Flip-Floping on TAS Anyone?

[FredH]

Honestly, I don’t think the “TAS is sillier, just look at it!” argument holds much water, mostly for reasons already described in this thread. About the only thing I find distinctly sillier are some of the alien voices Doohan and Nichols are forced to do.

 

[korblborp]

i didn't know TAS was a thing until my late 20s, when i walked into Salvation Army and the WHOLE THING sitting in their home media shelf. i had seen M'Ress on the internet in... places ... but i had thought she was a popular fan character. none of my OTHER star trek tapes or books had advertisement for it or anything.

 

[The Space Umpire]

i didn't know TAS was a thing until my late 20s, when i walked into Salvation Army and the WHOLE THING sitting in their home media shelf. i had seen M'Ress on the internet in... places ... but i had thought she was a popular fan character. none of my OTHER star trek tapes or books had advertisement for it or anything.

Rule 34 never sleeps

 

[Christopher]

The toe-to-head pan combined with Baker bugging out his eyes and K-9 doing the robot dog equivalent is a bit sexual, so Tallguy's not totally off base. But the moment feels more Lou Costello/played for laughs than anything truly prurient and in any event it passes pretty quickly, so I agree Tallguy is overstating things a bit above. Mudd's Women it ain't

The tilt shot (a pan is horizontal) was to show that she was a glamorously attired upper-class lady -- beautiful, yes, but not sexualized the way Leela or Peri was. And Baker didn't bug out his eyes at her -- he was avoiding looking at her, because he didn't want her there. The camera's gaze did not represent his own. (And Tom Baker bugging out his eyes was hardly unusual.)

Honestly, I don’t think the “TAS is sillier, just look at it!” argument holds much water, mostly for reasons already described in this thread. About the only thing I find distinctly sillier are some of the alien voices Doohan and Nichols are forced to do.

"Forced?" Doohan was an experienced radio actor, and doing tons of different voices was probably par for the course for him (and of course, he'd done plenty of voiceover work for TOS). And it was not uncommon for animated productions to have a small number of actors doing all the characters, e.g. Daws Butler and Don Messick doing all the male voices in early Hanna-Barbera shows, or Rocky & Bullwinkle relying mainly on Bill Scott, June Foray, Paul Frees, and Butler. Filmation shows rarely had more than 5-6 regular cast members doing most of the voices, although TAS (and other Filmation shows) had a number of uncredited guest actors who mostly still haven't been identified.

Besides, Nichols and Takei wouldn't even have been hired to do TAS if Nimoy hadn't insisted, pointing out to Filmation that it would've been a bad look to exclude the only two cast members of color. Giving them more characters to play meant they got to contribute more (although I don't know if they got paid more for it.)

 

[Richard S. Ta]

It’s an artefact of its time. You have to accept its limitations as what they are and look at it through a lens of ‘oh, this is what low budget animation in the early ‘70s looked like’.

Actually it’s not that different to TOS in that regard, itself being a good representation of what ‘60s TV sci-fi looked like with all the attendant limitations.

Like TOS though, it has a sort of a unique charm and a make-do attitude of sorts. The story telling is generally of a high standard, the music is repetitive but great and the cast are 90% present and correct.

It helps not to watch too many in a row or it becomes really evident that Majel/Doohan are doing voices for pretty much every guest character.

 

[Richard S. Ta]

Forced?

Yes, forced. By circumstances. The budget wouldn’t cover extra voice artists so they picked up the slack.

I’d expect you to understand, as a writer, that language has nuance. A word can have more than one meaning.