAS "Action Cue #2" (an arbitrary designation on my part) is the one that begins with a fanfare and horns, repeated a couple of measures with cellos doing a fast harmony underneath it. It rises in pitch a couple of times in the original recording, up about two octaves and ends fairly abruptly.

(In TAS, it's usually edited together with what I think of Action Cue #3. More strictly a chase cue, with similar orchestration to Action Cue #2: cellos doing a constant bassline underneath to heighten suspense with horns and other instruments doing an increasing pitch melody that repeats a couple of times.

(In the really good audio, you can hear a drumbeat and the drummer tapping the edge of a drum in time to the cellos bassline.

(Action Cues 2 and 3 tended to go together because the story narrative was usually: something bad happens; the leads decide what to do about it; then they do it. The music was usually edited so that Cue 2 occurred as a fanfare to something bad happening and the leads figuring out what to do. Cue 3 then happened as they set out to do it.)

Anyway, Action Cue #2 came to be used in Shazam, Space Academy, Jason Of Star Command ... I was jarred out of the moment by it every time, because to me that was TAS' "The crap has hit the fan!" music.

I admit to ignorance on terms. I'm a informed listener, not a musician. I can follow music but can't read it (though I could 30 years ago).

Absolutely, I'd love to get together all of Ellis' TV and film music if it were possible. Release it as a collection of CDs with an accompanying biographical piece or six.

Yes, short of still having the principals around to tell us, that would be the best way to try and figure out what from Filmation was Ellis and what was Prescott.

The cue I think of as the "love theme" music can be heard nicely in "The Slaver Weapon" when Spock makes his final log entry for the episode. Contrast it with the Flash Gordon "love theme" that can be heard under the scene where Thun and Flash are bedding down in Barin's castle, just before Zarkov contacts them.

(Edit: I just realized that this wording sounded extremely gay. It wasn't so intended and it's not how the scene plays. However, the music is just a bit incongruous because it's structured the way I think of a "love theme".

(It's another reason that I'm not sure if Ellis was directly responsible or not. The music is good, it works for the scene all right. But it doesn't work as well as the music for the desert crossing scene works for its scene.)

They're both just re-orchestrations of the primary motif of the show. When you listen for it, it's the same everywhere. Given that Ellis' music tended to be a little more complex than that, I just wonder if he was directly responsible for it?

And the comedy cues. Yes, hate them. The worst for me is the one played under Kirk getting inundated with Tribbles. The camera cuts to Kirk in a pile of Tribbles ... and there it is. That comedy cue. The one that will forever scream Filmation.

And worse, there are cooing and purring Tribbles over it.

And even in the 1970s I'd heard that cue forever. I think it may have originated the The Archies.

That doesn't shock me. That was going into what I think of as Filmation's twilight artistically. They were no longer producing work like Star Trek or Flash Gordon. They had unfortunately jumped the shark by Space Sentinals.

I'll definitely look, thanks! However I'll be willing to bet they come from one of three episodes. "The Slaver Weapon" is a really good bet.

Oh, how I love the audio for "The Slaver Weapon." You can actually hear the drummer tapping the rim during Action Cue #3. You can hear actors breathe if you listen closely.

And a lot of the music is in the clear. Not enough to create full cues, but enough to make you rip out your hair wishing they were all this good.

The desert crossing scene continues to amaze me. Both in terms of the animation (which is fantastic -- utterly brilliant compared to what Filmation did on Saturday mornings), but also the score. The music is clearly scored to the animation, and it's perfect. Very evocative of the old Flash Gordan serials, somehow.

The whole sequence takes its time, its not rushed like so many of Filmation's TV episodes. Flash, Dale, and Zarkov are dragged on a lengthy trip through a desert of blowing sand and craggy outcroppings. The visuals are clear, and the music makes an actual complete musical statement. It's a full piece, admittedly only a couple of minutes long. But it's the only music score of Ellis' of which I'm aware that he had the luxury of scoring it that way.

Dakota Smith

 

Ptrope, the mod over in the Fan Art forum is actually working on replacing the Filmation animation w/ cgi.

Star Trek Reanimated

 

If you're referring only to the action cues, you could be right. But in total, I'm certain there were significantly more than that. Heck, just off the top of my head I can think of five cues that use the main title theme: 1) the "Captain's Log" music that opened every episode; 2) an action arrangement of the "fanfare" portion of the TAS theme, lots of horns over a string ostinato, with some urgent woodwinds here and there; 3) a brief 8-note sting on horns, conveying an intense or surprising moment; 4) another brief, quieter sting playing a variation of the fanfare melody on what I think is a bass clarinet, followed by a subdued 2-note "ping-ping" motif; and 5) your "love theme" variation of the second, "song" portion of the main title.

And there are several distinct slow/quiet cues conveying mystery, eeriness, etc. There's the one that's slow strings playing four long notes, followed by a Clint-Eastwoody "oo-ee-oo-ee-oo." There's the one that's, I think, flutes and horns playing a staccato two-note cycle for eight notes, then rises to a higher cycle for eight, and so on. There's one that has a falling "ping-ping-ping" ostinato under slow horns. And there's one that begins as a variation on that, with the same ostinato played on strings and a rising statement on horns that builds up in intensity and suspense until you get a "scary" sting at the end (that's one of my favorites). Well, that one's more a suspense cue. I can think of another suspense cue with a 5-note phrase on low horns under a 3-note trumpet phrase, leading into a rising 7-note phrase that repeats twice.

Then there are a variety of short stings I could list, but you get the idea.

I don't think those are two separate cues cut together. I've heard them together too often in too many contexts, and they fit together so perfectly in harmonics and orchestration. I've always thought of them as the A and B parts of a single cue that sometimes has only one part or the other used. Although since that cue would undoubtedly have been written to allow for that, the distinction may be irrelevant.

Actually Space Sentinels came out in 1977, simultaneous with Space Academy and preceding Jason of Star Command and Flash Gordon. So that was when Filmation was just about at its creative peak. It's just the music that was bad (well, the show wasn't great, but it was par for the course), and it was much worse on this show than its contemporaries on CBS. That's why I think it must've been a network/budgeting issue. (Though, paradoxically, Flash Gordon was also on NBC.)

Just talk to them. That's all I'm saying.

 

The animated Farragut soundtrack was ripped from the DVDs. The music WAS on a separate track, however, the volume goes up and down with the dialog. I can only assume this means the dialog is also on a separate track.

 

Hmm, that would make sense. I know that the Filmation shows have the dialogue on one track and music and sound effects combined on another. The Isis DVDs have a few episodes with a music-and-SFX-only track. I guess if you can isolate that track, you could cut together enough bits without SFX to reconstruct the bulk of the score.

 

Razor blade, actually, along with a grease pencil to mark your spot, a little aluminum miter block, called an editing block, and a reel-to-reel tape recorder you can put in neutral so you can do a little wicky-wicky action on the playback head until you locate the right spot to make the cut.

A little something I got down to an art form back in the day...