ADF Logs

Do you reckon there were or are a good chunk of people by whom the TAS novelizations were held in higher esteem or even canonicity than TAS itself?

I just wonder because it seems easy to read a book and imagine it being in the universe of TOS, whereas it’s somewhat harder to watch TAS and translate it, in your brain, to the universe of TOS.

 

I tend to assume that the "true" version of what happened in TAS is about halfway between the TV version and the Foster version. Where they conflict, I go with the show (although I'm tempted to make an exception for "BEM," since Foster's version of Pandronian anatomy makes far more sense), but the Foster version adds a lot of interesting stuff on top of what's in the episodes.

When I read the Foster books, I imagine them as animated episodes in Filmation's style, just somewhat more fluidly animated (like Filmation's work in the Flash Gordon or BraveStarr movies a few years down the road). After all, I discovered TAS not long at all after discovering TOS, so my 5-year-old self saw it as a single show that just happened to be live-action sometimes and a cartoon sometimes, and both were equally "real" to me.

 

It was with these books that I learned to love ADF's style, and that while his books tend to start slowly, they richly reward patience.

 

I can only speak for myself, but I would say that my rule of thumb is what is seen in a TAS episode is what happened, but the novelizations can maybe explain better when some of the action isn't clear, or the "rules" of any given story are muddled. If I watch through the whole classic series like I did last time, I'll watch them in broadcast order, unless someone makes a production order case similar to TOS. The live action series I'll favor production order from hear on out.

I've read a scattering of the ADF log novelizations, mainly the ones that correspond to episodes I had seen while visiting relatives in New England way back in the day. I gather that ADF kind of built a framework around the episodes that he novelized, linking them into an order that he chose to novelize them in. It sounds intriguing, but I don't know if I can get too deep into that right now. Maybe someday. But in the absence of being able to actually sit down and read through the Log series, I will give default credit to ADF's linking framework, based on what I've read about on the forums here.

A couple decades ago, the books were much easier to access, and yes, easy to picture the characters as they are in TOS mode. I mainly stuck with reading novelizations of episodes I was familiar with, only branching out a little once in a while. I was lucky to have read Yesteryear in novelized format, so it felt more fleshed out, but the actual episode is still pretty good. However, I am not a typical bookworm, in the sense that it isn't easy for me to read. I read at a slow rate, have difficulty focusing sometimes, and can occasionally be daunted by very small text font size and an extensive page count. I still love to read despite all that. Now that the actual TAS series is more easily available, it's much easier for me to just watch the episodes. Much harder to contemplate going through the whole novelization series. If unabridged audiobooks were produced for the Log series, I would snag them in a heartbeat. Robert Petkoff reading through that series would be so amazing.

 

Pretty much. He did expand the episodes themselves, adding new scenes and dialogue and more detail to events, but he also bridged them together with new material in the manner of a "fix-up" novel, i.e. a novel stitched together from separate stories. And of course the last four had only one episode each, so in Logs 7-9 he added an original sequel story to the last 2/3 of the book, and his "Slaver Weapon" adaptation in Log 10 devoted only 3 out of 16 chapters to the episode, adding three original stories taking place before, during, and after the episode's events.

As for the order he used, it's largely the broadcast order with a few tweaks. Several adaptations are delayed for some reason, but the rest are pretty close to their positions in broadcast order, though the first volume is the only one that corresponds exactly.

 

I’ve wondered if they could do a sort of hybrid audiobook/drama in which they could combine Foster’s narrative with the spoken audio recorded by the original cast for the cartoon. I have no idea, though, whether those isolated audio stems still exist.

 

@Christopher Thank you for that overview. The Slaver Weapon adaptation sounds amazing! BEM is one that sounded interesting to me, too. My true enthusiasm is in the direction of things having to do with Captain Robert April, so one day I'll want to read The Counter Clock Incident. I definitely haven't written the series off by any means, but I may get to it in a more scattershot way.

I kind of wish that Yesteryear ended up as one of the ones that got a full-length adaptation, but in a different way to what you describe about the other one episode/one volume adaptations.

I recall reading somewhere there's something going on with Christmas celebrations in one of the volumes, and there's a Klingon captain that keeps reappearing in the later books.

 

An interesting idea, but some of William Shatner's reading of the dialogue is a little flat in TAS. It gets the job done, but it's still disconnected from the story and the other characters, because the dialogue was recorded separate from the other actors. Robert Petkoff would bring a lot of energy to it that wouldn't have been in the original episodes, and for my money he nails his performances as Kirk, sounding enough like the character and honoring the speaking cadence of the original performance without descending into parody.

I could get on board with a hybrid, but only if they really made it unabridged. There's a hybridized version of the novel Dune that does that, and there are good performances, but sometimes it favors the flow of a conversation between actors, and some of the non-dialogue text is jettisoned for good logical reasons. It's very nearly an unabridged production, but I'm picky about it being only nearly so, for Dune. I think it would bug me if they did something similar with the Logs, and labelled them as fully unabridged when they are actually very nearly unabridged.

 

The adaptation of "The Survivor" in Log 2 opens with a Christmas party.

Commander Kumara, an old "friend" of Kirk's and an atypically charming (but still devious) Klingon, is introduced in Log 7 and returns in Log 10.

A few episodes were recorded together, others separately. That's not the issue. Voice acting is a specialized discipline, and actors who haven't done it before often haven't learned how to give a performance entirely through their voice, so they can be a little flat. Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley -- the three least experienced voice actors in the cast (I count Nichols as experienced because of her singing career) -- gave the flattest performances in season 1. But they're better in season 2, Shatner especially. By then, they'd gotten more experience, and maybe had a better director.

The other reason a Foster audiobook using TAS dialogue wouldn't work is that Foster rephrased and expanded a lot of the dialogue, so there's a lot that the episode audio wouldn't cover, and it wouldn't work to be constantly cutting back and forth between the original actors and the audiobook performer(s).

 

That's great information, @Therin of Andor thanks for that. I thought I remembered reading something about a reoccurring Klingon commander, and I even thought I remembered something about Kirk being roommates, but it sounded far-fetched inside my mind.

A five-part essay in the 5-volume reprint? How lengthy and in-depth is this essay. I just had this uneasy feeling of my collector's bone playing up on me...