A few months back, the 22 episodes that make up the animated Star Trek series were released on DVD. I had seen a handful of them many, many years ago. It had been long enough that I scarcely remembered any of it aside from Spock having a saber-toothed tigery thingie for a pet as a child. In any case, recently (because of said DVDs) I had the chance to watch the series again.If you've never seen the animated Star Trek, it's essentially everything the original Star Trek was, only taken to greater extremes.
William Shatner, fully aware that he has only his voice through which to convey his performance, overacts even more than he did in the live action version.
You know how the original series had maybe forty minutes' worth of music (granted, memorable music, but not much of it) reused again and again from one episode to the next? Well, the animated series has about ten minutes, and it's arguably even more bombastic and over the top.
Not that it's all about the high extremes. There are the low extremes too. The "minor characters" generally have even less to do here than they did in the live action version. Poor Chekov didn't even make it into the animated series.
Klingons are even more ridiculously shallow villains.
And some plots careen along at breakneck pace to fit into the 22 minute running time of the animated series.
But despite all my ribbing, I don't mean to say that the series is all bad. In fact, it's almost exactly like the live action series in this respect: the good episodes are truly very good. And other episodes are unbelievably bad. Ultimately, if you're a fan, it's like having a fourth season of the original Star Trek.
And now, having watched it all, I truly have no idea why the Powers-That-Be that run the franchise have decided to basically disavow it and not consider its stories as "canon." They have the same tone as the original. Many of them are written by the same writers. They have (with that notable exception of Chekov) all the same cast.
What gives?
2 comments:
I think the one big thing they want to keep out of the "canon" is the personal forcefields that substituted for spacesuits in a few episodes. other than that, everything else seems to fit very nicely into the trek 'verse.
if we are going to have tribbles, it's best all our tribbles are little ones...
the mole
(I can hear the Animated Series music in my head as I type this. I hate it. Please make it stop.)
Why the hell should they care about canon at this point? Star Trek is just a platform for extracting money from a dwindling fanbase.
The thing that bugs me most about the animation is that it is Filmation. Like all Filmation cartoons in that era, they resort to overused half-close-ups of characters. Granted, this was probably very new in animation then -- a "cinematic" style if you will. It still bugs me.
(My verification word is "sajax." That rocks.)
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