On Star Trek the Enterprise was famously on a five-year mission. But thanks to the hostility of NBC to Gene Roddenberry and his little TV show, only three years made air. But in 1973, four years after the cancellation of the show, the fourth year was finally broadcast. Now admittedly it was not live action, but animation, but that was actually a good thing.
When the Roddenberry machine hooked up with the Filmation outfit, we got a Star Trek that was even more capable of going "where no man had gone before", because it's way cheaper to draw the unknown and impossible than to cast for it. Star Trek - The Animated Series kept the smart bits which made Trek special and added scope.
The smartest thing was making sure that cast members like William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy along with most of the rest were available to voice their animated counterparts. This more than anything else gives the show its legitimacy. Save for Walter Koenig who was not cast for cost reasons, the whole gang is back. Nichelle Nichols and George Takei are on the bridge, though the latter was unavailable for a time because of TV fair time rules because Takei was running for public office in California. James Doohan proved to be perhaps the most important member of the animated cast as he provided a cavalcade of voices for the show. Many of the others did too, but nowhere near as many as Doohan. One source said he did nearly fifty different characters for the run of the show in its two season.
I also think the Enterprise looked fabulous in its animated form. It was sleek and moved across the screen with a casual grace the live action had not been able to present. In the two seasons which added to a total of twenty-two episodes (sixteen in the first and another six in the second) Kirk and his crew found all sorts of new threats and all manner of different alien species.
Two new aliens actually served on the ship, one a three-legged and three-armed navigator named Arex and the other a catlike communications officer named Mress. Many of the aliens the crew encoutnered were equally off the human model. In fact the designs often reminded me of the science fiction art of Jack Gaughan. And that added a whole layer of utter weirdness that the live-action shows of the time were just not able to match.
I'm an enormous fan of the animated Star Trek. I think the shorter episodes of twenty-two minutes make for a more brisk storytelling and even at this size some of the stories seem to dawdle. Filmation uses limited animation by necessity and having so many different faces and form to switch back and forth between made Star Trek a visually more vibrant show than some of their efforts. The cartoon show kept the Star Trek boat afloat at a time when there was an enormous swell of interest in the show. Syndication had proved to be a surging and fabulous success.
The comics from Gold Key were finding an eager audience. The "Trekkie" was a new creature lurking among us. There was interest in those wags who had killed it off to try to find a way to get a little of the golden goose they'd let slip between their fingers. They were anxious to get of the glamour and maybe that might be on the big screen. A few years later when a little thing called Star Wars taught Hollywood a thing or two, a Star Trek movie was a certainty. But more on that next month when the Dojo reviews the Star Trek movies starring this great first cast.
Live long and prosper.
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