Favorite things about TOS and TAS

What are your favorite things about TOS and TAS?

Me, my favorite things about TOS are that they were willing to cast minorities in prominent roles. That, and all the bright colors on the costumes, sets, and some of the aliens. I first saw it on a black and white TV, and I was really missing out.


TAS: I love the non-humanoid forms of many of the aliens. The three-legged guy, the big sluglike people with the trunk, the plant people, the monstrous animals. All so cool! I want to see more of them!

 

The technobabble that never painted them into a corner.

 

• Spock/McCoy bickering
• Exploration and adventure, strange new worlds for sure. As content was told, the episode may dip in overall quality but the show really explored strange things
  
• Overall, telling stories and situations without being heavyhanded
• Even most of the heavyhanded ones can be watchable
• Color palettes used in the 1960s (color TV was new and was the impetus, but a lot of 60s shows didn't take the palette to the rich and varied detail TOS had, while not making it look garish - which is quite impressive a feat)
• Showing how humans overcame their past, sometimes with exposition hinting at possible ways to accomplish it
• The stories didn't have all the f/x money in the universe but that didn't stop them from engaging in big battles rather than drawn out soap opera. And the battles work
• The nonhumanoid beings. TOS never had the budget. TNG onward didn't. Even today, with CGI, it's easily cost prohibitive to have too many scenes with completely CGI characters and to blend them in sufficiently (never mind perfectly). TOS did manage the Horta. Otherwise it was "humanoids with masks", which still worked generally very well. Especially for the time where boot polish was often used to save on costs thanks to the f/x budget
  
• TAS also sold itself with some gravitas to make itself work despite being in animated form where people assume "kid cartoon" (as if the road runner and bugs bunny cartoons from the 1950s were made for children, which they weren't) Very few episodes are truly _bad_ (comparing ratios of TAS and TOS, TAS has a lower bad episode count. IMHO)
  
• Only TOS could get away with space-faring creatures such as a giant single cell amoeba within a far bigger protective void; the philosophical talk alone keeps a viewer watching
• The weeks when Kirk welcomed orphaned individuals like Alexander. (Why he didn't for Shahna but I write it off as how she took the reins and became a great leader as a result of Kirk's intervention )

 

TOS:
The bright colours
The miniskirts
The hand phasers
How they managed to do much with little

TAS:
Attempted to do new things. Aquashuttle, life support belts, holodeck-like recreation room, etc
Arex & M’Ress
The only onscreen representation of Robert and Sarah April to date
Established ideas that later officially became canon – Vulcan Forge, ShiKahr, etc

 

Yep - the positive attitude about the future. Showing the Federation had accomplished much (though, there are still bureaucrats and occasional nut-jobs).

When they did exposition on various social/political/economic issues, it was usually encapsulated in a way that pointed the issue out from the perspective of someone who lived without those issues and compared it to another world where those issues still ruled.

It's very hard to nail down all of the ways in which the original got it right - and so very often - the newer shows failed...

 

The melodrama.

 

The Original Series:
William Shatner
The Music
It was more than just just of pretty pictures filling 51 minutes.
It was fun

The Animated Series:
William Shatner
The Music
It was more than just just of pretty pictures filling 24 minutes.
It was fun

 

I loved the Vulcan challenge music and The Doomsday Machine themes apart from all the special effects, great acting and fantastic writing! Plus did I say anything about the colour?
JB

 

1. The lighting. Lighting with color needs to make a comeback.
2. The music. Self-explanatory.
3. Making Class-M planets look different, even if it's just a different colored sky.
4. Some of the more out-there concepts.
5. The conviction of the characters.
6. Villains who were more like antagonists who just had a different viewpoint.
7. Unconventional shooting solutions. Not having a set enhances "The Empath".
8. Great speeches by Kirk. There. I said it.
9. Spock's otherliness.
10. Episodes that still have a message in 2020.

 

One of the great testaments of TOS is that many of its stories still resonate going on sixty years later. So many of the issues TOS addressed are sadly still with us and I suspect will continue to be for quite some time.

 

True. Those are the reasons why I liked TAS.

 

Damn Straight! and the sense of exploration, adventure, going out there... something the following spinoffs just didn't address. TNG/DS9 made me think more that the galaxy was largely explored. as the worlds just didn't seem strange or new. Voy was more like Lost in Space..the exploration was in reverse..finding home..ENT had all the potential to be like TOS but until the 4th season, it was too much "Humans aren't ready" and Archer gets his ass kicked every other episode.. Give me TOS crew anyday..

 

With TAS you didn’t have the restrictions of live action budgets.

 

TOS told us the galaxy is virtually all explored or at least nearly, with the odd areas being star-mapped by the enterprise and other ships! TNG tells us the galaxy has been segregated into quadrants and that the Alpha region is all but known while the Beta quadrant is the Klingon's and Romulan territories! DS9 gives us a look into the Gamma quadrant through a wormhole (the idea of which was first used in a TNG episode, even if it was really the Delta quadrant) VOY shows us a ship actually travelling in the Delta quadrant on it's wat back home but on a journey taking seventy odd years amongst many alien races including the Borg!
Funny though that the TOS films still seem to maintain the all explored galaxy theory!
JB

 

Never ever got the impression the entire galaxy had been explored in TOS.

 

Yeah, I never got that impression either. Roddenberry - if I remember correctly - had said it was only a small percentage (TMOST?). I mean, the Galaxy is huge. Really, really huge. Just because they encountered the barrier twice doesn't mean the entire galaxy was explored. And don't give Star Trek V any legitimate consideration about the "Center of the galaxy." That was just "haha look SPACE!"

 

Yeah, TMoST says the galaxy was about four percent charted. Thats a lot of territory in terms of actual space, but it leaves a lot of unknown space. And TOS often made references to “this far out” or hundreds or thousands of light years beyond known space or “very little is known about that part of the galaxy.”

 

And "charted" doesn't mean "explored".

 

TOS: Spock and McCoys quarrels.
The way the hand phasers are.

TAS: Well I love the fact that they got the same actors to play the voices.
There was so much variety. I loved the water mutant creatures.

 

The sheer beauty of the original NCC-1701.