Star Trek: The Animated Series

Got this for Christmas. It was on my amazon Wish List. The show, new to DVD in time for the holidays, was produced a few years after the original series got the hook.

Why this series kicks ass is simple – they hired the entire original cast (with one exception, Chekov, so who gives a shit) as the series’ voice talent. Shatner, Nimoy and all the rest are in there pitching. I find it hilarious that five years later (ca 1973), the whole cast was still available to do Saturday morning cartoon voice-over work, especially on a job whose original incarnation probably consigned them to careers of doing Saturday morning cartoon voice-over work in the first place. It’s too bad the set doesn’t come with any commentary or new interviews, but I can imagine the cast was about as anxious to talk about this gig as Paramount was to ante up the cash to pay them to recollect.

The quality of the writing is about on par with your average Original Series episode – I’ve seen several names of people in the writing credits, like D.C. Fontana, who wrote noteworthy episodes of the original series.

Unfortunately, the packaging is as cumbersome and stupid as the packaging on the initial release of the original series. What in god’s name were they thinking?

And as a cartoon, on strictly cartoon merits, it fails miserably.

For one thing, they only show the three angles of the ship that the original series showed. Side view, three-quarters and… well, maybe there are only two angles. These are just drawings for crying out loud, not complicated-at-the-time camerawork. They could at least have the view of the ship rotate, like other animated series of its time. No, they just pull these static ship drawings from left to right across the screen. It was like a contest to see how little money they could spend and still have their efforts qualify as “animation.”

What works about the show for me is that, I’m screening them while I work, which means I rarely actually look up at the TV screen. So since I don’t see the shoddy visuals (always a hallmark of the live-action show anyhow), I’m getting first-run, concise episodes of the original series that I’ve never seen before in my thirty-odd years of Star Trek fandom.

(I’m pretty sure I hear Shatner playing another character, Carter Winston, an intergalactic philanthropist/philanderer in one ep. He probably wrote the episode under an alias, too!)

This set is great fun, and as soon it’s available for half of what they’re asking right now (like all the other versions of Star Trek eventually have become), it’ll be a must-have for any Star Trek fan.