Is TAS considered canon, and a close "cousin" to TOS?

Just was curious what the concensus here was. I really enjoyed TAS, some episodes moreso than TOS in some regards. Personally I look at it as a season 4 of TOS, giving us a view of more of what happened in the original five year mission.

 

Well, canon, by definition, is not a matter of popular consensus, but a matter of official dictate. Something is part of the Trek canon if the current producers of Trek treat it as such.

Now, I believe it was in '89 that Gene Roddenberry put out a memo declaring TAS non-canonical. Since he was the guy running the show at the time, that made it non-canonical at the time. However, he died a few years later, and at that point, his views on canon ceased to be binding. (In the same way that Jeri Taylor's treatment of her Voyager novels Mosaic and Pathways as canonical was disregarded and contradicted by her successors after she left the show.) While subsequent showrunners did not explicitly revoke his assertion about TAS, they have never enforced it either, and subsequent Trek productions have contained multiple references to things and ideas from TAS: References to elements of "Yesteryear" in TNG: "Unification" and ENT's fourth-season Vulcan arc; ShiKahr canonically referenced in multiple episodes; several references to "Edosian" life forms (a nod to Mr. Arex's homeworld Edos as established in the Foster novelizations); the name Klothos for Kor's starship (mentioned in DS9: "Once More Unto the Breach"); the name "Lunaport" from "Yesteryear" (where Amanda died in the alternate timeline) mentioned in ENT: "The Catwalk"; a reference to Sepek from "Yesteryear" in TNG: "Eye of the Beholder". (Source: Therin of Andor's Toon Trek page.) The makers of TOS Remastered incorporated elements from TAS into their new visual effects, such as the robot drones from "More Tribbles, More Troubles" in "Charlie X" and "The Ultimate Computer" and ShiKahr as seen in "Yesteryear" appearing in "Amok Time."

And keeping in mind that the real arbiter of canon is whoever currently produces new Trek content for the screen, note that the scenes of Spock's childhood in the 2009 movie are practically a remake of the equivalent scenes from "Yesteryear."

So I think it's clear that most post-Roddenberry producers of Trek have seen TAS as an acceptable source of material to draw upon. They'd probably be happy to disregard some of the sillier parts, but the same goes for some things from the live-action canon, such as ST V and "Threshold," which have been freely contradicted by later productions. Something can be canonical without being absolutely binding on later canon in every detail. Canon is defined in the broad strokes, not the precise details, and any long-running canon reinterprets or disregards aspects of its past.

 

Excellent review and analysis, Christopher. As usual.

 

Thanks for the deep answer man.

It just struck me as odd that there's not much conversation on it when there were a lot of good episodes that were....well, pretty advanced for a cartoon series of its time script-wise, if you look past the kinda Hanna-Barbara style animation (only the mouths moving, backgrounds looped and barren, etc). The scripts were pretty damn good.

Than again, my fave series is prolly Enterprise, followed by DS9, TNG, TOS (with TAS fitting in there), and VOY, so take whatever I say with a grain of salt lol.

 

Yes, very nicely and clearly explained, indeed.

It is also an interesting concept that canon has the potential to change with the times, with the powers that be at a given time. It is an evolving thing, to some extent...

 

As I see it, canon, continuity, and even viewing order of episodes ultimately comes down to personal opinion. It's all a matter of what you, the fan and viewer, believe to be part of your own canon. For me, I see all the TV shows and movies, including TAS, as all part of the same canon universe, but I also include the fan film series New Voyages/Phase II and a few of IDW's comics to help fill in some of the gaps in continuity. But that's just my opinion.

 

TAS is just a continuation of TOS and accounts for the 4th and 5th years of the Enterprise's five year mission.

 

Well, TOS is generally considered to run from 2266-69, and VGR: "Q2" established that the 5-year mission ended in 2270. So TAS would only cover the fifth year or year and a half, with the first year being largely unchronicled.

 

No, not in the case of canon. You are describing some "personal preference to continuity", which is fine, but THAT IS NOT CANON. See Christopher's explanation - that wasn't his opinion, it's just what canon is. It goes for Trek, but also other franchises/series such as Sherlock Holmes (speak to a Holmes fan about canon!).

 

I gave up trying to figure out what is and isn't canon a long time ago. Why bother removing bits and pieces from canon when the whole thing's a discontinuous mess anyway?

IMO, if TPTB really wanted TAS, "Threshold" and STV decanonized, they wouldn't be on the DVDs.

Star Trek's a vague mythology under the pretence of being something more.

 

See, again, you're making the mistake of assuming that "canon" means "something that's treated as 100% 'real' in every detail." That's not what it means. As I said above, canon is defined in broad strokes, not in exhaustive detail. Every long-running canon ignores or contradicts parts of itself. Series fiction is a work in progress and thus is subject to revision. In a novel or a movie, you can tell the complete story, then go back and fix things and make it all fit together (ideally) before you release it. But in series fiction, if you put something out there and then come up with a better idea or discover you made a mistake, the best you can do is introduce a retcon and pretend it was that way all along. A canon is not something that is entirely consistent. That is an impossible, delusional goal. A canon is something that pretends to represent a consistent reality, even though it contains inconsistencies. Old canon is routinely superseded by new canon, by refinements (or in too many cases, degenerations) of the work in progress.

But that doesn't mean those superseded parts are no longer "canon." It means they're parts of the canon -- the overall core body of work -- that are no longer considered binding. Or that have simply been reinterpreted. Often, a new installment in a series will assume that an old installment happened in some form, but will reinterpret the specifics of how it happened. Thus, the story is still part of the canon in that it can inform new material in broad strokes; but contrary to fans' mistaken belief, being part of the canon does not mean that every single detail of a story must be treated as inviolable gospel. Something can be contradicted in some respects and still have "canon value," as Orci and Kurtzman would put it.

A lot of the problems with fans' interpretation of canon come from that 1989 Roddenberry memo. That memo only represented Roddenberry's approach to canon at the time, but too many fans have mistakenly assumed it represented some universal law of how canon was supposed to operate. Roddenberry defined canon in exclusionistic terms -- it's only this and not that or the other thing -- and that led to the high walls some fans build between "canon" and "not canon" and the judgmental attitude they take toward the distinction. Also, the Roddenberry approach to canon is often simplified as "Nothing that isn't seen onscreen is canonical," and fans often fallaciously assume the truth of the complement of that statement, "Everything that is onscreen is canonical," even if it's a tiny, near-invisible bit of filler text on a viewscreen. Which is a logical fallacy. The canon is that which is onscreen, yes, but that doesn't mean every tiny thing shown onscreen is binding and inviolable, because every canon is subject to revision as it goes.

 

Here's my litmus test: Do I enjoy watching it? Yes, then what does it matter if it's canon or not. No, then what does it matter if it's canon or not.

In other words, a particular work being considered canon doesn't affect whether I enjoy it or not.

Canon arguments always boil down to what Bert Cooper said to Pete Campbell when the latter tried to out Don Draper as Dick Whitman. "Who cares?"

 

^Yep. Canon doesn't actually matter to the fans, since they can accept or reject the "reality" of any installment they want. If you want to believe that, ohh, "In a Mirror, Darkly" never happened but the DC Comics Mirror Universe Saga did, there's nothing stopping you from establishing that in your own personal continuity.

And canon doesn't matter to the creators, because they're the ones who define it and they're free to redefine it. If they want to say that IaMD never happened but The Mirror Universe Saga did, they're entitled to do so because it's their franchise to do with as they please.

There's only one very small group of people to whom questions of canon actually have any relevance whatsoever: Tie-in writers like me. We can't say IaMD never happened without getting the outline rejected by CBS, because we're obligated to stay consistent with canon. We can say The Mirror Universe Saga happened, but only if we can do so without contradicting anything from the canon.

(And, well, yeah, it matters to freelance writers working for a Trek series, since they have to follow the lead of the showrunners. But since they're working directly with the showrunners anyway, I sort of lump them into category 2.)


Now, as for TAS's canon status, we've established that the producers of onscreen Trek have had no problem including references to it. As for the tie-in writers, we've been free to incorporate TAS characters, concepts, and ideas into our fiction for most of the past two decades; the only time we weren't was for the brief period when Roddenberry and his assistant Richard Arnold were cracking down on it, a period that ended with Roddenberry's death. So if nobody's stopping the makers of onscreen Trek from acknowledging TAS, and nobody's stopping the makers of Trek tie-ins from acknowledging TAS, then tell me: why should the fans worry about it? Who could possibly stop you guys from accepting it as "real" if that's what you want to do?

 

I consider it canon.

And a little sidenote to fans of TAS, have you checked out the fan-made animated episodes put out by the Starship Farragut guys? If not, do so. It's like two missing episodes.

 

This is more or less the way I see it too. If I had any say in the matter, everything would be canon, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff ("Parrallels" gives us 285,000 parrallel universes to play with after all.). But in the end, it doesn't matter.

Does anybody remember four years ago when the TAS DVD was released, there was a canon discussion then. I have a vague memory that when this happened, the studio had "re-canonized" it. Of course, I might just be recalling some fan discussion here or elsewhere. Anybody remember anything about that?

 

Thanks Freman!

 

There are parts and aspects about TAS I like very much and there are parts that make me cringe. My perspective is to see it as a stylized storyboard or even a comics adaptation of live-action events set in the "real" live-action TOS universe.

When I put TOS and TAS together I have the bulk of the Enterprise's 5-year voyage.

 

TAS may as well be canon. It was written by the creative team of TOS, and included the cast. So many references to TAS have popped up in all series, and even the new film.

An interesting topic would be which parts of TAS wouldn't you want to be considered "canon."