Spoilers I finally exposed myself to The Animated Series
- Thread starter Qonundrum
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Yup. On the one hand, Filmation's custom of doing lonnnnnggg, slow pans across really wide background paintings was one more way of avoiding animation and eating up screen time, but on the other hand, they really put a lot of care into those really wide, panoramic paintings, so they were worth taking the time to look at.
There are definitely moments of greatness. Made better when finding out the cast prerecorded there scenes only when they had time available. Wasn't done as a group effort.
Yeah, saying a Filmation cartoon was 24 drawings per second is being VERY generous.
In any given dialog scene, the only thing moving is a mouth, and that's maybe 3-5 key positions. Maybe an eyebrow gets raised in in 5 frames. The rest of the image is a single cel of the person/people layered under the mouth and brow. But they made it work.
True... it just means they had a couple frames slip through. It's passable animation, but definitely not 24FPS, apart from the celluloid negative it was filmed on.
I'm just amused by the spoiler tag for a thread about a 45-year-old cartoon.
Three forms of thought cross my mind...
1. I'd never seen the show before, so to anyone who hadn't seen it then the "spoiler tag" would technically not be inaccurate
2. the way I babble on about plot bits, or even the basic structure if a person wanted to find out without being fettered by any external influence of any sort, I felt a subconscious need to hand out a disclaimer...
3. But being 4.6 decades old, there admittedly is some levity in flagging it with the spoiler tag since the chances of anyone under 30 wanting to look at this seem fairly minuscule...
One can always hope, people flock to spoilers the same way moths are attracted to a campfire or flies to a pasture that was just vacated by a cow.... moovin' on...
For a long time the show wasn’t seen as canon so a lot of people ignored it, including me. When they brought it out on DVD, CBS decided to recanonise it to improve sales.
That means that silly anti matter story is now canon. I would love to see a live action episode about that.
That means that silly anti matter story is now canon. I would love to see a live action episode about that.
I love how it remained true to TOS' look and feel. The actors are all five years older and that kind of comes across in their performances but for most parts the show respects the original show and doesn't mess with the formula. I actually loved the rotoscoping for the Enterprise fly-by shots because again, the angles are familiar from the use of the same stock shots we saw over and over on TOS, so as a result TAS really feels like a proper continuation of the live-action show.
Their character designs too. I always figured that the way Kirk's hair was drawn in TAS was just a simplification of his TOS hairstyle, but once I saw Shatner guest-starring in a live-action TV episode from 1973 and I realized that Kirk's TAS hairstyle was a pretty close rendering of what Shatner's toupee looked like at the time!
Agreed @Christopher. The early concept sketches of the characters as shown in The Art of Star Trek also depict Scotty with the moustache that James Doohan grew after TOS (and which he retained in the movies), so they obviously had this in mind but ultimately decided in Scotty's case at least to leave him with his clean TOS look.
They gave Lt.Kyle a tache though!
JB
JB
Yup. Giant Spock clone? Giant Apollo. Giant rock monsters? Giant spacegoing amoeba. Radiation shrinking people to tiny size? Radiation accelerating people to superspeed. The hell planet in "The Jihad" isn't much different from the decaying Genesis Planet in The Search for Spock. The magic-using aliens of Megas-tu are not so different from the magic-using Sylvia and Korob. "The Lorelei Signal" is just the planet-of-alluring-space-babes trope from "Spock's Brain" crossed with the rapid-aging trope of "The Deadly Years."
On a certain level, yes. But "Lorelei" did something live-action TOS did not: Make proper use of the situation, which wasn't as camptacular as "Spock's Brain" to begin with. Uhura took command and she, with Chapel, save the day. Nichelle Nichols really hit a homer with that episode, she draws in the audience perfectly with her cadences.
No clue why they reused so much of TOS in TAS, but for what I've seen so far it didn't stop them from doing original and different takes. Variation on a theme. Still works, and a certain 1979 Trek film has TAS to thank as well... except that cloud didn't have intestines (and yet that implies a quicker get-out plan compared to traveling the other direction to get out of its maze-like brain thing, since "The Immunity Syndrome" was an inspiration for "One of our Planets is Missing")
HB's biggest problem was not having enough animators to go around.
Several times in more serious cartoons certain characters or groups of characters are animated in a sillier manner befitting a sillier show. A good example is the group of Yeti pursuing Jonny Quest in that show's Yeti episode. The Yeti rock back and forth as they run, as if possessed by Captain Caveman.
Other times animation meant to be seen as a distant shot on a big background was used for closeups, really making the characters look odd.
Examples of these and other problems can be found by Googling Jonny Quest animation. But it affected many of their shows, there just hasn't been the effort to catalog them in the other HB shows that there has with JQ.
Several times in more serious cartoons certain characters or groups of characters are animated in a sillier manner befitting a sillier show. A good example is the group of Yeti pursuing Jonny Quest in that show's Yeti episode. The Yeti rock back and forth as they run, as if possessed by Captain Caveman.
Other times animation meant to be seen as a distant shot on a big background was used for closeups, really making the characters look odd.
Examples of these and other problems can be found by Googling Jonny Quest animation. But it affected many of their shows, there just hasn't been the effort to catalog them in the other HB shows that there has with JQ.
Which is the point -- not only was TAS no sillier than TOS, sometimes it was less silly.
If you mean reusing general tropes and themes, that's just the nature of an ongoing series. It's just the nature of fiction in general that certain patterns will be reused many times in different works.
But it is true that TAS did a number of direct sequels or brought back familiar characters from TOS, more so than TOS did itself. Let's see...
"Yesteryear" (D.C. Fontana): Guardian of Forever; Sarek & Amanda (& Spock's sehlat)
"One of Our Planets is Missing" (Marc Daniels): Robert Wesley
"More Tribbles, More Troubles" (David Gerrold): Direct "Trouble With Tribbles" sequel/rehash
"The Infinite Vulcan" (Walter Koenig): Passing mention of Eugenics Wars from "Space Seed"
"Once Upon a Planet" (Len Janson & Chuck Menville): Direct "Shore Leave" sequel
"Mudd's Passion" (Stephen Kandel): Harry Mudd
"The Time Trap" (Joyce Perry): Kor, various familiar species
"The Pirates of Orion" (Howard Weinstein): Elaborates on "Journey to Babel" Orions
That's fewer than I thought there were, actually. And three were cases of TOS writers doing sequels to their own episodes (recall that Fontana did the final draft on "City on the Edge"). Interesting that only three cases were from writers unconnected to TOS.
I used to think that Alan Dean Foster was probably inspired by "One of Our Planets..." (which he novelized) when he came up with "In Thy Image," the basis for the TMP script. But it turned out that "Image" didn't have the elements that resembled "Planets" -- they were added in later revisions by Harold Livingston. So the similarities were probably coincidental, like most similarities between different works of fiction.
My favorite was when they'd just plain not draw something that was too difficult to animate, like during Race's fight with the Sumo wrestler in "The Dragons of Ashida." They just cut back to Jonny and Hadji describing the cool martial arts move that Race just did off-screen.
And thank you for not spelling it "Johnny Quest." That drives me nuts.
The Filmation "Side Shot" of the slow moving Enterprise that they used again and again was one I loved as a kid as it gave a view of the ship that felt detailed.
What often drove me crazy (even as a kid watching on NBC - I was 10 in 1973) was they way they'd insert a random backdrop at a somtimes wierd angle, and then wen they cut back, the backdrop would be different.
What often drove me crazy (even as a kid watching on NBC - I was 10 in 1973) was they way they'd insert a random backdrop at a somtimes wierd angle, and then wen they cut back, the backdrop would be different.
Animator Will Finn did time at Filmation and has little good to say about it. Other animators have chimed in similarly, complaining about how stultifying bureaucratic the place was. To wit:
...my first week on HE-MAN, the cleanup crew were given model sheets of "Ram Man" where the designer had drawn his thumbs on the wrong side of his hands.
In his "full front" pose and side pose, the thumbs were right, but in the rear pose, they were drawn incorrectly, it was an obvious mistake.
When we pointed this out to the clean up supervisor, she went ashen and told us we had to follow it anyway, until the proper protocol had been addressed to look into the problem. Whenever he turned his back, we had to have "Ram Man's" thumbs inbetween around to the wrong side of his hand to be perfectly "on model."
I swear to God I am not making this up.
It took a couple of weeks, but we were eventually given new "corrected models" and the crew went into overtime to re-do all the incorrect clean up we had been doing in the interim.
If Kafka had ever written pure farce, even he could not have topped FILMATION.
—Will Finn (source)
As Finn and others point out, only the layout department was allowed to create a new drawing, otherwise as an "animator" your were actively discouraged to draw anything new and mostly supposed to xerox and trace existing work. I hesitate to invoke John K nowadays as much as I hesitate to mention Cosby, but the former said of Filmation:
...my first week on HE-MAN, the cleanup crew were given model sheets of "Ram Man" where the designer had drawn his thumbs on the wrong side of his hands.
In his "full front" pose and side pose, the thumbs were right, but in the rear pose, they were drawn incorrectly, it was an obvious mistake.
When we pointed this out to the clean up supervisor, she went ashen and told us we had to follow it anyway, until the proper protocol had been addressed to look into the problem. Whenever he turned his back, we had to have "Ram Man's" thumbs inbetween around to the wrong side of his hand to be perfectly "on model."
I swear to God I am not making this up.
It took a couple of weeks, but we were eventually given new "corrected models" and the crew went into overtime to re-do all the incorrect clean up we had been doing in the interim.
If Kafka had ever written pure farce, even he could not have topped FILMATION.
—Will Finn (source)
As Finn and others point out, only the layout department was allowed to create a new drawing, otherwise as an "animator" your were actively discouraged to draw anything new and mostly supposed to xerox and trace existing work. I hesitate to invoke John K nowadays as much as I hesitate to mention Cosby, but the former said of Filmation:
The style of Filmation character designs were the blandest of all time. They were neither cartoony nor "realistic". They were merely - vacant. Expressionless. Without statement or style. (source)
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It would be nice if, for once, we could have a thread about TAS that just discusses it as a show, rather than degenerating into yet another impromptu prosecution of Filmation.
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