Risa

I loved TAS when I watched it as a teen when it first ran.

I was beyond the age Saturday morning cartoons, but was so happy to have more Star Trek.

I was furious that older fans campaigned against the show to the point that NBC canceled it before more than the first six episodes of the second season were in production.

It still stands as the only Star Trek show to earn a ‘Best Series’ Emmy.

I hadn’t seen TAS in many decades when we picked up the DVDs for our kids (who are now in their late teens).

Given all the CGI and generally better animation in children’s programming, I wasn’t convinced that they would like it. But they took to it right away and it was very successful as an introduction to the franchise for them — more than 35 years after it was made!

One point, the number of frames on the animation, the movement only in the mouths during speech as well as the reuse of sequences was the only way to stay in budget in the 1970s.

The art direction was top-notch nonetheless. The original drawings, including some of the gorgeous mattes for alien planets and some of the new aliens are fantastic.

(I have some images to upload but that function seems to remain offline.)

I think the hardest part for many, myself included, was getting over the poor animation budget. The stories are on par with a lot of TOS imo once you park your visual brain at the door. And they were able to do things in animated form they couldn’t do on a TV budget. Getting to explore more aliens that didn’t just have slightly different forehead ridges is nice.

I enjoyed it, there are a couple of very decent stories. The fact they could have more deviant species portrayed (like the cat people) is also fun.

The animation quality is horrible, and they often reused scenes very noticeably, and some of the voice actors sound like ridiculous Scooby Doo villains, but despite all of that it was a good run.

Love it. Pleasurably campy, occasionally actually quite good despite its comically bad animation.

But honestly, what animation have you actually watched? Infinity Train is a solid piece of television, with season 3 being one of the best pieces of media I’ve ever experienced. I find it weird to broadly dismiss animation as a general storytelling medium; there are some things you can do with animation that just doesn’t look good in live action.

It's pretty nice if you keep in mind that it's a product of its time and meant for a younger audience (or at least inclusive of a younger audience).

I'd rank The Animated Series close to the bottom of Trek, but significantly above Discovery and Picard.

Lower Decks, which was an excellent animated show definitely geared toward adults, took quite a few elements from TAS. And since it's such a short show (like 8 hours in total?) I recommend sitting through it before Lower Decks.

Between the very limited animation and run time, and the disengaged voice acting from some of the cast, the series is really best enjoyed in the form of the Alan Dean Foster novelizations.

But it is worth enjoying one way or another. There are some stinkers, but also some very strong concepts in there. Strong enough that future Trek mined from them directly, like The Motion Picture cribbing off One Of Our Planets Is Missing.

I found I enjoyed it more when I treated it like a radio drama (or podcast), never actually looking at the bad animation 😁 but yeah, as mentioned elsewhere, I rank it way above Discovery