New Appreciation for TAS
- Thread starter Bry_Sinclair
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There's also a Gold Key Star Trek comic written by Len Wein, "Museum at the End of Time," that's uncannily similar to "The Time Trap" and came out the previous year, which has often made me wonder. I mean, the general concept is widespread enough to be coincidental, but Wein's story also involved the Enterprise crew having to cooperate with Klingons to escape.
Interesting. Could Wein have been an uncredited writer for TTT?
It was credited to writer/actress Joyce Perry. I think if Wein had been a co-writer, we would've found out by now.
Are there better examples of animation for something like Star Trek?
I mean a bench mark - a serious animated sci-fi series we can look at and say we wish the Star Trek animated series was like that. There's the Star Wars stuff but I'm not a big fan of that.
I would've enjoyed it if Sunbow Productions had made an animated Star Trek series in their naturalistic style from the Eighties (best known through series such as Jem, The Transformers, and GI Joe).
I would've loved it if Filmation had done a second Trek animated series in 1980, as a followup to ST:TMP. Their animation quality had improved considerably by then, as seen in shows like Flash Gordon and The Lone Ranger. Their music was beautifully rich and cinematic, and by the early '80s they'd started to bring on writers like Paul Dini, Michael Reaves, and eventually Diane Duane and J. Michael Straczynski. They'd done revivals of other shows, like Batman and Fat Albert, so it was theoretically possible. And an animated series building off of TMP could've made use of the new alien crewmembers that were only glimpsed in passing in the movie.
I love TAS. One thing bothers me though. That is, the overuse of the "explosions". Those annoying little "pow, pow, pow ..." explosions.
I've always enjoyed TAS despite its limitations. I didn't get a chance to see Trek in its initial network run but was old enough to become a fan once it hit syndication. By the time TAS premiered, I was 10 years old and the thrill of watching new, first-run Trek was thrilling to me. For many reasons, it remains so because there are elements I truly enjoy, from the music to the original cast voicing the animated versions of their characters (plus some), to the incredibly lush backgrounds and imaginative alien designs. While some of the stories were sub-standard in my opinion, it doesn't stop my enjoyment of it and the feeling of excitement I get whenever I decide to rewatch the episodes.
I don't know, I don't recall many sci-fi cartoons in that period. Maybe some of the comics-based or anime stuff like "Battle of the Planets"? I've seen screen-caps but not the actual show.
Battle of the Planets was pretty dumb and weird. It was actually based on an entirely Earth-based anime called Gatchaman, but it came out in the wake of Star Wars, so the US distributors added new framing animation with a robot character and rewrote things to make it seem like the characters were traveling from planet to planet.
Absolutely agree, an animated series following TMP would have been fascinating. Especially, to fill in the events between TMP and the WOK.
Sorry to bother you, but do you mean the second bridge exit was seen in TOS ?
No, he means TAS. We never saw an alternate exit in TOS, although it's pretty clear there was one.
Filmation's actual "animation" quality barely changed between TAS and the 80s. It's still mostly still poses with a few overlay cels punctuated by occasional fuller animation for a moment of action, but by and large it was no better. Their Flash Gordon show benefitted from what appears to have been a more substantial budget for its inaugural movie, from which a lot of animation was endlessly recycled for the course of the show. Oh, yeah, and they discovered slot-mask animation to pep up energy fields and magical barrier at little relative cost. 
But TV animation in general was cheap and the show budgets allowed for little more than what you got, no matter what studio. Early on Shamus Culhane experimented with forgetting about lip sync and putting the money normally spent on that into more movement, but it never caught on.
But TV animation in general was cheap and the show budgets allowed for little more than what you got, no matter what studio. Early on Shamus Culhane experimented with forgetting about lip sync and putting the money normally spent on that into more movement, but it never caught on.
There were quite a number of sci-fi cartoons produced in the 1970s: as you point out, there was Battle of the Planets (adapted from the Japanese Science Ninja Team Gatchaman), but there was Space Battleship Yamato (distributed as Star Blazers in North America) and Hanna-Barbera's Sealab 2020. But Filmation had their own style, and reserved their best of the decade for Star Trek--which was a fan concern eased by the final product I do not believe the material suffered in any way.
TMP was a critical failure, blasted for not capturing the spirit of TOS, so there was no way Filmation (or any other studio) was going to base a cartoon on what had been derisively called "The Motionless Picture". Producing a post-TWOK cartoon would have been the right idea, similar to DC Comics' monthly title set in the same period.
It was still limited animation, of course, but it got more refined. In TAS and other early-'70s Filmation shows, shots of characters in motion were sparse, and the ones we got tended to be stiff, generally just walk/run cycles in a flat plane or silhouetted movements to simplify the inking/coloring. Practically the only exception was a single movement cycle of a waist-up character running toward and past the camera. But starting with mid-'70s shows like The New Adventures of Batman and Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle, Filmation started filming acrobats performing action moves and using that footage as reference for rotoscoped animation. This was a radical advance in their animation quality, because it let them do fluidly animated action shots of the kind that characters like Batman and Tarzan needed to be capable of. And they continued to add further such shots to their repertoire in following years. As you say, the Flash Gordon feature film gave them the budget to create a lot of rich, fluidly animated movement sequences that they were able to add to their stock library and continued to use in subsequent shows.
Oh, yeah, and they discovered slot-mask animation to pep up energy fields and magical barrier at little relative cost.
Yes, that was a major innovation that Filmation pioneered. Flash Gordon also used the innovation of photograpining miniatures painted white with black lines in order to create "cel-shaded" 3D animation of ships and vehicles, allowing far more freedom of movement in action sequences involving such objects. (The same technique was used in the Taarna sequence of the Heavy Metal film to animate the landscape that the camera flew over in the opening minutes.)
Yes, I know, obviously. I was there at the time. These were the shows I grew up watching. But I'm not comparing them to the superior animation we've gotten used to today. I'm merely comparing what Filmation was capable of in 1979-80 to what they were capable of in 1973-4. A revived animated Star Trek done with the same animation quality as Flash Gordon or Blackstar, with all the innovations like rotoscoped action sequences and 3D ship animation and more elaborate energy-field effects -- as well as with the gorgeously rich music of that era -- would've looked and sounded a lot better than TAS did, even though it would obviously still fall short of modern standards. And the advantage of having writers like Paul Dini and J. Michael Straczynski on board should be obvious.
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