The Animated Series - Good or mere Curiosity?
- Thread starter T'Baio
- Start date
Add The Infinite Vulcan to 'UNWATCHABLE' and I pretty much agree with this list.
Okay, let's clear up this canon thing.
There is nobody at Paramount or CBS whose job it is to hand down dogma about what is or isn't canon. Canon is simply what the current producers of new material in a franchise choose to acknowledge. When the producers change, ideas of canon can change. For instance, while Jeri Taylor was the showrunner of Voyager, she considered her crew-bio novels Mosaic and Pathways to be canonical, but once she left, her successors contradicted a lot of things from those books.
With TAS, Roddenberry and his aide Richard Arnold issued a memo in 1989 saying that, as far as Roddenberry was concerned, TAS didn't count. But Roddenberry also considered at least a couple of the movies to be non-canonical, and even wanted to discount parts of TOS itself as apocryphal because he was disappointed with how they turned out.
Once he died, though, Richard Arnold was promptly fired, and from that point on, that '89 memo was no longer binding. There was nothing to prevent any subsequent ST writers and showrunners from acknowledging TAS in their works, and indeed we have gotten numerous canonical allusions to TAS in the years since, including mentions of the Klothos as the name of Koloth's ship, Edosian orchids, the kahs-wan ritual and Vulcan's Forge, etc.
True, nobody's ever officially declared TAS canonical again. But nobody's needed to, because such a declaration wouldn't make any difference. Whoever's in charge of producing new Trek is free to acknowledge or ignore whatever parts of it they want to. Because "canon" isn't some predefined code that's rigidly binding on all subsequent creators and fans. It's merely a descriptive category, not a proscriptive one. Canon is whatever the current showrunners want it to be, and it's a loose, mutable thing.
And it makes even less difference to the viewers whether TAS is canonical or not. It's still just as fictional either way. You don't work for Paramount or CBS, so if you want to consider TAS "real" within your own personal interpretation of the Trek universe, nobody can stop you. Heck, even if you did work for Paramount or CBS, nobody would bother to stop you. Because it's been maybe 17 years or more since anyone working for Paramount or CBS has had any interest in enforcing that 1989 memo.
Me, I pick and choose. I count about half the episodes as "real," but the other half have implausibilities I can't get around, so I treat them as apocryphal. That has no bearing on their entertainment value, however.
In terms of quality: By today's standard, TAS's animation is crude. But by the standards of the day, it was an impressive piece of work considering its limits. Filmation did just about the most limited, repetitive animation on TV in the '70s, but also the best-looking animation. Compare it to contemporary Hanna-Barbera stuff at the time (the other leading TV animation studio), and the H-B stuff has a little more movement but it's sloppy and ugly. Filmation's shows had gorgeous background art, cleanly drawn cel art, and imaginative design work, and their adaptations of pre-existing properties were generally rather faithful. Filmation adapted Star Trek more faithfully than any other studio would have; they kept all the original cast they could afford, they were true to the look and format of the show, they didn't add kid characters or a cute alien mascot, they didn't turn it into a shoot-'em-up adventure, etc. It was made by people who loved and respected the original show, and largely written by people who'd worked on the original show.
And yes, sometimes the stories were silly, but no more often than the stories on TOS were. The crew getting progressively shrunken is no sillier than Spock's brain being stolen. Encountering Kukulkan is no sillier than encountering Apollo. An alternate universe where magic works is no sillier than an alien-created haunted house. A giant Spock clone is no sillier (well, not much sillier) than a giant space amoeba.
Actually it ran for one 16-episode season and one 6-episode season, which wasn't atypical for a Saturday morning animated series at the time. Kids are (or at least were) more tolerant of reruns than adults, so a show would often stay on the air for years while constantly rerunning the same 1-2 half-seasons' worth of material.
There is nobody at Paramount or CBS whose job it is to hand down dogma about what is or isn't canon. Canon is simply what the current producers of new material in a franchise choose to acknowledge. When the producers change, ideas of canon can change. For instance, while Jeri Taylor was the showrunner of Voyager, she considered her crew-bio novels Mosaic and Pathways to be canonical, but once she left, her successors contradicted a lot of things from those books.
With TAS, Roddenberry and his aide Richard Arnold issued a memo in 1989 saying that, as far as Roddenberry was concerned, TAS didn't count. But Roddenberry also considered at least a couple of the movies to be non-canonical, and even wanted to discount parts of TOS itself as apocryphal because he was disappointed with how they turned out.
Once he died, though, Richard Arnold was promptly fired, and from that point on, that '89 memo was no longer binding. There was nothing to prevent any subsequent ST writers and showrunners from acknowledging TAS in their works, and indeed we have gotten numerous canonical allusions to TAS in the years since, including mentions of the Klothos as the name of Koloth's ship, Edosian orchids, the kahs-wan ritual and Vulcan's Forge, etc.
True, nobody's ever officially declared TAS canonical again. But nobody's needed to, because such a declaration wouldn't make any difference. Whoever's in charge of producing new Trek is free to acknowledge or ignore whatever parts of it they want to. Because "canon" isn't some predefined code that's rigidly binding on all subsequent creators and fans. It's merely a descriptive category, not a proscriptive one. Canon is whatever the current showrunners want it to be, and it's a loose, mutable thing.
And it makes even less difference to the viewers whether TAS is canonical or not. It's still just as fictional either way. You don't work for Paramount or CBS, so if you want to consider TAS "real" within your own personal interpretation of the Trek universe, nobody can stop you. Heck, even if you did work for Paramount or CBS, nobody would bother to stop you. Because it's been maybe 17 years or more since anyone working for Paramount or CBS has had any interest in enforcing that 1989 memo.
Me, I pick and choose. I count about half the episodes as "real," but the other half have implausibilities I can't get around, so I treat them as apocryphal. That has no bearing on their entertainment value, however.
In terms of quality: By today's standard, TAS's animation is crude. But by the standards of the day, it was an impressive piece of work considering its limits. Filmation did just about the most limited, repetitive animation on TV in the '70s, but also the best-looking animation. Compare it to contemporary Hanna-Barbera stuff at the time (the other leading TV animation studio), and the H-B stuff has a little more movement but it's sloppy and ugly. Filmation's shows had gorgeous background art, cleanly drawn cel art, and imaginative design work, and their adaptations of pre-existing properties were generally rather faithful. Filmation adapted Star Trek more faithfully than any other studio would have; they kept all the original cast they could afford, they were true to the look and format of the show, they didn't add kid characters or a cute alien mascot, they didn't turn it into a shoot-'em-up adventure, etc. It was made by people who loved and respected the original show, and largely written by people who'd worked on the original show.
And yes, sometimes the stories were silly, but no more often than the stories on TOS were. The crew getting progressively shrunken is no sillier than Spock's brain being stolen. Encountering Kukulkan is no sillier than encountering Apollo. An alternate universe where magic works is no sillier than an alien-created haunted house. A giant Spock clone is no sillier (well, not much sillier) than a giant space amoeba.
Actually it ran for one 16-episode season and one 6-episode season, which wasn't atypical for a Saturday morning animated series at the time. Kids are (or at least were) more tolerant of reruns than adults, so a show would often stay on the air for years while constantly rerunning the same 1-2 half-seasons' worth of material.
I'd rate it as well as the third season of regular TOS, maybe a bit above. A few decent episodes (Yesteryear being one obvious one) and some other lesser episodes. Think of it as TOS-lite with a few interesting ideas you'd love to have seen make it through to the regular series.
My (three year old) daughter loves it but decides on episodes based on whether or not she's going to watch the "woman episode"
My (three year old) daughter loves it but decides on episodes based on whether or not she's going to watch the "woman episode"
I think it's canon far more than anything that followed.
It has its charm with some really good stories at the heart of it. But it also suffers from static animation and over reused sound tracks.
It's worth the price - these aren't 'remastered' eps, by any means, but the transfers are clean, the sound is as good as one can expect from '70s cartoons, and some of the stories are surprisingly good, considering it was a Saturday-morning "kids' show." The animation is average for the time, but frankly, no worse than a lot of the stuff on the air today - only the style of the imagery dates it, not the techniques. It's the only DVD set of Trek I've bought at retail price.
^Actually I find that the limited animation style used by Filmation and other studios back in the '70s has been making something of a resurgence in recent years with the use of Flash animation to produce TV cartoons. For instance, the Flash-animated Doctor Who productions I've seen (The Infinite Quest and the reconstructions of "The Invasion") have a very Filmationesque quality at times, with the same fairly static character poses being used over and over, stock movements being reused, the occasional bit of rotoscoped animation being incongruously inserted when a fluid motion needs to be shown, etc. And the art style wasn't that much different, the same kind of clean, simplified character designs.
Gene didn't think aspects of TFF and The Undiscovered Country were canon, either. Had he lived to see DS9, VOY, ENT, or JJ's film, he may well have said the same thing about them.We'll never know.
would anyone say its better than clone wars the cartoon?
The difference is that with Flash animation the in-betweens can be essentially "free" so you can vary the speed of actions even in stock animations, and they don't have to feel as static and eye-numblingly dead as Filmation's work.
True enough.
TheLonelySquire
Vice Admiral
I love it. Reminds me of when I was 10 watching it on Saturday mornings. Even now TAS and some pancakes on a rainy weekend morning...priceless!
"Yesteryear" is better than TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT COMBINED! Buy it online and you might be able to get it even cheaper.
Not canon, but still Trek.
Yeah does anybody watch that? My neph does....I should ask him.
Well, I think that statement is just a little too hyperbolic
, but it is indeed an awesome episode. As a fan of Mark Lenard's work on Star Trek, I get such a kick out of hearing his voice coming out of a cartoon rendering of him.
The new film seems to have wiped April from existence!
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