I'm only talking about the discussions I've personally experienced. I'm assuming nothing about anything beyond that. You asked whether reanimating TAS has been discussed, and I referred to the discussions I've personally been aware of, because I have no knowledge of any others.
Please take another look at what I wrote. I'm not saying TAS holds up well compared to animation from the '80s or '90s or today. Heck, even Filmation's work from five or six years later was a quantum leap above what they achieved in TAS. What I said, quite specifically, was that it was about as good as you could expect TV animation from 1973 to have been. It's not like all the other shows from that era were beautifully done and TAS's makers somehow dropped the ball. If anything, TAS had more money and care (though less time) put into it than most of its contemporary shows.
I'm certainly not saying TAS's animation was flawless. I'm just saying that it was a product of its time, that there's no realistic way in which a Saturday morning television show made for NBC in 1973 could have been much better made than TAS was. So it's a matter of setting your expectations to what was possible in the context.
I guess what I'm saying is that I try to judge things by how well they do in comparison to their limitations, rather than in comparison to something that has fewer limitations. For instance, if I see a low-budget SF movie from the '60s or '70s and they do a cool piece of miniature work even though you can clearly see the wires, I may respect that more than a CGI shot in a modern big-budget movie. Because even though the CGI shot looks more realistic, it was, if not necessarily easier for its makers to achieve in terms of labor, at least more expected because we know the means were easily available. When I look at a TV show or movie, I'm not just seeing the result, I'm thinking about the effort that went into it. Maybe it's because I'm a creator myself, or maybe it's just because The Making of Star Trek was one of the first non-children's books I ever read and it started my lifelong fascination with film and TV production. But if I know that the creators of a film or show were working under a specific set of limitations, I respect it if they manage to transcend those limits in any way, rather than damning the limits themselves.
I might actually be okay with a Star Blazers 2199-style recreation if it were done by animators who strove to be faithful to the design sensibilities of TAS while making the animation richer and more fluid. I'd particularly like it if they tried to update it in a Filmationy way -- e.g. incorporating the kind of rotoscoped action sequences that Filmation was using by the time of Tarzan and The Lone Ranger and Flash Gordon and He-Man, so that it looked like Filmation itself had made it a few years further along. Maybe it could be done; as I think I mentioned, the current Ninja Turtles series did an amazingly authentic TAS pastiche last season, beautifully capturing the art style.
And it might well be possible to capture or duplicate the actual, original background paintings and reuse them, with new animation composited over them and maybe a bit of digital enhancement to give them more movement. It's that artwork that I most want to see preserved.
What I absolutely would despise would be if it were changed to fit the generic 3D-animated style of today's shows. That would take away all its charms. I freely admit that TAS's animation was severely limited, but its design was fantastic. I would like something that had more movement and dynamism than TAS, but I would not want to lose the look.
The problem, though, is that even if you updated the visuals, you'd still be stuck with a 1970s-vintage voice, music, and sound effects track. I suppose that, since the voices are on a separate audio channel from the music and FX (so that foreign dubbing can be easily done), it would be possible to keep the voices and redo the music and sounds. But I'd hate to lose all that marvelous Ray Ellis music. It could, I suppose, be recreated by a modern orchestra, but it wouldn't sound quite the same. And I assume audiences today would want a wider range of musical cues; if so, I'd prefer to have them drawn from other Ellis Filmation scores such as Space Academy, Jason of Star Command, Flash Gordon, and Blackstar. Again, though, they'd have to be recreated, since the original masters are missing.
Even with all that, though, you'd still be stuck with the voice performances, which were also pretty limited in their own way. It might be a little incongruous to hear them alongside more modern, sophisticated animation.
I'd say it's very dissimilar in principle, because it's not just about substituting a few brief shots but about replacing the entire visual content of the series.
As I said, I think TAS's budget was actually relatively high for a Saturday morning network cartoon in '73-4. But that was probably pretty low in absolute terms.
Okay, she was actually turned into the "cowardly lion", but the final design looked coincidentally "Caitian".
