Star Trek the Animated Series?

[Terok Nor]

It's a shame they didn't make more episodes but I'll take what I'm given.

Filmation ruled my childhood. I watched practically everything they put out.

 

[Maurice]

Gerrold: Surprisingly, nothing was cut. In fact, the animated scripts were almost as long as the live action scripts -- but as animation they played faster. That gave us the opportunity to do the stories in depth.

If this TAS script is an indication, he's wrong on that count. It's 34 pages. The shortest TOS script I've seen is 56 pages, and most are in the 60s, with a few in the 70s.

 

[YJAGG]

It was great ! in time before CGI and the magic that Henson brought to life in his movies, this was the amazing to have aliens so different in form that GR could not have done on the Desilu lot.

 

[BillJ]

A very hit or miss show, but an interesting extension of the Star Trek universe.

 

[Lance]

It was great ! in time before CGI and the magic that Henson brought to life in his movies, this was the amazing to have aliens so different in form that GR could not have done on the Desilu lot.

One of GR's better jokes at conventions was that some of the uglier actors he sometimes saw hanging around at the Desilu commissary could've conceivably passed as aliens.

 

[tomswift2002]

I never saw the Animated series till it came out on DVD, and I think its a lot better than Enterprise and should be considered canon more than Enterprise.

 

[Galileo7]

I never saw the Animated series till it came out on DVD, and I think its a lot better than Enterprise and should be considered canon more than Enterprise.

I feel strongly about both TOS and TAS. IMHO, TAS is the concluding years of TOS five year mission, so yes it is important canon.

 

[Terok Nor]

I never saw the Animated series till it came out on DVD, and I think its a lot better than Enterprise and should be considered canon more than Enterprise.

 

[Christopher]

I really liked this show. I don't know why Roddenberry tried to excise it from canon.

For one thing, at the time, Filmation had gone out of business and the ownership of TAS was up in the air. When it was made, Paramount didn't yet own the franchise, so TAS was copyrighted by Filmation and Roddenberry's personal production company, Norway Corporation. So once Filmation went belly-up, Paramount didn't own TAS and it wasn't clear who did, and thus it was deemed preferable to distance the rest of the franchise from it. But that was resolved decades ago; Paramount (now called CBS) gained full ownership of TAS.

The other reason is that Roddenberry, late in life, had gotten pretty possessive about ST and wanted to decanonize everything that didn't fit his personal vision. He considered several of the movies and even much of TOS itself to be apocryphal. Since TAS had been run by D.C. Fontana rather than himself, he didn't consider it to be "his" Star Trek. Although that's ironic, since it was the only incarnation of Trek on TV that he had absolute creative control over, through his deal with NBC. He could've made it anything he wanted. He chose to let Fontana run it instead, and then he later decided that meant it didn't count.

Some animated adaptations of live-action TV shows in that period were terrible, by not remaining true to the spirit of their live-action forebears. TAS, on the other hand, is almost particular about trying to replicate TOS and its universe, without changing anything or ''kiddifying'' the concept.

Filmation's adaptations of classic franchises were often done with great fidelity. Their Tarzan was just about the most book-accurate screen adaptation ever, using ideas and characters from Burroughs's work that I don't think have ever been put onscreen anywhere else. Their Flash Gordon and Zorro were very faithful to the sources as well, as was their Lone Ranger, although they tweaked that one to be more educational about American history (at the expense of realism, because the Lone Ranger and Tonto got involved with events that spanned over 30 years of real history without aging a day). Even their New Adventures of Gilligan was pretty authentic, although the same can't be said for its sequel Gilligan's Planet, or most of Filmation's other comedy sequels like The Brady Kids or My Favorite Martians.

For what budget Filmation had to work with, I always thought they did great stuff. Re-using clips, music, etc. out of necessity but for me anyway, it was great.

Yeah, they got pretty good at doing more with less, and even innovated new animation techniques, like the use of backlit moire effects, and creating an early form of 3D animation from photographs of physical miniatures painted white with black outlines (a technique that Filmation employed in Flash Gordon and that was later featured in the Taarna sequence of the film Heavy Metal).

Flash Gordon TAS was their crowning glory, imo. Done just like the old serials and well-acted, produced, drawn, etc.

Yes, it started in 1979 as a primetime animated feature film which was beautifully, fully animated and much more adult than Filmation's usual fare. Unfortunately, because of legal conflicts with the De Laurentiis Flash Gordon movie from the following year, the Filmation movie was delayed until 1982, aired only once, and never released on video in the US, which is a tragedy, because it's the best FG movie ever, enormously superior to the 1980 movie. There is an overseas release of the movie available on YouTube, though.

The '79 animated series version of FG was largely constructed from retraced and revoiced scenes from the film (the animation had to be redone to give the characters more consistent wardrobe throughout the season, and to make Dale Arden's clothes less revealing), and the first season basically tells an expanded version of the events of the movie, leaving out the initial, rather dark and violent WWII portion on Earth and the bits about Ming making an alliance with Hitler. Thus it kind of starts in medias res with no setup. And it gets a bit repetitive, since some material from the movie is repurposed in more than one episode. Still, drawing from the movie allowed it to be far better-animated and more sophisticated than most Saturday morning fare at the time. Unfortunately, the brief second season was done more cheaply and dumbed down more for kids.

I think it's a missed opportunity that Filmation didn't do a second Star Trek animated series in 1979 or 1980, to tie into Star Trek: The Motion Picture. There's precedent -- Filmation did two different Batman series in 1968 and 1977, and of course there's The New Adventures of Gilligan and Gilligan's Planet. A post-TMP animated Trek would've been done with the more refined, advanced animation techniques Filmation had adopted by that point (like using rotoscoped character movements traced from live-action footage), not to mention the rich, lush music that Ray Ellis was composing for Filmation shows around that time, and it would've been able to take advantage of the rich visual style of TMP and feature its diverse background aliens. And it would've been more onscreen Trek in the movie era, something we don't have much of. I think that if such a thing had been done, Filmation's Trek work would have a better reputation overall.

 

[Terok Nor]

Thanks Christopher

I didn't know that about the Flash Gordon series. I loved that show. Now I want to see the movie

 

[Christopher]

^The title is Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All. Check YouTube.

 

[Galileo7]

Thanks Christopher

I didn't know that about the Flash Gordon series. I loved that show. Now I want to see the movie

here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6YhSjRiVio

 

[Galileo7]

I think it's a missed opportunity that Filmation didn't do a second Star Trek animated series in 1979 or 1980, to tie into Star Trek: The Motion Picture. There's precedent -- Filmation did two different Batman series in 1968 and 1977, and of course there's The New Adventures of Gilligan and Gilligan's Planet. A post-TMP animated Trek would've been done with the more refined, advanced animation techniques Filmation had adopted by that point (like using rotoscoped character movements traced from live-action footage), not to mention the rich, lush music that Ray Ellis was composing for Filmation shows around that time, and it would've been able to take advantage of the rich visual style of TMP and feature its diverse background aliens. And it would've been more onscreen Trek in the movie era, something we don't have much of. I think that if such a thing had been done, Filmation's Trek work would have a better reputation overall.

Absolutely agree. It would have been awesome TMP-TAS .

 

[Terok Nor]

^The title is Flash Gordon: The Greatest Adventure of All. Check YouTube.

Thanks Christopher

I didn't know that about the Flash Gordon series. I loved that show. Now I want to see the movie

here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6YhSjRiVio

Thank you both. I appreciate this a lot right now

 

[Maurice]

Filmation's Flash Gordon movie wasn't fully animated in the sense of a Disney film or a Looney Tunes short; there was still a lot of limited animation with some shots that went full animation. that quibble aside, one of the coolest things in it was the the way they did the spaceships: they built models of the ships, painted them flat, then covered then with fine painted-on gridlines. They were shot with the motion control rigs used for Space Academy and Jason of Star Command, so they moved in perfect camera-correct perspective.

(Now, I've read accounts claiming the animators rotoscoped this footage, but to my eye the fact that the linework doesn't exhibit the telltale jitter you'd get from hand-drawn rotoscoping makes me think they used the same technique used to shoot the B-17 bombers and flyover landscapes for the Heavy Metal movie two years later: paint the model flat and cover it with lines, shoot on high-contrast film and print the frames as negatives to animation cels, leaving you with black lines on clear film. The ink and paint people then only have to draw in any missing outlines and then paint the results.)

EDITS:
I found confirmation of my suspicion here (link):

“They’re painted white and outlined—right on the model—in black. No rotoscoping will be necessary here, because the frames will be blown up to become the line drawings ready to receive paint.”

The whole story can be read here in an old Future Life article on the Filmation Flash (link) The article starts on p.20 and you can click to enlarge the pages to a readable size and mouse over those to get the magnifier.

I also found a description of the motion control system here in Starlog 27 page 19–20 (link):

Possibly the most innovative system, though, is the one that was used for animating spaceships. A motion-control camera set-up (like the one used in Star Wars and most films since) was used to photograph fully constructed miniatures of the ships and aircraft. These models were white with black grid lines, and were photographed against a black background. Like the X-wings and TIE fighters in Star Wars, the Flash Gordon ships zoom toward and away from the camera, bank, roll, turn, etc. — perform wild actions that would be all but impossible to animate from scratch.

An unexpected plus arose from that space-ship system: It was discovered that with the use of the motion-control camera, long dollies and zooms could be added to portions of painted scenes. In one outstanding sequence, Earth grows menacingly large in the sky beyond the towers of Ming's city on Mongo, as the planets rush together on a collision course. The planets were cut-out paintings mounted on the motion-control track. This, and other techniques, lend the film a multi-plane look, though no multi-plane equipment was used.

Filmation's Adventures in Outer Space​

 

[Galileo7]

Filmation's Flash Gordon movie wasn't fully animated in the sense of a Disney film or a Looney Tunes short; there was still a lot of limited animation with some shots that went full animation. that quibble aside, one of the coolest things in it was the the way they did the spaceships: they built models of the ships, painted them flat, then covered then with fine painted-on gridlines. They were shot with the motion control rigs used for Space Academy and Jason of Star Command, so they moved in perfect camera-correct perspective.

(Now, I've read accounts claiming the animators rotoscoped this footage, but to my eye the fact that the linework doesn't exhibit the telltale jitter you'd get from hand-drawn rotoscoping makes me think they used the same technique used to shoot the B-17 bombers and flyover landscapes for the Heavy Metal movie two years later: paint the model flat and cover it with lines, shoot on high-contrast film and print the frames as negatives to animation cels, leaving you with black lines on clear film. The ink and paint people then only have to draw in any missing outlines and then paint the results.)

EDITS:
I found confirmation of my suspicion here (link):

“They’re painted white and outlined—right on the model—in black. No rotoscoping will be necessary here, because the frames will be blown up to become the line drawings ready to receive paint.”

The whole story can be read here in an old Future Life article on the Filmation Flash (link) The article starts on p.20 and you can click to enlarge the pages to a readable size and mouse over those to get the magnifier.

I also found a description of the motion control system here in Starlog 27 page 19–20 (link):

Possibly the most innovative system, though, is the one that was used for animating spaceships. A motion-control camera set-up (like the one used in Star Wars and most films since) was used to photograph fully constructed miniatures of the ships and aircraft. These models were white with black grid lines, and were photographed against a black background. Like the X-wings and TIE fighters in Star Wars, the Flash Gordon ships zoom toward and away from the camera, bank, roll, turn, etc. — perform wild actions that would be all but impossible to animate from scratch.

An unexpected plus arose from that space-ship system: It was discovered that with the use of the motion-control camera, long dollies and zooms could be added to portions of painted scenes. In one outstanding sequence, Earth grows menacingly large in the sky beyond the towers of Ming's city on Mongo, as the planets rush together on a collision course. The planets were cut-out paintings mounted on the motion-control track. This, and other techniques, lend the film a multi-plane look, though no multi-plane equipment was used.

Filmation's Adventures in Outer Space​

Filmation [ Ark II, Space Academy, Jason Of Star Command, Flash Gordon:TAS ] did impressive science-fiction for '70s Saturday mornings that production design and quality equaled the '70s prime-time series IMHO.

 

[Christopher]

Filmation's Flash Gordon movie wasn't fully animated in the sense of a Disney film or a Looney Tunes short; there was still a lot of limited animation with some shots that went full animation.

Yeah, and they reused the same character movements several times in different scenes, so they were still using the trademark Filmation stock system. But compared to their usual work, and to TV-level animation in general at the time, it was extraordinarily rich and gorgeous.

A similar example was Filmation's pilot movie for BraveStarr, which was meant for a theatrical release preceding the TV series but was delayed and only got a limited release. It was richly, fluidly animated on much the same level as Flash Gordon, and a ton of that animation was recycled in the series, giving it a higher quality than usual. (Although they didn't recycle story elements the way FG did. FG's movie and first season are basically different tellings of the same overall story, with a lot more side quests inserted in the TV season, whereas the BraveStarr movie is the in-continuity origin story for the series that follows.) Although I didn't know that at the time, since I only learned of the feature film's existence a few years ago.

that quibble aside, one of the coolest things in it was the the way they did the spaceships: they built models of the ships, painted them flat, then covered then with fine painted-on gridlines. They were shot with the motion control rigs used for Space Academy and Jason of Star Command, so they moved in perfect camera-correct perspective.

(Now, I've read accounts claiming the animators rotoscoped this footage, but to my eye the fact that the linework doesn't exhibit the telltale jitter you'd get from hand-drawn rotoscoping makes me think they used the same technique used to shoot the B-17 bombers and flyover landscapes for the Heavy Metal movie two years later: paint the model flat and cover it with lines, shoot on high-contrast film and print the frames as negatives to animation cels, leaving you with black lines on clear film. The ink and paint people then only have to draw in any missing outlines and then paint the results.)

Yes, I mentioned this earlier myself. No way was it rotoscoped; the lines have a grainy quality to them that's consistent with being photographed, and some of the lines disappear in the way they would if they were painted onto a 3D model that was rotating relative to the camera.

The motion-control work was supervised by the same people who did Space Academy and Jason too, by the way. They included Michael J. McAlister, who would go on to be a visual effects director and supervisor for films like Starman, Willow, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and The Truman Show, and Pat Sweeney, whose resume as a VFX director of photography is huge and far-reaching.

Filmation [ Ark II, Space Academy, Jason Of Star Command, Flash Gordon:TAS ] did impressive science-fiction for '70s Saturday mornings that production design and quality equaled the '70s prime-time series IMHO.

Space Academy benefitted from being able to snatch up a number of talented designers and FX artists who were looking for new work since they'd just wrapped up an obscure little project for a guy named George Lucas, something about wars among the stars...

Although Space Academy didn't use the bluescreen/motion-control work that Star Wars featured. It relied on the same kind of in-camera multiple-exposure compositing that 2001: A Space Odyssey and Space: 1999 had used -- which gave cleaner results without matte lines or graininess, but had the drawback of not being able to let objects pass in front of one another without translucency, so they had to leave blank spaces in the starfield for the paths the ships would follow. On Jason, they did start using motion-control bluescreen mattes, and while they were more versatile, they also looked a lot cruder and uglier because of the obvious matte lines and lower image clarity.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

Filmation's adaptations of classic franchises were often done with great fidelity. Their Tarzan was just about the most book-accurate screen adaptation ever, using ideas and characters from Burroughs's work that I don't think have ever been put onscreen anywhere else. Their Flash Gordon and Zorro were very faithful to the sources as well, as was their Lone Ranger, although they tweaked that one to be more educational about American history (at the expense of realism, because the Lone Ranger and Tonto got involved with events that spanned over 30 years of real history without aging a day).

Flash Gordon, Tarzan and Star Trek earned the most critical support for authenticity (with TS arguably being the jewel in Filmation's crown), while the rest of their adaptations were blasted for being soulless spin-offs, with the only resemblance in name only.

The Brady Kids, New Adventures of Gilligan, My Favorite Martians, etc., were hollow knock-offs compared to the charm (or so some claim) and seasoned sitcom scripting used on the parent series. In The New Adventures of Gilligan, gone were the occasionally sly social or political commentary (e.g. Howell's accusation of "creeping socialism," knocking Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program, and love of the class system), or well planned sight gags. They were replaced with Gilligan no longer being a man child (and as the Professor character once observed, cunning), but being reduced to a total childlike state, while the Skipper was not the proud sailor, but just as in need of instruction as Gilligan, and so on.

Filmation--like the horrid Hanna-Barbera--gained attention by adapting many live-action TV series, but most were not held in high regard by the children they were designed to entertain.