Yes, I agree. Certainly was an educational show for kids at the start but evolved relatively early into something broader. And by the time I got to it in the 80's it was aimed more towards upper teens / young adults. John Nathan-Turner amped up some of the sex appeal and glamour to bring in a broader audience. The female companions' hem and neck lines got progressively shorter.
Aiming a show at children and including appeal for adults have never been mutually exclusive goals. Most children's shows have elements that are intended to appeal to parents watching along with their kids, like how
Rocky & Bullwinkle had lots of subversive political humor. Even
Sesame Street has always had a lot of jokes and references that toddlers learning their ABCs would be too young to understand, like
Monsterpiece Theatre and "Alistair Cookie." (Heck, I doubt most
adults younger than my generation would know who Alistair Cooke was.) And there have been a fair number of kids' shows that featured sexy women in revealing outfits, e.g. Teela's armored bathing suit in
He-Man.
For that matter,
Doctor Who always made a point of including sexy young women "for the dads."
That didn't start with Peri. Sure, you could get away with more skin on TV by the 1980s, but the principle was the same.
And the fact that TOS writers and producers were involved maintained that standard. Had it been a Filmation staff job, the result would have been different.
That's entirely false, and deeply unfair to Filmation. First of all, it's a false dichotomy. D.C. Fontana was the story editor of TAS season 1, but Lou Scheimer and Norm Prescott were its actual producers, the same as every other Filmation show until Prescott's retirement in 1978, and Fontana wasn't involved with season 2. It doesn't get more "Filmation staff" than Scheimer, Prescott, and Filmation's other co-founder and head director Hal Sutherland, who directed the entirety of TAS season 1, with veteran Filmation animation director Bill Reed directing all of season 2. And several TAS episodes were written by animation writers who worked on other Filmation shows, such as Len Janson, Chuck Menville, and David Wise.
The whole reason Roddenberry went with Filmation instead of Hanna-Barbera or another studio was because Filmation was the only animation studio that wanted to produce an authentic, adult-oriented continuation of TOS rather than kiddifying it with cute mascots and zany plots and whatnot. They were fans of the show and wanted to do it right.
Filmation generally strove to be faithful in its adaptations of adventure series. Their
Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle was the most faithful screen adaptation of the original novels I've ever seen aside from toning down the violence, portraying Tarzan as an educated man rather than a monosyllabic brute and using multiple characters and concepts from the novels. Their
Flash Gordon, at least in its first season, was also very faithful to the original comic strips, though the network forced them to dumb it down for kids in season 2. Filmation did sometimes adjust the shows to be more educational, like how its
Lone Ranger series focused on real figures and events from the history of the Old West (albeit conflating 30 years of real history and told in no particular order), but otherwise authenticity was very important to them. The adaptations they took more liberties with tended to be comedies like
The New Adventures of Gilligan (and
Gilligan's Planet),
The Brady Kids, and
My Favorite Martians. Okay, granted, Filmation's
Shazam was hardly faithful to the comics, but in modestly budgeted live action, it really couldn't be.
