I assume the makers liked to try to position the show as adult to reassure the fans that the show wasn't going to be dumbed down because they wanted as many eyeballs as possible on it, and why distance a potential built-in audience. So what else were they going to say?
Except it really
was more adult than its contemporaries. I already pointed out several standard tropes of Saturday morning shows that it didn't employ. It told straight adventure stories that dealt with serious themes. Exploring a graveyard ship whose captain destroyed its entire crew to stop a deadly threat. Struggling to decide whom to evacuate from a doomed planet. Facing down energy-sucking women who've seduced and killed countless men to stay alive. A woman facing and forgiving an alien impostor of her dead fiance. An alien race putting Kirk's crew on trial for the atrocities and genocide committed by their ancestors. These were the same kinds of stories you'd see on TOS, and
not the same kinds of stories you'd normally see on kidvid. As I've said, the only real concession to the time slot was toning down the sex and violence.
People tend to focus on the sillier aspects of TAS to justify their preconception that it was a kids' show, but there's plenty in TOS that's just as silly. A giant Spock clone is no sillier than a giant Apollo or a giant space amoeba. Miniaturized Terratins are no sillier than the miniaturized
Enterprise on Flint's desk. The sorcerors and demons of Megas-tu are no sillier than the Greek-cosplaying, psychokinetic Platonians, or a planet of space gangsters or space Nazis.
I bet these replies are ironic because Christopher was a kid when became a fan of TAS.
Yes. I discovered TOS in prime-time reruns in January 1974 when I was 5 years old. As near as I can remember, it was no more than a few weeks later that I discovered it was also on Saturday mornings in cartoon form. So for me,
Star Trek was one show that was sometimes live-action and sometimes animated. I didn't differentiate the two. (Although that wasn't unique in my experience at the time, since Filmation also had animated versions of live-action sitcoms like
The New Adventures of Gilligan and
The Brady Kids. But in those cases, there were pretty clear differences between the live-action and animated versions, much more so than between the two
Star Treks.)
Re: Leonard Maltin, he's an animation buff, and he hated the cheap animation that became commonplace on 1960s and 1970s television (that's probably the main reason he used the word '"disturbing.")
But that has nothing to do with whether it's an original show or an adaptation. The original concepts that Filmation and Hanna-Barbera made were no better animated than their adaptations.
It looks like the Emmy folks also got the wrong idea when they awarded the show Outstanding Children's Series...
Awards often put things into inappropriate categories because there's no available alternative. Things that intentionally try to break the mold, as TAS did, are hard to fit into standardized cubbyholes.
The reason producer Lou Scheimer performed the voices for so many supporting characters was that the 'official' voice actors were contracted to perform no more than three different voices per episode. And since there were usually only three regular cast members working on each show, Lou would fill in the rest of the male cast.
He also got his wife and kids to do many of the voices, and they were much worse actors than he was. And there were other uncredited voice actors who did occasional roles.
