New Appreciation for TAS
- Thread starter Bry_Sinclair
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When I saw the 11-footer hanging in the National Air and Space Museum in August 1977, there was a wall-mounted display of the FJ Blueprints. They were a pre-Ballantine version, a first edition of sorts that he'd been selling at conventions, I think.
Thus GR saw and approved the Blueprints long before the 1975 package came to bookstores, and I thought maybe early enough for the plans to have influenced TAS, but an interview with FJ's daughter suggests not. It's more likely that TAS influenced the Blueprints to add that bridge exit, or that it's a coincidence. So I agree TAS came first, but behind the scenes, it was by less than two years.
FWIW, the TAS exit leads to another turbolift, but in FJ's plans, they lead to a narrow corridor surrounding the bridge.
I think their Flash Gordon cartoon at the other end of the decade was technically better made and much more watchable (certainly better paced), even if the scripts were simplistic by comparison.
I remember the Tarzan cartoon created by the same company in the seventies! I think it may have lasted for quite a few seasons and it had the same incidental music! Did Lou Scheimer do He-Man and The Masters of The Universe as well?
JB
JB
Thank you for the link. I wasn't aware of the level of acrimony over the blueprints. Saddens me, really. I always loved them and the technical manual. That GR and FJ had issues doesn't detract from the special place in my heart I have for them.
It had a few music cues in common with TAS and other Filmation shows, yes, though it mostly relied on a library of cues specific to itself. The cues it shared with TAS were the ones that originated with Lassie's Rescue Rangers in 1973 and continued to be used in multiple '70s Filmation shows, notably Shazam! and The Secrets of Isis.
Yes, that was one of Filmation's later shows produced by Scheimer after his partner Norm Prescott had left. (They were the two whose names spun around in a circle in the end credits of earlier Filmation shows, a way of giving them equal billing.) Scheimer also did numerous voices for the show, most prominently Orko, King Randor, and Trap-Jaw, as well as the opening narration. But its music was a synth-rock score done by Shuki Levy & Haim Saban, who did the music for an astonishing number of '80s cartoons. (That's the same Haim Saban whose production company owns Power Rangers.)
I hate to bring up anything related to Bill Cosby at this point, but since we're talking FIlmation, it's germane.
What's funny/sad is that the show with what I consider the best character designs in Filmation's history, Fat Albert, tellingly did not originate at Filmation. Nay, the initiial versions of the characters were all largely designed for the Ken Mundie directed Hey Hey Hey It's Fat Albert special aired on NBC in 1969. When the series got picked up by CBS with FIlmation at the helm, the character designs were, for lack of abetter word, "Filmationified" and became comparatively rigid and lifeless. And I don't just mean the animation, I mean the designs. Yet, even so lifelessly adapted, they're 10x better than FIlmation's usual bland work.
The 1969 special is not availlable on video anywhere these days, but a few seconds of it have surfaced online.
Mind you, I grew up watching Filmation shows, but nostalgia doesn't stop me from seeing how blandly and mechanically they were ground out. To me TAS stands out mostly because of the writing, but little else.
(For anyone curious, the TV special is discussed briefly in the 2016 documentary Floyd Norman: An Animated Life, at about 54 minutes in. It's on Neflix streaming as I wrote this.)
What's funny/sad is that the show with what I consider the best character designs in Filmation's history, Fat Albert, tellingly did not originate at Filmation. Nay, the initiial versions of the characters were all largely designed for the Ken Mundie directed Hey Hey Hey It's Fat Albert special aired on NBC in 1969. When the series got picked up by CBS with FIlmation at the helm, the character designs were, for lack of abetter word, "Filmationified" and became comparatively rigid and lifeless. And I don't just mean the animation, I mean the designs. Yet, even so lifelessly adapted, they're 10x better than FIlmation's usual bland work.
The 1969 special is not availlable on video anywhere these days, but a few seconds of it have surfaced online.
Mind you, I grew up watching Filmation shows, but nostalgia doesn't stop me from seeing how blandly and mechanically they were ground out. To me TAS stands out mostly because of the writing, but little else.
(For anyone curious, the TV special is discussed briefly in the 2016 documentary Floyd Norman: An Animated Life, at about 54 minutes in. It's on Neflix streaming as I wrote this.)
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Show me anything else from '70s Saturday mornings that was any better, other than repackaged Looney Tunes shorts. Hanna-Barbera was Filmation's main competitor, and their stuff was just as formulaic and just as cheap-looking -- and also a lot uglier and sloppier. Filmation's shows has less movement than H-B's, but that allowed them to put more care into making the artwork look good. And their stories had messages and morals and tried to be racially inclusive, which could rarely be said about anything from H-B. I know which studio I preferred as a kid.
I loved the Filmation Tarzan 'toons of the 70s, but then again I loved all those toons back then. The Tarzan ep that stands out in my brain is the one with the tarantula, probably because I saw it after having watched Kingdom of the Spiders (Shatner at his finest!) and planted the seed for arachnophobia in my 7 year old brain.
Filmation mostly adapted stuff from other sources, but "Fraidy Cat" was fairly good and that was one of their few original characters. It's dated now, but still moderately enjoyable (and on Amazon Prime, oddly enough).
Other original Filmation concepts include The Secret Lives of Waldo Kitty (though that was a parody of Walter Mitty and various adventure characters), The Secrets of Isis (though that spun off from Shazam!), The Ghost Busters, Wacky & Packy, Ark II, Space Academy, Space Sentinels, Jason of Star Command and the various superhero shorts created for Tarzan and the Super 7 (The Freedom Force, Manta & Moray, Superstretch & Microwoman, and Web-Woman -- which was going to be Spider-Woman before Marvel created their own Spider-Woman character to pre-empt Filmation from copyrighting the name), Hero High (part of The Kids' Superpower Hour with Shazam), Blackstar, and BraveStarr.
I have virtually no memory of Fraidy Cat. I never liked Filmation's comedies as much as their adventure shows, with Fat Albert being the main exception. I kind of liked Waldo Kitty and The New Adventures of Gilligan, though, and Filmations' Ghostbusters had its moments.
Since you're opening up the possibly of live-action, the Sid and Marty Krofft shows are in competition too, for "anything else from '70s Saturday mornings that was any better" than Filmation shows.
Land of the Lost certainly had great writers, a lot of whom were Star Trek alumni, though just how well they were actually doing is a matter of opinion. LotL episodes "Circle" by Larry Niven and David Gerrold and "The Pylon Express" by Theodore Sturgeon, are good examples that are at least arguably better than anything FIlmation did.
Land of the Lost certainly had great writers, a lot of whom were Star Trek alumni, though just how well they were actually doing is a matter of opinion. LotL episodes "Circle" by Larry Niven and David Gerrold and "The Pylon Express" by Theodore Sturgeon, are good examples that are at least arguably better than anything FIlmation did.
I agree on their adventure series trumping the comedy. I did enjoy Fat Albert and have a much stronger memory of that one versus Fraidy Cat. When I saw Fraidy Cat it was incorporated into another show's format, and not the centerpiece, so it probably couldn't really stand on its own if given the chance. Blackstar was another I recall enjoying, although it paled in comparison to Thundarr the Barbarian, which may have been the inspiration for it. Most of the stuff made in the 1980s I didn't see since I was moving past the age of cartoons by about 1982-83.
I'm pushing 50 and I still watch cartoons...
I'm 47 and I still watch them... or, rather, I tend to rewatch many of my favorites from my childhood. After I hit puberty ~1983 I was kind of... less interested in them though. Music and boys kind of replaced cartoons (and monster/horror movies) as my distraction of choice.
The biggest difference between TAS and Flash Gordon was TAS not using rotoscoping to such a generous level as that seen in FG. As much as I think Flash Gordon is one of the jewels in Filmation's crown, the rotoscoping was a bit distracting.
...then you should run away screaming from Hanna-Barbera, the so-called "big fish" of 70s TV animation, yet their quality was consistently in the toilet. Between their stint using a cheap Australian sister company to animate early 70s shows like Sealab 2020, Super Friends and Goober and Ghost Chasers, the work was difficult to tolerate, and unlike your opinion about TAS' stories, H-B rarely had scripts that were not recycled from their other series (if you've seen Scooby Doo, you've seen Clue Club, Goober, The Funky Phantom, Captain Caveman and the Teen Angels, etc.), or aimed at kids fond of dumbass crud.
Even DePatie-Feleng Enterprises' Return to the Planet of the Apes (with its Doug Wildey contributions) was a departure from the bargain-basement H-B style of animation.
At least Filmation--more often than not--were more in tune with the interests/needs of 1970s viewers and not digging up "comedy" routines from Vaudeville or Abbott and Costello as H-B did without end. Where adventure was concerned, 70's H-B worked to not find creative alternatives to a lack of violence (thanks to the intrusive Action for Children's Television), while Filmation at least had firing guns and body tackles (TAS & FG), taking it of the sandbox zone.
Filmation was not perfect--no animation house can claim that--but when they were on their game, they were head and shoulders above the dreck passed off as U.S.-based animation of the 1970s.
I was about 10 when TAS premiered, and as a die-hard lover of TOS I was happy to see the series live on, if in a different format. I remember scenes from a number of TAS episodes even now, 44 years later! For an animated series on Saturday morning, the concepts presented were pretty high brow compared to other programs aimed at young audiences. Like all things, it did have some shortcomings: the Enterprise moving through space almost sideways (wouldn't you think Scotty could have fixed that?), odd crew members like Lt. Arex and Lt. M'Ress (I wish the series could have afforded to bring back Walter Koenig as Chekov), dialogue that seemed stiff and unnatural at times, and some plots that seemed hard to follow as a result of cramming too much into a 22-minute program.
It wasn't TOS, of course, but it was all we fans had at the time. Many of us thought that Star Trek as a series pretty much ended with TAS (don't forget that "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" was still several years away at that point). Our Twitter group @TOSSatNight watches and comments live on a TOS episode each Saturday night on Netflix, Hulu, DVD or Blu ray (or whatever means you have) at 9 PT/ 11 CT/ 12 ET, and every few weeks we watch a TAS episode afterward. It's great fun, and for those who don't remember TAS it's something new and interesting to see!
It wasn't TOS, of course, but it was all we fans had at the time. Many of us thought that Star Trek as a series pretty much ended with TAS (don't forget that "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" was still several years away at that point). Our Twitter group @TOSSatNight watches and comments live on a TOS episode each Saturday night on Netflix, Hulu, DVD or Blu ray (or whatever means you have) at 9 PT/ 11 CT/ 12 ET, and every few weeks we watch a TAS episode afterward. It's great fun, and for those who don't remember TAS it's something new and interesting to see!
My posts were all about comparing several Filmation productions against each other, as in "To me TAS stands out mostly because of the writing, but little else." in reference to my earlier argument that Filmation's animation had not improved in any significant way in the 80s.
My arguments re Flash Gordon were that I believe it is a better paced show than TAS, and is a better looking cartoon and "technically better made"(what with its use of motion control filmed model spaceships and use of slot-gag animation) than TAS in terms of its overall look and design. A lot of people conflate design (look) with animation (movement), and I treat them as the distinct entities they are.
As to Hanna Barbera et al, I previously offered that "TV animation in general was cheap and the show budgets allowed for little more than what you got, no matter what studio.' But I will add that I thought Filmation's character design was the most drab and lifeless of all the major players of the era.
My arguments re Flash Gordon were that I believe it is a better paced show than TAS, and is a better looking cartoon and "technically better made"(what with its use of motion control filmed model spaceships and use of slot-gag animation) than TAS in terms of its overall look and design. A lot of people conflate design (look) with animation (movement), and I treat them as the distinct entities they are.
As to Hanna Barbera et al, I previously offered that "TV animation in general was cheap and the show budgets allowed for little more than what you got, no matter what studio.' But I will add that I thought Filmation's character design was the most drab and lifeless of all the major players of the era.
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Well, that's an artificially narrow argument. You're deliberately focusing on the one thing that (supposedly) didn't improve so that you can deny the fact that they did improve overall. That's the worst kind of cherrypicking -- ignoring every fact except the one that fits your premise.
And how can you deny that the incorporation of fully animated rotoscope action sequences counts as an improvement in animation? You just said that you're judging it by the standard of the amount of movement, and obviously the rotoscope sequences added a lot more fluid, lifelike movement to Filmation shows, even if it was the same finite catalog of movements repeated over and over. Yes, it's an incremental improvement, but it's still an improvement, and that's all I'm saying. A TMP-era Star Trek animated series where we got to see Kirk and Spock and Sulu running and jumping and swinging into action using the rotoscope sequences created for Batman and Tarzan would certainly have been somewhat better-looking than the stiff, brief action shots we got in TAS. Of course both would be below the modern standards of animation, but it's just ridiculous to claim there's no improvement at all.
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