Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973-1974) Review

Twenty-two half-hour episodes on NBC Saturday mornings between September 1973 and October 1974, four years after the original series was canceled, with almost the entire original cast voicing their own characters. The 7 is for a show whose scripts are good and whose animation is indefensible. Filmation made it cheaply, the movement is minimal, cels are reused constantly, and none of it would survive a modern eye. Go past that and what’s left is a set of episodes written by working science fiction authors, several of which are better than the original series episodes they follow up. I’ve watched all twenty-two more than once and they hold.

It surprises me how much I end up caring about episodes that look like they were drawn on a lunch break. The scripts pull me past the stiff figures within a few minutes, and the reservation that keeps it at a 7 is that the cheapness never fully goes away. I’m always aware I’m watching a bargain version of something better.

It’s also the most consequential piece of Star Trek almost nobody has seen, and it spent two decades formally exiled from its own franchise’s canon.

The Writing Is Why It Survives

D.C. Fontana was story editor and associate producer. That’s the single fact that explains the quality of the whole run.

She had been one of the two most important writers on the original series alongside Gene Coon, wrote Journey to Babel and This Side of Paradise, and arrived here with the authority to commission properly and not to accept whatever a Saturday-morning budget attracted. The writers she hired are the same population the original series used. Larry Niven, David Gerrold, Samuel Peeples, Stephen Kandel, Chuck Menville and Howard Weinstein. It’s a list of working science fiction professionals instead of animation staff.

That’s the identical decision that produced the best of the original series, and my review of that show makes the same point. A network drama that goes to published science fiction writers gets science fiction, and one that goes to television generalists gets a Western with rubber masks.

The half-hour length is the real constraint instead of the animation. Twenty-four minutes forces some episodes into story sketches, and the weaker entries are the ones that needed forty-five minutes and were given half of that. What the format does suit is the anthology instinct the original series had. A single idea, executed briefly, with no requirement to service an ongoing plot, and several of these are closer to a short story than anything in live-action Trek.

Several are also direct sequels handled with unusual care. More Tribbles, More Troubles brings back Cyrano Jones with Stanley Adams reprising him, Once Upon a Planet follows Shore Leave, and Mudd’s Passion continues Harry Mudd, none of which feels like a cash-in.

I think the Tribbles sequel is the most fun of that group, and I like that none of these return visits play as nostalgia bait. Fontana treated the old episodes as material worth building on.

The Slaver Weapon and the Kzinti

Larry Niven adapted his own Known Space story The Soft Weapon into an episode of Star Trek. It’s a thing that happened and which almost nobody believes when told. That brought the Kzinti into the franchise. A species of large aggressive felines from Niven’s own continuity, with a history of losing wars to humanity, dropped wholesale into Star Trek along with the Slaver artifacts and the stasis boxes. The episode is also structurally strange in a way live action would never have permitted. Kirk isn’t in it. It follows Spock, Sulu and Uhura on a shuttle, with no ship and no captain, and the plot is a puzzle about an artifact instead of a confrontation.

What makes it work is that the puzzle is a real one. The weapon has settings, the characters have to deduce what they do, and the resolution turns on somebody selecting the wrong one. That’s a science fiction problem instead of an action beat.

Uhura also gets more to do here than in almost any original series episode. That’s a consequence of the format and not of anybody’s politics. With Kirk absent, the material had to go somewhere.

The Kzinti then sat unused for forty-six years until Picard referenced them. It’s the longest gap between a species being introduced and being mentioned again in franchise history.

It remains the only time a major science fiction author imported his own established alien species into Star Trek wholesale, and the fact that it happened on a Saturday morning cartoon is the best argument for taking this series seriously.

Yesteryear Is the Best of It

Fontana wrote it herself and it’s the best episode of the series by consensus and by mine. The premise uses the Guardian of Forever from City on the Edge of Forever. Spock returns from a time survey to find that nobody recognizes him, that an Andorian has been serving as first officer, and that he’s been erased because his younger self died on Vulcan during a childhood rite.

So he goes back to Vulcan as an adult, under a false name, to save himself as a boy. That means the episode is a man meeting his own father as a stranger and being unable to say so. Mark Lenard returned to voice Sarek. It matters enormously. The relationship established in Journey to Babel is carried into a scene where Sarek doesn’t know who he’s talking to and disapproves of his son in front of him. The ending is the part that shouldn’t work in a children’s cartoon. Young Spock’s pet sehlat, I-Chaya, is fatally injured, and Spock has to authorize the animal’s death instead of prolong its suffering, and the episode treats that as his first real Vulcan decision.

That’s a serious piece of writing about what a culture costs a child, delivered in twenty-four minutes on NBC on a Saturday morning in 1973. I’d put it above most of the live-action franchise, and the sehlat scene does more to justify this series’ 7 from me than anything else in it. It also won the series the Emmy. It’s the detail that turns the achievement into a production fact.

The Animation Is Atrocious and It Bought Something

There’s no defending the animation, and it’s the thing that holds my rating down. It’s worth being exact about what’s wrong with it. Filmation worked by minimizing movement. Characters stand still and talk, walk cycles repeat, the same establishing shots return dozens of times, mouths move against otherwise static faces, and large stretches consist of two figures in front of a painted background.

The reuse is systematic instead of occasional. The studio built a library of cels for each character and each action and drew from it across the whole run. That’s why every episode has the same handful of gestures in it.

What the medium bought in exchange is the part people forget. Animation costs the same whether the alien is a man in a suit or something that couldn’t be built at all, and the series spent that difference. Two regular crew members are non-humanoid as a direct result. Lieutenant Arex has three arms and three legs, Lieutenant M’Ress is feline, and both are on the bridge weekly, which live action in 1973 couldn’t have afforded for a single episode.

The settings do the same work. Enormous alien vistas, a ship inside a cloud creature, a water world, and a giant Spock clone, none of which the original series could have attempted on its budget.

So the trade is legible and it’s the same trade the original series made in the other direction. That show spent nothing on planets and everything on scripts. This one spent nothing on movement and bought scale.

Chekov, Nimoy and the Casting

The casting history contains the single best piece of trivia in the franchise and one of the worst things anybody did to a cast member. Filmation didn’t want to pay for Nichelle Nichols or George Takei. Leonard Nimoy refused to participate at all unless both were included, on the stated grounds that the crew’s ethnic diversity was the point, and the studio gave way.

That’s worth thinking about. The actor with the most bargaining power on the production spent all of it on two colleagues and not on himself, and the reason the animated Enterprise has Uhura and Sulu on the bridge is that Nimoy wouldn’t sign otherwise.

Walter Koenig was the casualty. Chekov was cut for budget, replaced at navigation by Arex, and Koenig was the one regular left out.

He then wrote an episode anyway. The Infinite Vulcan is his script, and it made him the first member of any Star Trek cast to write for the franchise, which is a distinction he holds before Nimoy, Frakes, Russ or anybody else.

The way he found out is the ugly part. By his own account he learned Chekov wouldn’t be returning when D.C. Fontana announced it to an audience at a convention, after he’d already written the episode.

That story is an insult to Koenig. Losing the role to a budget line is bad enough, and hearing about it from a convention stage after he’d already written them an episode is a lousy way to treat anybody.

James Doohan and Majel Barrett then voiced almost everything else. Arex, M’Ress and a large proportion of the guest characters across twenty-two episodes. That’s why the series sounds like four people doing forty parts, because it roughly is.

The Emmy, the Exile and What It Gave the Franchise

This is the first Star Trek to win an Emmy, which surprises almost everybody who hears it, and the award has a direct production consequence. The first season was sixteen episodes and the ratings were poor, because the show wasn’t drawing enough children. That’s what happens when you commission working science fiction writers for a Saturday morning slot. It should have ended there. The Emmy is what caused Filmation to add six more episodes the following autumn, taking the run to twenty-two, and those six exist entirely because a jury liked Yesteryear.

Roddenberry then dismissed the series from canon. The reported reason is The Infinite Vulcan, which leaves a twenty-foot Spock clone alive on a planet, and which nobody wanted to be obliged to address later. That exile lasted until after his death and the series has since been accepted back. That’s the correct outcome, because several things the franchise depends on originated here.

Kirk’s middle name is Tiberius because of this show. The holodeck exists because of this show, introduced as a recreation room in The Practical Joker eighteen years before The Next Generation built a series around it. The Kzinti came from here. Fontana’s account of Spock’s childhood is the version everything since has used.

So the most disposable Star Trek gave the franchise its holodeck and its captain’s middle name, was the first to win it an award, and spent two decades formally not counting.

The Essential Episodes

Twenty-two episodes is a weekend. That makes this the only Star Trek series a person can simply watch in full without a plan.

Yesteryear first, then The Slaver Weapon. Those two are the reason to be here and both stand entirely on their own without the animation being an obstacle for long.

More Tribbles, More Troubles next. That’s Gerrold’s own sequel to the best episode of the original series and which appears in that review as well. Cyrano Jones returns, the tribbles have been engineered not to reproduce, and the Klingons have a solution to them.

The Infinite Vulcan for the curiosity value and because it’s better than its reputation. Koenig’s script is a serious science fiction premise about cloning and scale, and it’s a considerably more coherent hour than Spock’s Brain managed in live action. Beyond the Farthest Star, One of Our Planets Is Missing, The Time Trap and The Pirates of Orion are the next tier. Howard Weinstein wrote the last of those at nineteen. That makes him the youngest person to write for Star Trek. The Practical Joker is worth it purely as the holodeck’s first appearance, and the episode itself is a bottle show with the ship’s computer playing pranks on the crew. The weak ones are weak from compression and not from bad ideas. The Magicks of Megas-tu, The Terratin Incident and The Ambergris Element all have premises that needed more room than a half hour allows.

Should you watch Star Trek: The Animated Series?

Yes, all twenty-two, and accept the animation as the price. Filmation cheapness with professional science fiction writers on top of it, Larry Niven importing his own aliens wholesale, Fontana writing the best account of Spock’s childhood anybody has managed, Nimoy spending his standing on two colleagues, an Emmy that bought six more episodes, and the holodeck arriving eighteen years early on a Saturday morning.

The 7 is where it sits because I’m splitting the difference between what’s on the page and what’s on the screen. The writing would get a higher number from me, and the Filmation animation drags it back down every time two characters stand frozen in front of a painted background. I’d still take this cheap cartoon over plenty of expensive Trek, because Fontana hired real writers and let them write.

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