Yes, and ADF built a whole Pandronian civilization, too. Both here and with "The Counter-Clock Incident," he managed, when expanding the scripts, to iron out some of the more nonsensical elements of the episodes as broadcast.
Ari Ben Bem: Wtf?
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
I always thought it was a neat "out there" idea, personally. IMO, part of what makes TAS so fun and enjoyable is that (even though tight budget and time constraints still applied, naturally) they could basically do anything they wanted without feeling constrained by what would be practically achievable and/or come off as believable in live action...
-MMoM
-MMoM
I think it would have been cooler and more interesting, if Bem had broken down into, say, about 20-40 Tribble-sized (
) pieces, which all floated out and reassembled. More interesting, because a) there would have been greater similarity among the pieces, and b) they could have at least mentioned the idea that Pandronians could assemble into a variety of different shapes, including non-humanoid ones, and maybe even demonstrated that. Maybe Spock mentions that species previously thought distinct based on provisional data were possibly both Pandronians in different arrangements.
) pieces, which all floated out and reassembled. More interesting, because a) there would have been greater similarity among the pieces, and b) they could have at least mentioned the idea that Pandronians could assemble into a variety of different shapes, including non-humanoid ones, and maybe even demonstrated that. Maybe Spock mentions that species previously thought distinct based on provisional data were possibly both Pandronians in different arrangements.
I think it would have been cooler and more interesting, if Bem had broken down into, say, about 20-40 Tribble-sized (
Or withholding of information, he did seem to be testing the Federation, they probably didn't want to reveal all about themselves right away.
One thought that's occurred to me over the years is whenever an alien race is met in any show, how do we know how they really look? Do they wear clothes of some sort or is that their hide/skin? Maybe it's an elaborate encounter suit and they don't look anything like that. Could they be wearing some kind of mask? Just seeing them really doesn't prove anything. What if those Romulans were wearing Vulcan ears just to fool everyone? Maybe the Klingons hired a bunch of actors with shoe polish and fake mustaches to represent them in the mid 23rd century.
I think it didn't translated well because Filmation didn't want to spend the money to create the unique animation necessary to make each of the separate parts move believably. I often wonder what the budget on those shows really was.
TAS actually had a pretty high budget for a '70s Saturday morning cartoon, though a large part of it went to the actors' salaries. The thing you have to understand is, as crude as TAS's animation looks today, it was typical for TV animation at the time. Aside from reruns of theatrical Warner Bros. cartoons, pretty much everything on Saturday mornings was limited animation. You basically had a choice between the Filmation style, where things didn't move much and repeated a lot but were at least neatly drawn and painted, and the Hanna-Barbera style, where there was a bit more movement and a bit less repetition but the artwork was sloppy, rough, and full of errors.
Granted, TAS's first season was produced under enomous time pressure -- they were given only 6 months to do 16 episodes, which is incredibly tight for animation -- so it cut even more corners and had more animation errors than was typical for Filmation. But "Bem" was part of its second season, which was produced under less of a time crunch and thus has generally better animation. I'd say -- speaking as someone who watched these shows in their original runs as a kid -- that the work in season 2 was about as good as you could find in a 1974 Saturday morning cartoon.
I'm pretty sure he does.
Thanks for recognizing that. Film's my thing and traditional animation is something I studied extensively. (Heck, I did a digital variation of a technique from Fantasia to create the black hole in "The Tressaurian Intersection".)I'm pretty sure he does.
The cost issues around limited animation are something I'm painfully aware of. Anyone ever read "Talking Animals and Other People"? In it, Shamus Culhane talks about how a lot of the cost in TV animation was in the lip sync, so at one point he tried a show that flat out dispensed with it so he could spend more of the paltry budget on actually animating the characters... something DePatie-Freling did fairly well in their Pink Panther made-for-TV cartoons many years later.
I once got to chat with Richard Williams. That was fucking cool.
EDITED to slightly reorganize.
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A good number of Filmation Trek shots put the mouths of the characters out of the frame with extreme close ups (usually the upper right quarter of a face) and the eyes moving back and forth. I remember noticing that their jaws only moved when seen in profile. Which was typical, I realize, but still something as a kid kinda jumped out at me.
When I used to draw comic books as a lad, I used the filmation style. They were a big part of my life.
When I used to draw comic books as a lad, I used the filmation style. They were a big part of my life.
Agreed.I always thought it was a neat "out there" idea, personally. IMO, part of what makes TAS so fun and enjoyable is that (even though tight budget and time constraints still applied, naturally) they could basically do anything they wanted without feeling constrained by what would be practically achievable and/or come off as believable in live action...
-MMoM
As much as I adore that TAS tried as much as it did to remain faithful to the aesthetic and style of TOS mostly, I also really liked the occasions when they went 'out there' with wild concepts they'd almost certainly never have touched in live-action, or at least not done as well. 
Bem seems like one of those often referenced but never seen characters from DS9 (Boday, Vilix'pran). I don't mean one in particular, but the kind of character DS9 would have referenced multiple times. (Odo: "I still haven't managed to locate Lieutenant Herm's missing legs." Bashir: "Have you tried the arboretum? His feet like to walk in the Vodean grass there.")
And for the record, the name is spelled "Ari bn Bem."
IIRC, one of the numerous differences between the episode and the Foster adaptation is that the episode gave his surname as "Bem" (treating the "bn" as more like a middle name) while in the book he was always referred to as "bn Bem," and the equivalent for the other Pandronians (eb Riss, afdel Kaun, etc.).
Spoiler alert: at the end of Log Nine, the Tam Paupa (the living, sentient crown, NOT the supposed council mentioned in the Starbase 118 wiki, a notion somebody seems to have pulled out of a bodily orifice) recognizes bn Bem as having grown from his encounter with the Delta Theta III entity, and chose him to become the new premier of Pandro.
