TAS is a derivative work of TOS.
The Animated Series
- Thread starter JeffinOakland
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But that's not about how many people read them. It's just about what they are. Again, "canon" is not some kind of official seal of approval, it's just a description for something that already exists. "Canon" is a word that was coined by Sherlock Holmes fandom to describe the original Doyle stories and to distinguish them from apocryphal stories by other writers. The original work in a franchise is the canon, and things based on it by other creators are not, simply by definition. Sometimes it gets more complicated, sometimes tie-ins get included or parts of the original work get excluded; but the basic, starting-point definition of canon is the original stuff that the other stuff is based on. And it's not a formal label imposed by the studio; it's a description that fans and critics apply to what the studio creates.
So are the movies and the four live-action sequel series. But those are all counted as part of the canon because they're production of the copyright owners of the franchise. In the original, Holmesian use of the term, canon is the work of the original author as distinct from things written by other authors. But when something is the creation of many hands, it's the studio that owns and produces the property that's effectively the "author."
Granted, TAS was produced by Filmation Associates rather than Paramount, which just distributed it. But it was also co-produced with Gene Roddenberry's Norway Productions, which at the time did still own the copyright to Star Trek. Roddenberry was its executive producer, and his deal with NBC gave him absolute creative control over it -- something he never had with TOS or TNG. It's ironic that the one part of Star Trek that Roddenberry made a point of disowning was the one part that was most purely his, at least contractually.
Anyway, I don't get why we're still debating why people used to think it wasn't canonical. Does it matter what people thought in the past? In the here and now, it doesn't matter anymore. Why can't fandom move past this issue? They're the only ones keeping the "debate" alive.
I realize that now. When I was 13, I didn't see the bigger picture.
My favorite aspect of TAS was how the animation allowed the scriptwriters to develop storylines and scenes that would have been impossible to film due to safety, budgetary or technology restraints in real life. This allowed for some far out (even silly) scenes w Kirk and Spock & gang performing the physically or near-physically impossible, which is fun in this context.
I'll be fine with the changing of bans, if we can add one onto Enterprise and all of JJTrek.
My exposure to the animated Star Trek was debatably distinctive. While I had fleeting memories of the original live action series during its NBC run (the approach of the Doomsday Machine caused me to duck behind my father's easy chair screaming), I didn't start watching it with regularity until 1972 during its syndication. I initially did so in order to "roleplay" Spock opposite a newly earned friend's Kirk. "Huh?" you ask. In short, I encountered a boy roughly my age just after my father and I moved to an apartment complex. This boy, Kyle, was an avid watcher and liked to play Kirk. He wanted someone to play with him as Spock. To win his favor I agreed. At first I watched as a kind of "research", but that activity soon grew into genuine interest.
Barely a year passed and it was SEptember 1973. By this time I was an avid fan. As far as my father was comcerned, it was more like a "rabid" fan. ;-) Anyway, NBC debuted the animated series with "Beyond the Farthest Star". At the same time, the reruns of the live action originals ceased. I think it was a local CBS affiliate was transmitted the 1966-69 reruns; so it wasn't the same station that hosted the new cartoon. I have no idea why this was done, but the upshot was that the Filmation cartoon was the only material available for viewing for the next 2 years. So, only a year after becoming a childhood Trekkie, I was likely amuch indoctrinated by the cartoon as I was the "real deal".
Come September of 1975, NBC ceased airing the animated series and a week or two later, reruns of the original live action series were broadcast once more. I wasn't too upset over the loss of the cartoon because there were still many episodes of the "original 79" I had not yet seen. Eventually, active thoughts about the Saturday morning adaptation faded, replaced by material that was still new, at least for me. Not that I outright "forgot" about it. Publications like Bjo Trimble's "Star Trek Concordance" treated the animated material with equal importance to the 1966-69 series, actually going into even deeper detail. then there were Alan Dean Foster's novelizations of the Filmation cartoon. He expanded upon the material, filling each adaptation with incidental moments that made the stories read a bit more like the 52+ minute originals. (I've endearingly joked that the cartoon segments played like "Reader's Digest" versions, stripped down to the "highlights". Funny thing, without access to the actual cartoons, my memories of those broadcasts became "distorted" by the "fleshing out" Foster introduced. When I saw them well over a decade later on Nickelodeon, I found myself wondering, "Hey, what about this part? Did they 'snip' it? Wait; no, that was one of Foster's embellishments. It never existed in the episode itself."
Sincerely,
Bill
Barely a year passed and it was SEptember 1973. By this time I was an avid fan. As far as my father was comcerned, it was more like a "rabid" fan. ;-) Anyway, NBC debuted the animated series with "Beyond the Farthest Star". At the same time, the reruns of the live action originals ceased. I think it was a local CBS affiliate was transmitted the 1966-69 reruns; so it wasn't the same station that hosted the new cartoon. I have no idea why this was done, but the upshot was that the Filmation cartoon was the only material available for viewing for the next 2 years. So, only a year after becoming a childhood Trekkie, I was likely amuch indoctrinated by the cartoon as I was the "real deal".
Come September of 1975, NBC ceased airing the animated series and a week or two later, reruns of the original live action series were broadcast once more. I wasn't too upset over the loss of the cartoon because there were still many episodes of the "original 79" I had not yet seen. Eventually, active thoughts about the Saturday morning adaptation faded, replaced by material that was still new, at least for me. Not that I outright "forgot" about it. Publications like Bjo Trimble's "Star Trek Concordance" treated the animated material with equal importance to the 1966-69 series, actually going into even deeper detail. then there were Alan Dean Foster's novelizations of the Filmation cartoon. He expanded upon the material, filling each adaptation with incidental moments that made the stories read a bit more like the 52+ minute originals. (I've endearingly joked that the cartoon segments played like "Reader's Digest" versions, stripped down to the "highlights". Funny thing, without access to the actual cartoons, my memories of those broadcasts became "distorted" by the "fleshing out" Foster introduced. When I saw them well over a decade later on Nickelodeon, I found myself wondering, "Hey, what about this part? Did they 'snip' it? Wait; no, that was one of Foster's embellishments. It never existed in the episode itself."
Sincerely,
Bill
^In my case, I first watched TOS in January 1974 (41 years ago tomorrow, in fact!), and then discovered TAS just a few weeks later, if I've reconstructed things correctly. So I was experiencing them both at once, and I just thought of them as two facets of the same whole.
IIRC, Richard Arnold was posting on Usenet - sometimes arguing with the Trek novelists (Duane, Ferguson, Crispin, Lorrah, Carey, among others) about issues that eventually got shunted away by "the memo" of 1989 - around that time. Richard was officially employed as Star Trek Archivist after the premiere of ST IV (1986), but he had been attending Trek conventions with Gene (and without him) all through the 80s, and he would often field questions from fans who would ask about the Rihannsu, dreadnoughts, the Tech Manual, the FASA RPGs, etc and they'd ask why the movies and then TNG were ignoring certain factoids that didn't seem to gel, or would have resolved a plot in a diffferent way.
Richard started to use the term "canon" more and more frequently, expecting his answer to stop all the weird questions, but it kind of backfired. But yes, the "canon" debate did seem to have its roots in Usenet and GEnie, and then convention appearances and Richard's column in "The Communicator" (the eventual title of the Official Fan Club newsletter).
Significantly, when TNG started, TAS had not had much of a rescreening in USA for quite some time. It was fairly ridiculous to hold the TNG writers to staying true to TAS when TNG was already playing loose with some events from TOS. ie. I recall, after "Encounter at Farpoint" had premiered, that Q's mentioning of a World War III ruffled a few fannish feathers because people (and FASA?) had made up personal (and licensed) timelines that tracked the Eugenics Wars, but not a third world war.
It was convenient to just ignore TAS at the time. It was 22 less scripts that had to be consulted when refining continuity, and new fans of Trek (and numerous TNG scriptwriters) had never been exposed to TAS.
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Similarly, the recent IDW John Byrne photo comic featuring Mudd. It also seems to ignore the events of "Mudd's Passion". (As did "The Business, as Usual, During Altercations" in "Mudd's Angels" by JA Lawrence, waaaaaay back in the Bantam days.)
It's badly in need of updating, but my Toon Trek pages (as of 2004) are here:
http://andorfiles.blogspot.com.au/2009/10/toon-trek.html
And that was essentially Richard Arnold's take on TAS during the late 80s. That it had not been produced by Desilu/Paramount, but was instead a joint creation of Filmation, Norway Productions and NBC Children's Programming, essentially produced under license like the comics, novels, toys, etc. Splitting hairs, yes, but it made his point.
Distribution of TAS eventually fell to Paramount TV after its initial run, and outright ownership of TAS wasn't clarified as being Paramount TV's (later CBS) until much later.
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Going over that list, it seems that most of the TAS episodes I didn't list nods to already were referenced in Crucible: The Fire and the Rose. (Contrary to what your page says, that's the only reference to Wesley that mentions his governorship of Mantilles, as far as I can tell.) Though there are a couple of ambiguous ones, like a shuttlecraft named Copernicus being used in ST V.
When David R George III autographed my copy, he wrote "Every time I added a TAS reference, I thought of you."
Yeah, it's been soooooo long since I put it together, but I recall I had a reason to list "Governor" rather than "Wesley". So it could be that "Yesterday's Son" and "Tears of the Singers" referenced the man and not the position?
Yeah. Some were me just being a cheeky completist. I remember being taken to task by KRAD on a few when I was first putting it together.
My Google Books search of Tears doesn't turn up a mention of Wesley at all. Yesterday's Son features Wesley still in command of the Lexington and says nothing about any governorship. (After all, the novel ignores "Yesteryear," so it stands to reason that it ignores "One of Our Planets is Missing" too.)
Wesley also appears in The Disinherited, but that book takes place before "The Ultimate Computer."
Oh, by the way, I was going to mention... Maybe the reason Mudd's Angels disregarded "Mudd's Passion" was because Ballantine had the rights to that story, so Bantam couldn't acknowledge it? I don't know what the licensing agreements were like back in the '70s. Then again, it could simply be that J.A. Lawrence hadn't seen TAS.
Judith Lawrence does explain in the introduction that they were essentially asked to ignore "Mudd's Passion" because Alan Dean Foster was adapting those TAS episodes for Ballantine's "Logs".
No. You're mistaken.
Okay, found my notes. I'll have to go through the books themselves, but...
"Yesterday's Son" actually mentions that Wesley is back in Starfleet; ie. he is therefore "the former governor" of Mantilles.
http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Talk:USS_Lexington_%28NCC-1709%29
I can't find any reason for why I connected the governor with "Tears of the Singers". Perhaps an old wiki entry that is now gone?
Yes, that was in my notes, too.
I just went through the book myself, and I could find no mention of Wesley being "back in Starfleet." I thought I remembered such a reference, but I can't find one. Maybe I just assumed it in an attempt to reconcile the book with TAS. But as far as I can find, the book makes no mention of TAS at all.
For that matter, the Memory Beta talk page you link to does not actually say that Yesterday's Son claims Wesley returned to Starfleet. It just says that YS says Wesley was in command of the Lexington, and the commenter assumes from that reference that he returned to Starfleet after Mantilles. But it's pretty clear to me that Crispin just wasn't familiar with TAS or chose to ignore it.
Agreed, which is why I generally avoid discussions of Cannon, or Personal Cannon, which while the former makes a certain amount of sense, the latter does not.
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