The Animated Frontier

It’s weird how thoroughly Star Trek: The Animated Series got flushed down the memory hole for a while, Gene Roddenberry and Paramount mutually deciding that the series wasn’t canon, and was not worth revisiting. In that 1990s era when Star Trek repeats were a regular fixture on the BBC schedules, The Animated Series never got a look in. When it aired in 1973-1974, it was the first significant chunk of new official Trek content since The Original Series got cancelled, and it actually won an Emmy; arguably, without that, you don’t get The Motion Picture, the movie series following on from that, and The Next Generation and its followups.

In more recent years, however, Paramount seem to have warmed to The Animated Series; they acknowledge it more, writers in new Trek series are making more references to it, and whilst there has not been a specific announcement that it’s canon again, it seems to be more or less be treated as such. Between DVD and Blu-Ray sets and the entire series being available for streaming (on Netflix in the UK, I guess it’s probably on Paramount+ in the US), it’s never been easier to dip into it. For this article, I’m going to do that – in part to offer my thoughts on the series itself, but also because I think it’s interesting to compare it to the current cartoon Star Trek offering, Lower Decks.

The first episode, Beyond the Farthest Star, pretty much sets up what to expect from The Animated Series. On the one hand, the animation is often a little rudimentary – there’s lots of shots where little beyond the characters’ mouths are moving, some use of silhouettes is used to cut corners, and where material can be recycled it is. All of these are sins of 1970s-vintage American TV animation, of course, but it’s still potentially off-putting.

That said, the episode also nicely showcases the possibilities of the new show. Thanks to the ample availability of footage from the original show to rotoscope, the animators are able to get the look of the returning cast down just fine. There’s also new characters. Lt. Arex, who replaces Chekov on the bridge because the production team didn’t want to shell out for Walter Koenig (James Doohan provides the voice for him) is a three-armed alien of a sort which it would have been difficult for 1960s-vintage practical effects to pull off, and the still shots in the episode depicting this astonishing alien ship are fantastic. Later, the episode The Time Trap depicts a council consisting of a large number of alien races – something it would have required a significant cast to pull off, each with separate makeup and prosthetic requirements to pull off using practical effects.