In 1973, Filmation presented Star Trek: The Animated Series, one of the lesser-celebrated but no less glorious jewels in the Star Trek crown. I, for one, prefer this series to Voyager and Enterprise.
Anyway, Filmation's Lou Scheimer had Gene Roddenberry on board as an executive consultant, and the fantastic Dorothy Fontana served as the series story editor. The entire cast, save for Walter Koenig (Chekov), returned to provide the voices for their characters, the crew of the original starship Enterprise.
The first episode, "Beyond the Farthest Star" (by Samuel A. Peeples; directed by Hal Sutherland), starts routinely with the opening credits, a nice, if rough approximation or re-creation of the live-action series credits. Only with "starring the voices of" as the legend, rather than simply "starring." Still, I challenge any Star Trek fan to watch this and not feel the thrill of nostalgia; the surge of adrenaline as the original Enterprise zooms across the stars...into unknown territory again.
As the half-hour opening installment begins, the Enterprise is cruising on the "outer fringe" of the galaxy en route to "Quasar M-17," when a strange "radio emission" is intercepted by the crew. A sudden increase of gravity (or "hypergravity") drags the Federation starship off course, and it promptly falls into the gravity well of a dead star. The Enterprise manages an orbital insertion in the nick of time, and Spock soon detects a strange alien starship also trapped in orbit. He determines that it has been locked there, trapped, on the magnitude of "300 million years."
An investigation of the ship (which boasts a biological, organic design; presaging many 1970s productions such as Alien [1979]), reveals that aliens destroyed their own vessel because they had accidentally taken on a malevolent, formless life form who was seeking escape...into the heart of the galaxy. This creature, a "magnetic organism without mass," makes it back to the Enterprise with the landing party, and begins to run amuck there. Captain Kirk seemingly chooses suicide and certain destruction rather than freeing this evil life form from its ages-old captivity...
As you can tell from this brief synopsis, there are many familiar elements here; or rather, some elements that would one day become familiar to Trekdom. From the original series, we have an age-old, formless entity of pure evil, like Redjac in "The Wolf in the Fold." And future Treks, including Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, would also involve an alien entity hoping to escape a planetary prison with the use of a starship. Like Star Trek efforts including "Where No Man Has Gone Before," Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Next Gen's "The Nth Degree," a definable landmark in the galaxy is visited by the Federation; here the outer rim; (in other cases, it's the edge of the galaxy or the center of the galaxy). What I'm saying is that it is both fruitful and illuminating to gaze at The Animated Series not as apocryphal; but rather as a transitional bridge between Trek productions of the 1960s and the 1980s. After all, besides Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the Animated Series is the ONLY Star Trek produced during the disco decade. With the caliber of the talent involved (Roddenberry, Fontana, Gerrold, Larry Niven, Shatner, Nimoy and others), it shouldn't be quite so easily dismissed by fans who choose to dismiss it as being outside of "canon."
So, generally, how does Star Trek: The Animated Series compare to original Trek? It is clearly designed for children (it is a Saturday morning series, after all), but to use a common phrase, it is "light years" ahead of other Saturday morning fare from the same decade. I just finished blogging Filmation's Flash Gordon, for instance. It's an entertaining series in all, but essentially a very basic run-around, confrontation show: Flash vs. Monsters; Flash vs. Ming, etc. There's no character development, really, and the serial format precludes the accommodation of grand science fiction ideas. On Star Trek, as early as this first episode, one detects the ideas at work. The Animated Series is not so much simplified as streamlined. And, it's immensely entertaining.
But anyway, Filmation has done a remarkable job of recreating the original Enterprise interiors, costumes and production design. In this episode, there are several nice insert shots of classic Federation hardware such as tricorders and communicators...and they look just right. The transporter console is familiar too, and the bridge looks great. The level of fidelity here is more than respectable. It's astonishing.
What's different? Well, interestingly, you can already detect how Gene Roddenberry was incorporating new and fascinating ideas into the franchise; updating the Trek universe. For instance, a pan across the bridge of the Enterprise reveals a second turbo lift (to the left of the view screen; to the right of Engineering). We would next see a second turbo lift on the bridge next in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Satisfying the curiosity of many, this episode also reveals for the first time some of the details of what specifically Spock sees in the "blue glow" of his library computer viewer. At one point it's just a sine wave, signifying the "heart beat" of the alien, but it's still cool. Haven't you always wanted to know what he was seeing in that bloomin' thing? I know I have.
Anyway, Filmation's Lou Scheimer had Gene Roddenberry on board as an executive consultant, and the fantastic Dorothy Fontana served as the series story editor. The entire cast, save for Walter Koenig (Chekov), returned to provide the voices for their characters, the crew of the original starship Enterprise.
The first episode, "Beyond the Farthest Star" (by Samuel A. Peeples; directed by Hal Sutherland), starts routinely with the opening credits, a nice, if rough approximation or re-creation of the live-action series credits. Only with "starring the voices of" as the legend, rather than simply "starring." Still, I challenge any Star Trek fan to watch this and not feel the thrill of nostalgia; the surge of adrenaline as the original Enterprise zooms across the stars...into unknown territory again.
As the half-hour opening installment begins, the Enterprise is cruising on the "outer fringe" of the galaxy en route to "Quasar M-17," when a strange "radio emission" is intercepted by the crew. A sudden increase of gravity (or "hypergravity") drags the Federation starship off course, and it promptly falls into the gravity well of a dead star. The Enterprise manages an orbital insertion in the nick of time, and Spock soon detects a strange alien starship also trapped in orbit. He determines that it has been locked there, trapped, on the magnitude of "300 million years."
An investigation of the ship (which boasts a biological, organic design; presaging many 1970s productions such as Alien [1979]), reveals that aliens destroyed their own vessel because they had accidentally taken on a malevolent, formless life form who was seeking escape...into the heart of the galaxy. This creature, a "magnetic organism without mass," makes it back to the Enterprise with the landing party, and begins to run amuck there. Captain Kirk seemingly chooses suicide and certain destruction rather than freeing this evil life form from its ages-old captivity...
As you can tell from this brief synopsis, there are many familiar elements here; or rather, some elements that would one day become familiar to Trekdom. From the original series, we have an age-old, formless entity of pure evil, like Redjac in "The Wolf in the Fold." And future Treks, including Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, would also involve an alien entity hoping to escape a planetary prison with the use of a starship. Like Star Trek efforts including "Where No Man Has Gone Before," Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Next Gen's "The Nth Degree," a definable landmark in the galaxy is visited by the Federation; here the outer rim; (in other cases, it's the edge of the galaxy or the center of the galaxy). What I'm saying is that it is both fruitful and illuminating to gaze at The Animated Series not as apocryphal; but rather as a transitional bridge between Trek productions of the 1960s and the 1980s. After all, besides Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the Animated Series is the ONLY Star Trek produced during the disco decade. With the caliber of the talent involved (Roddenberry, Fontana, Gerrold, Larry Niven, Shatner, Nimoy and others), it shouldn't be quite so easily dismissed by fans who choose to dismiss it as being outside of "canon."
So, generally, how does Star Trek: The Animated Series compare to original Trek? It is clearly designed for children (it is a Saturday morning series, after all), but to use a common phrase, it is "light years" ahead of other Saturday morning fare from the same decade. I just finished blogging Filmation's Flash Gordon, for instance. It's an entertaining series in all, but essentially a very basic run-around, confrontation show: Flash vs. Monsters; Flash vs. Ming, etc. There's no character development, really, and the serial format precludes the accommodation of grand science fiction ideas. On Star Trek, as early as this first episode, one detects the ideas at work. The Animated Series is not so much simplified as streamlined. And, it's immensely entertaining.
But anyway, Filmation has done a remarkable job of recreating the original Enterprise interiors, costumes and production design. In this episode, there are several nice insert shots of classic Federation hardware such as tricorders and communicators...and they look just right. The transporter console is familiar too, and the bridge looks great. The level of fidelity here is more than respectable. It's astonishing.
What's different? Well, interestingly, you can already detect how Gene Roddenberry was incorporating new and fascinating ideas into the franchise; updating the Trek universe. For instance, a pan across the bridge of the Enterprise reveals a second turbo lift (to the left of the view screen; to the right of Engineering). We would next see a second turbo lift on the bridge next in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Satisfying the curiosity of many, this episode also reveals for the first time some of the details of what specifically Spock sees in the "blue glow" of his library computer viewer. At one point it's just a sine wave, signifying the "heart beat" of the alien, but it's still cool. Haven't you always wanted to know what he was seeing in that bloomin' thing? I know I have.
What's changed? Well, first and foremost, there's an alien navigator, the three-armed Mr. Arex, sitting in Mr. Chekov's spot. He's a little gimmicky for my taste (three arms; three legs), but okay overall, I guess. More genuinely fascinating, Federation technology has been updated. It now includes "life support belts" which eliminate the need for space suits in inhospitable environments. I actually like this idea a great deal, and think it's both inventive and keeping in the spirit of the original Trek's vision of the future. Space suits are so retro! It seems that personal forcefields generated by small belts is not only a nice cheap expedient (like the transporter...) for getting into and out of weird environments, but I kind of think the belts tart up the uniforms nicely. To me, Star Trek is never really about the early, hard days of space travel (leave that to another favorite, Space:1999, please...), but rather the era wherein man has tamed technology and it is easy, simple-to-use and - again this phrase - streamlined. Maybe life support belts aren't inherently dramatic (like space suits); but then neither is the transporter. A shuttle is much more interesting, isn't it? That's okay, though, belts and transporters feel "Trekkish," and get us into environments where otherwise it would be hard to go. I like this; I like this view of the Trek universe as being much more advanced than ours.
Uniquely, the bridge is now equipped with an "automatic bridge defense system," a turret that lowers from the bridge ceiling in times of danger and can target any object in the room with a phaser array. Although this turret is hijacked by the evil alien in "Beyond the Farthest Star" (oopsy!), I actually think this is a device that perhaps should have stayed in the live-action franchise. I got tired in The Next Generation (in episodes like "The High Ground" and "Best of Both Worlds") of watching Lt. Worf leap over a furniture barrier between his station and Captain Picard when confronted with unfriendly interlopers. Any alien could apparently just beam onto the bridge and punch crewmen or hijack them off the ship. Lame! It seems like an automatic defense system might have actually come in handy. An intruder beams in - zap 'em! It's easier on the legs than jumping hurdles, Mr. Worf. (That's also a bad design of the NCC-1701-D if you ask me; putting up a thick barrier between the Security Station and the rest of the command crew...).
Another change: We see Engineering, and it looks familiar enough, save for the new "engineering core." That's different terminology than we've been accustomed to on Star Trek. It's really just a giant glowing hatch in the Engineering deck floor, ostensibly leading down into the anti-matter/matter reactor. I don't know for sure. It's not entirely clear what it is. They don't call it a dilithium crystal chamber, though.
"Beyond the Farthest Star" is a colorful episode, and an advantage of animation is that alien spaceship designs and planets are not restricted by live-action budgetary constraints. Here, the alien ship is organic in design, consisting of individual cells or pods that have been "burst open," (again, think Alien...). The scale of this alien ship is something that couldn't be accomplished back in the day of the original Trek; and the landing party's tour of the derelict reminded me a little of the Krell tour in Forbidden Planet.
The Animated Series also gets hosannas from me because it gets the characterizations spot on. The Captain's final strategem in this episode is pure Kirkian brinkmanship - straight from the live-action show. Spock's dispassion and tendency to refer to humans as primitive (with a good rejoinder from Kirk in this case...), is also present - and welcome. Dr. McCoy is his interjecting, emotional self, etc. I know I'm biased, but this is my favorite Star Trek crew, and I guess I'd rather see more of them than of any other team. And some will no doubt quibble with this assessment, but I believe The Animated Series is actually closer to the original concept of Star Trek than any spin-off; in terms of production design; character development and yes, themes and storylines. And especially in heart. Later Star Treks would have benefited from incorporating more, not less of this series.
I'll take the slightly streamlined stories and 22-minute running time here for the advantage of seeing Kirk, Spock and Bones in action again. The Animated Series - like the first six motion pictures - feels like real Star Trek. Not the replicative fading I'd come accustomed to in the later Berman era. If you can swing the price of the DVD set, I highly recommend that you boldly go...
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