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Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise...
Fooled you this time, maybe. They used the same opening lines for the Animated Series of Star Trek as they did for the original series. Tried to have a similar opening sequence, too, as the credits were playing. Different music, though still decent. And the same font, of course.
Gathered together most of the original cast, although they replaced Chekov with a semi-trilaterally symettrical alien named Aryx. I think Walter Koenig was committed to another project at the time. And they aimed it at Saturday morning to catch the people who watched the original show when it first aired now watching cartoons with their kids.
Was it as good? Well, if it had been, it would have gone more than one season, but it tried to be true to the original show as much as possible, in a simplified, we've got to tell a story in twenty-two minutes kind of way. More could be done with aliens and, since the special effects were drawn like everything else, anything was possible - you could lose the artificial gravity, have a giant Spock, have the characters shrink to almost microscopic size, or fall into an alternate universe where everyone aged backwards. They tried to keep the byplay between the characters as much as possible and sometimes that (and the dialogue) went over the heads of a big part of their target audience, the kids. The animation was primitive (no better than the Spider-man series of the previous decade), but so was the budget. Many of the actors, particularly James Doohan, did more than one voice.
The stories were mostly solid, if overly simplified, but were adapted for a reading audience by Alan Dean Foster (the master of adaptations and a pretty damned good author in his own right) in the Star Trek Log series of books.
A worthy successor, in my opinion, that could have benefited from a more substantial spending allowance.
And yes, I have all of these on tape, too.
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Page last updated: 13 Apr 2003.