Star Trek: The Forgotten Series

While we’re talking about Trek, lemme mention something that many may remember but many may have forgot or never known about.

There’s a sixth Star Trek series that is seldom discussed today except in fearful whispers.

Despised and shunned more than Voyager, it is Star Trek: The Animated Series (TAS).

It ran for two years (22 episodes) in the 1973-1975 seasons.

To quote H. P. Lovecraft: "It was horrible . . . blasphemous . . . loathsome . . . abnormal."

Or was it?

The series did indeed have clunker episodes, and a disproportionate number of them. But then so did The Original Series which ran 78 episodes and, in the words of Phillip J. Fry were "About a third of them good."

TAS had the advantages of having the original cast members (Bill Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, etc.) doing the character voices. It had the advantage of Star Trek veterans and mainstream sci-fi writers doing scripts (Larry Niven, David Gerrold, D.C. Fontana). Its animated format allowed the creation of aliens, including crew members, who could never have been done in a live-action series at the time. It also introduced the holodeck technology that reappeared and became a fixture starting with Next Gen.

Some of the stories were very well done, including one (Yesteryear) set on Vulcan during Spock’s boyhood that was so well done details of it later became canonical on live-action shows despite the fact that the animated series has generally been ejected from continuity.

Yes, the series is regrettably considered non-canonical by most. Thus (except for events mentioned in Yesteryear) it is not included in Michael and Denise Okuda’s Star Trek Chronology. This is a pity because the two-year animated series could serve as a nice completion of the Enterprise’s famed "five-year mission" which only ran three years in the original series. Instead, the Chronology treats the five-year mission as having begun two years before TOS and ejects TAS from the timeline.

Admittedly, the series wasn’t up to the same standard. It had more clunker episodes, and even the good ones suffered from being only twenty-one minutes long (as opposed to about fifty for TOS) and aimed to a greater degree at children. Still, I have a fondness for it and, as bad as Trek has been on other occasions, I incline toward including it in the canon.

The series is currently out on VHS. Hopefully it’ll be out on DVD.

In the meantime,

HERE’S A SITE WHERE YOU CAN LEARN ALL ABOUT STAR TREK: THE ANIMATED SERIES.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

15 thoughts on “Star Trek: The Forgotten Series”

  1. Thanks for the TAS tip! I like your use of the word ‘canonical’ in this context of a star trek discussion. The word is usually applied to Biblical issues, and its nice to get a feel for the word in another context.
    Bonus points if you can get ‘hermeneutics’ somehow into future posts within a context other than Biblical research . 🙂
    Jerry

  2. Jimmy,
    While you’re terrific on Catholic Answers and I usually enjoy this BLOG, I cannot fathom why you’d rank DS9 Numero Uno and not just a smidge ahead of Voyager (although I always thought Voyager had promise – wrong Captain – too much native american shlock). The worst for me was the baseball theme on DS9, pathetic!
    The Next Generation could still be in production if everyone was willing. I never got sick of it. The younger crew they seemed to be bringing into prominence on the final seasons, showed real promise. Data as Holmes was brillant. Beverly’s dramas were tiresome, but I still loved her.
    And TNG had the quality characters and performers to handle those many rehashed plots that all the incarnations were saddled with. Peter

  3. Okay, here are some interesting facts. On a previous post, I ranked TAS above Voyager and compared Voyager to Gilligan’s Planet. Both TAS and Voyager were produced by Filmation — a company famous for its use of rotoscoped stock footage. Well, because I like to double-check my facts when writing about animation in the middle of the night, I discovered some background information on JMS.
    Apparently, he wrote for both the He-Man and the She-Ra cartoon series. These two series were probably Filmation’s high-point of 80’s animation. JMS also was the series editor for the live-action and computer animation children’s series Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future (the show that allowed spoiled rich children to shoot at the screen with their new toys). He also worked on Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, the Real Ghostbusters, and the very short-lived but dark Spiral Zone.
    Betcha didn’t think there were that many cartoons in the 80’s — much less ones done by JMS

  4. Not only did JMS work on He-Man and She-Ra, so did Larry DiTillio, who worked as story editor on Seasons 1 & 2 of B5 and penned a number of scripts himself.
    Trek writer D. C. Fontana also contributed a script to the Matter of Eternia, and Paul Dini, who’s been noted for his work on Batman: The Animated Series, did several shows.
    (And if anyone mocks the shows, so help me, I _will_ post my thoughts on reading He-Man as Catholic allegory. 🙂 )

  5. Not only did JMS write all those cartoons, he also introduced B5 elements in Captain Power (such as Kosh’s line, “So it begins . . . “) knowing (or hoping) that they would soon be used on B5.
    Cartoons, incidentally, were how JMS broke into television. He then moved on to the 1980s Twilight Zone and Murder, She Wrote, which gave him the status needed to launch B5.
    And it all started with He-Man.

  6. Matthew:
    He-Man as Catholic allegory? I’m intrigued! Feel free to e-mail me off the site. 🙂
    (I was a huge He-Man fan back when it first aired. Even saw the movie w/ Dolph Lundgren. Though, I was in my teens, and not as discerning of quality as I am now.)

  8. Hey Jimmy,
    I remember the animated series well from my childhood. I don’t know if you remember from your roleplaying days, but the animated series was treated as canonical in the old FASA Star Trek RPG. Also, the old 1970’s “Star Trek Concordance” does likewise acting as if it was just a continuation of TOS. P.S.- I always liked the old FASA explanation of TOS Klingons: They were half human and the pureblooded Klingons (who controlled the empire)were too secretive to let anyone know what they were really like.

  10. It’s not as bad as the Star Wars Christmas special where Chewbacca went back to Kashykk to visit his family for Christmas. I’ve been trying to find a way to see it for years, but it is so loathed that almost no record of it can be found.

  11. Actually, it was “Life Day,” rather than Christmas.
    And the title was “The Star Wars Holiday Special.”
    In the words of Lovecraft, “It *was* horrible . . . blasphemous . . . loathsome . . . abnormal.”
    And unwatchable.
    Truly Star Wars at its lowest point.

  12. They also had a boxed set of it on Laser Disc too. I almost bought it because I was young. I didn’t buy it because I was poor. I wanted to eat instead……

  13. Hard to believe “Life Day” could be any worse than big screen episodes of I and II. I’m not even going to bother with III. Guess I’ve never forgiven Lucas for not sticking to his original plan of VII, VIII and IX following at three year intervals (like first three) before going back to prequels. Peter

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