It's the 50th Anniversary of 'Star Trek: the Animated Series' (bbc.com) 60
Star Trek: The Animated Series was a half-hour Saturday morning cartoon that premiered exactly one half century ago — yesterday. You can watch its opening credits sequence on YouTube — with its strange 1970s version of the theme song. CBS's YouTube channel also offers clips from various episodes.
Starting in 1973, it ran for two seasons — a total of just 22 episodes. But the BBC notes it kept Star Trek in people's minds after the original series had been cancelled in 1969: While The Original Series had struggled in the ratings during its initial run, the show thrived in syndication, and created the phenomenon of fan conventions (think Comic-con in the present day). Because of this, studios were interested in more Star Trek, but there was a problem: the sets had been scrapped, the costumes were gone, and it would have been cost-prohibitive to rebuild everything from scratch. NBC settled on a different approach: an animated series.
According to The Fifty-Year Mission by Mark Altman and Edward Gross (an oral history of Star Trek), Gene Roddenberry wasn't overly interested in an animated show in and of itself. However, he was willing to go along with it because he saw it as a stepping stone to another live-action show or a feature film. An animated show would energise fans, he thought, so he agreed on the condition that he would have full creative control of The Animated Series. After a fight, the network gave in. The full, regular cast returned, with the exception of Walter Koenig's Pavel Chekov, who was cut for budget reasons...
[I]t was very much conceived of as a continuation of The Original Series. Some of the episodes were direct sequels, such as More Tribbles, More Trouble, which is a continuation of the classic The Trouble with Tribbles, and featured the return of Cyrano Jones... [Another episode was a sequel to The City on the Edge of Forever.] Dorothy (DC) Fontana led a group of writers from the original show who mostly wrote for a traditional, adult Star Trek audience. That's why the show didn't catch on — while it was well-received by critics, it might have done better in prime time. The show won a Daytime Emmy for best children's series, but it was cancelled after two years because of low ratings. Roddenberry then moved on to work on another live-action series, called Phase II, which would eventually become Star Trek: The Motion Picture...
Whatever is decided regarding "the canon", The Animated Series sits firmly within Star Trek's guiding ethos: Gene Roddenberry's vision for a utopian future where humans coexist peacefully with aliens as part of a Federation, and there's no poverty or war.
Starting in 1973, it ran for two seasons — a total of just 22 episodes. But the BBC notes it kept Star Trek in people's minds after the original series had been cancelled in 1969: While The Original Series had struggled in the ratings during its initial run, the show thrived in syndication, and created the phenomenon of fan conventions (think Comic-con in the present day). Because of this, studios were interested in more Star Trek, but there was a problem: the sets had been scrapped, the costumes were gone, and it would have been cost-prohibitive to rebuild everything from scratch. NBC settled on a different approach: an animated series.
According to The Fifty-Year Mission by Mark Altman and Edward Gross (an oral history of Star Trek), Gene Roddenberry wasn't overly interested in an animated show in and of itself. However, he was willing to go along with it because he saw it as a stepping stone to another live-action show or a feature film. An animated show would energise fans, he thought, so he agreed on the condition that he would have full creative control of The Animated Series. After a fight, the network gave in. The full, regular cast returned, with the exception of Walter Koenig's Pavel Chekov, who was cut for budget reasons...
[I]t was very much conceived of as a continuation of The Original Series. Some of the episodes were direct sequels, such as More Tribbles, More Trouble, which is a continuation of the classic The Trouble with Tribbles, and featured the return of Cyrano Jones... [Another episode was a sequel to The City on the Edge of Forever.] Dorothy (DC) Fontana led a group of writers from the original show who mostly wrote for a traditional, adult Star Trek audience. That's why the show didn't catch on — while it was well-received by critics, it might have done better in prime time. The show won a Daytime Emmy for best children's series, but it was cancelled after two years because of low ratings. Roddenberry then moved on to work on another live-action series, called Phase II, which would eventually become Star Trek: The Motion Picture...
Whatever is decided regarding "the canon", The Animated Series sits firmly within Star Trek's guiding ethos: Gene Roddenberry's vision for a utopian future where humans coexist peacefully with aliens as part of a Federation, and there's no poverty or war.
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Re: Lower Decks Mary Sue (Score:2)
Exactly what is the above satirising? Wesley?
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The whole show. Wesley especially, but if you look at it carefully, every single Star Trek character is like that. They get away with things that should have meant a court-martial times and times again. How many times did they violate the prime directive and nothing happened? Not to mention messing with the timeline on various opportunities?
Watch STTNG again (or hell, TOS is even worse) and realize that they have a free pass on anything they do.
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Mary Sues are among the oldest writer in the book. Yes, even The Book.
The god in the Bible is a Mary Sue.
Proof? Well, he can do everything, knows everything, everyone wants to be his friends, even though he does nothing but get his friends into trouble but they still love and even worship him, everyone who opposes him is axiomatically wrong, even if what they say would make a lot more sense than what god says... There literally isn't a single Mary Sue trait that that character doesn't have.
In the second boo
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Good characters don't just have their strengths but also their weaknesses. Because without, they get boring. If there is nothing that limit the character, there is nothing to challenge the character and nobody would want to hear their story. Of course we do know that the character will, in the end, somehow, overcome the obstacle presented to them. That's a given. What kind of story would it be if the hero doesn't eventually save the day? But getting there, the hero needs to best a problem that actually is a
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Re: Lower Decks Mary Sue (Score:2)
>Watch STTNG again (or hell, TOS is even worse) and realize that they have a free pass on anything they do.
TOS was an episodic space western from the 1960s, written without imagining what would follow it. Of course it's all over the place by the standards of TNG. They casually went back in time, which is not spoken about due to the implications this would have.
I don't know what TNG you watched? The Prime Directive was always taken seriously. Where it was at risk, the decision to do so was not taken light
Re: Lower Decks Mary Sue (Score:3)
Re: Lower Decks Mary Sue (Score:2, Insightful)
Aaand we have a Slashdotter complaining about a Star Trek show that satirizes Star Trek being *WoKe*.
Super cool.
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Such a shame, 'cause having that guy in the lead would be so unusual. /s
Also, it's incredibly woke.
Another moron spouts that thinking it's a bad thing.
Re: Lower Decks Mary Sue (Score:3)
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That raises the question of whether a concussion would have any effect on Jadzia Dax. Klingons may be reasonably tough, but not really much more so than humans and they need their brains. Presumably, the symbiote could steer everything just fine even if Jadzia whacked her head hard enough to knock herself out. Plus the symbiote might help in recovery, healing, etc. They're also entirely different species. It's well established in Star Trek that some humanoids are just a lot stronger than others. Vulcans, fo
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Could also be that those apparently bony ridges on their foreheads are actually some variety of soft target. In any case, I thought the complaint with Jadzia is that she was a woman, not a big, strong man? Cisco is actually a fairly big guy at 6' 1" and fairly solidly built.
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wait...
You know! You are with section 31 aren't you?
Re: Lower Decks Mary Sue (Score:2)
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Probably because it's been a while and I keep thinking of the networking company.
Re: Lower Decks Mary Sue (Score:2)
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Mariner has been around the fleet a few times. She's very capable and smart, but she's got problems with authority. She's been promoted and demoted several times. She's serving on her mother's ship because she's seriously running out of chances.
Yup. Was going to say that too. Several episodes in season 1 explain (or hint at) her backstory and offer that she (Mariner) has *way* more experience than the other ensigns in her group, especially Boimler (who self-admits to have been on only 5 planets, including Vulcan and Earth), and has been on many away missions, gotten into many fights, etc... In one, a former classmate of hers, who's now a captain herself, is astonished that Mariner is still an ensign and remarked how everyone at the academy thou
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It's funny. Laugh. Personally, I think you take this way, way more serious than the show deserves.
If that show was even remotely meant to be taken serious, I could see your point. But it's not. It's a comedy show in the Star Trek universe and the characters are deliberately drawn over-the-top and exaggerated. The narcissistic first officer, the grumpy-cat doctor, the gruff-exterior-but-sweet-core security chief, the Janeway-esque-but-not-quite-as-qualified captain... name a single character that isn't a car
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It's bloody awful! The entire series is a studio implementation of the Mary Sue [tvtropes.org] character TV trope.
So, in other words, a pretty standard action hero with the exception of not being a straight white male? I mean, your description sounds pretty much like a James Bond/Jason Bourne/Jack Bauer type. All completely unrealistic super-beings, but it doesn't seem like you have a general problem with super-capable characters with experience and connections well beyond what any normal person should be able to achieve. For some reason, you just have a problem with those characteristics belonging to this particular c
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ST:TAS awwww yassss, better than hot grits! (Score:2)
Good Stories (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of them were good scripts - several by good writers left over from ToS.
I watched them with my daughter a decade ago and a good time was had.
No Starship Captains screaming for genocide back then. Ah, Gene, ya old bastard, they ruined your vision.
Re:Good Stories (Score:5, Interesting)
Roddenberry actually disliked a lot of TOS. He wanted to go much further than the studio allowed him to. TNG was closer to what he wanted, but even that was a long way off from his vision in many ways.
Trek has to keep reinventing itself, because real life moves forward. The mortality plays of the 60s wouldn't work in the 90s, when things like equality for black people and women were much more widely accepted.
The best captain of the 90s was Sisko, because he was willing to do what needed to be done. Picard and Kirk had the luxury of always being able to choose the moral path, take the higher ground. Sisko had to make the difficult choices with no good options.
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"they ruined your vision"
Let's not kid ourselves: Gene's vision was of fucking a bunch of different women.
The Soft Weapon (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the episodes was a fairly accurate version of Larry Niven's short story "The Soft Weapon".
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I like that they substituted Spock for Nessus in the original story. It made sense in context.
Young Spock (Score:4, Insightful)
And JJ lifted the young Spock scene from TaS episode 2 wholesale and used it in his movie. Of course, JJ does that. Take TaS, Diane Carey's novel Dreadnought, and Wrath of Khan, stick them in a blender, and hit FRAPPE and that's JJ Trek. With anything resembling plot either reduced to 30 seconds of attention span at a time, or just accidental leftover elements from the stories he lifted that managed to make it through the blender.
Re: Young Spock (Score:2)
My theory is that Abrams has some kind of mental impediment. He's able to recognise when something is popular, yet can't seem to understand why people like it. That'd explain why he throws things together, the 'memberberries', yet outside of context that'd make people happy.
He and his flying monkeys have left a trail of destruction. The only reason Abrams didn't get to destroy DC on film is because Warner got to it first, and now they've released him from contract now there's little left.
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Abrams is a hack of a writer. He knows how to steal plots and ideas, but he doesn't have a clue why he should or why those ideas worked originally.
And this is why it doesn't work in his scripts. He understands what worked, but he has no idea why it did, so he can't adapt the ideas to his work.
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Young Spock was probably the best part of TAS.
There was an episode where the men went crazy and the women had to save them. Can you imagine the rage if it was released today? I think a lot of kids at the time realised how silly sexism was back then, which was an improvement over Turnabout Intruder.
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As far as I know, that's Star Trek canon. Why wouldn't he? IMO, that's one of the few good things he did with his version of Trek.
There I'll agree with you.
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Sounds about right. JJ Abrams movies are mindless action/adventure style flicks with an <X> theme/skin/style. Where <X> is Star Trek or whatever.
If that's what you're looking for, great. If you wanted an <X> movie, you're out of luck.
Naturally, that level of mindlessness is likely easy for today's AI to generate....
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Naturally, that level of mindlessness is likely easy for today's AI to generate....
OMG! JJ Trek was made by an AI! JJ IS AN AI!
TBH, it kinda does have that feel. His movies hit that uncanny valley sort of feeling. Like they are almost a story, but just off in so many ways, that it's like an alien society that had been watching us made it. Just not quite getting what actually made the story bits he stole good, and using them all in not quite the right way. The lead-out from one element doesn't quite tie into the lead-in to the next because they are different story-lines with differen
Re:The Soft Weapon (Score:5, Informative)
That's "The Slaver Weapon", to be specific. It ought to be accurate, as DC Fontana brought Larry Niven in to adapt his story into the Star Trek episode.
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Well, ok, to be specific, it may have been called "the slaver weapon" on the show but the original Niven short story was indeed "the soft weapon".
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Re:The Soft Weapon (Score:5, Informative)
Filmation (Score:3)
The "canon decision" has been made (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is this a question? Well, back in the 1970s, some guy worked for Gene Roddenberry and he wanted a raise. Gene, who was notoriously cheap, didn't want to give the guy a raise but also didn't want to lose him, so instead Gene gave the guy some kind of title that suggested the guy was the person who made decisions on what was and wasn't canon. This guy hated The Animated Series, so he said "It's not canon". Gene is long dead, the guy is either dead or not part of Star Trek any more, so the validity of the "not canon" decision has been questioned and now it's canon.
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>The Animated Series is canon.
It must have been fairly well done, because I remember a couple of things from it but remember them as from the original live action series.
I might just have to find a copy to watch somewhere.
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Some of it is canon, some of it is ignored. Same as every other Trek show, to some extent.
For example, according to TOS, in that era women couldn't be captains. That seems to have been abandoned, with female captains all around that era on other shows.
We probably aren't going to see the Kzin again either.
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We probably aren't going to see the Kzin again either.
Already have, in several Lower Decks episodes, and one Picard episode.
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Huh, you are right. Apparently their empire was shown on a star map in TNG too.
Furries are officially part of Star Trek.
Re-do It! (Score:5, Interesting)
The big complaint is the animation quality. So why not throw it out, keep the sound track, and start over? The stories are great.
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Those negative space Filmation faces are a bit creepy and cardboard to these eyes. So yeah! Since that's how animation is done anyway. And nearly the whole voice cast is there.
I say: mellow anime in realistic style (no rubber face), with deep shadowing for cel animation. "painted" CG for space and i dunno go crazy with the backgrounds maybe something impressionistic vs ralph mcquarrie. someone should just do this. hm.
Good writing and voice acting; terrible animation. (Score:2)
Disappointing (Score:2)
To my young mind, the fact that it was animated meant that it could have had scenes with dozens of starships. Complex space battles with Klingons. It could have strange unimaginable aliens and alien worlds. On and on.
Instead, aside from a few nods like another alien on the bridge it was mostly just a 2D drawn version of the live action show.
I mean when they put the crew in space the didn't even put them in space suits. They jus
Re: Disappointing (Score:4, Insightful)
Disagree (Score:2)
I saw it during it's original run on Saturday morning TV, it was really great and it hit the spot for Star Trek fans dying for more. Yes the animation was not that great but it was 1972 and they did it with as small a budget as possible but the stories were wonderful and we got most of the original actors plus Stanley Adams as Cyrano Jones, Roger C. Carmel as Harry Mudd and Mark Leonard as Sarek. And I don't agree that "it didn't catch on" because Star Trek fans loved it but it was on Saturday morning and t