Live long and prosper, friends of the Junkyard.  We’ve covered all of classic Trek through the movies and into the Kelvin universe, but we have one more area left to explore: Star Trek: The Animated Series.  This is a series that remains true to the original cast without pulling in all the romance that the classic series offered, usually between Kirk and some scantily clad woman.  The result is a more kid-friendly version of Trek that was not watched by the kids.  It’s a shame too because for my money, this was a solid 24 minutes of television.  

Shatner and crew reprised their respective, iconic roles and we were back doing things in animated form that we were not able to do with a television budget.  We had new alien crewmen with three arms, spaceships that didn’t look like models, and a new theme… which wasn’t going to come close to the original. The limitation wasn’t in what could be done on screen now, but the length of time they would get to tell the stories.  Like the original series, some of the ideas were deeper than the average kid would have found palatable though and the animated format in the 70’s seemed to be marketed at a group that would probably miss some of the finer points.  These came in at just under 25 minutes, so the stories had to be told in simpler terms.  

Kirk and crew have a mission: map an area of space.  Par for the course really.  They encounter an enormous spaceship and it’s something that could never have been achieved comfortably in live action TV of the 70’s.  (Well… maybe!  Having recently watched Space: 1999, I may have to rethink that, as some of the ships are rather impressive… but still, credit where due, this series offers a chance to see what Trek could have been.)  When watching this, Scooby Doo came to mind, particularly with a glowing green cloud (that laughed a lot like Vincent Price).  The explosions are horrendously bad, looking effectively like Batman’s Bam, Pow, Zaps just without the words.  But like classic Doctor Who, I am willing to see beyond all of that for a good story. 

In this, the crew realize that something is still alive on the ship after 300 million years.  It’s an entity that is able to take over the Enterprise, reproducing and destroying life wherever it goes.  Kirk has to pretend to be willing to crash the ship to make the entity leave, where it gets stuck on a planet of such gravity, that it can never escape.  As they leave it, we hear a very sad “don’t leave me alone…” and I actually felt for it.  Sorry evil entity, you were probably just misunderstood. 

So yeah… about that.  It’s established early on that the entity has been drifting alone for millennia.  Is it any wonder that when it gets on board the first ship it can and it goes a little mental.  I get that way in about an hour of having no one to talk to on a Saturday.  How much worse if I could live forever and found myself drifting alone through the cosmos?  Man, you better believe I’d be a bit nutty!  So I couldn’t help feel like writer Samuel A. Peeples could have given this a more positive spin.  Having recently started a more modern animated series, Cowboy Bebop, I can see how they could introduce things over the course of its run.  So there’s no reason this being couldn’t have come on board and become a new character, accepted and welcomed rather than being treated as an enemy that needed to be cast adrift again, alone forever.  Couldn’t we have made a friend instead??

I do love that this is essentially season 4 of classic Trek.  Some things have changed – since Turnabout Intruder, it looks like they’ve upgraded the defense matrix in the ceiling of the bridge and there are belts you can wear to stay warm in the absolute zero temperatures of space.  And some things never change – McCoy still thinks he’s better suited being on the bridge than in sickbay, and Spock still loves a countdown.  The characters all still feel the same, although I did question where Chekov was and why there was someone else in his place.  I did have to question why Uhura is so surprised that a starship could be built with “grace and beauty” in mind?  Has she seen the ship she serves on??

In the grand scheme of things, I’ve little to complain about.  It’s the first of 22 episodes and I’ll grant that it was entertaining despite my little quibbles.  The crew leave to go back to their job of charting stars and I’m left to wonder if Kirk will issue an alert to Starfleet to tell them to avoid this planet… or if he’s just waiting for some poor shlub to end up there and have the threat start all over again.  Maybe the next crew will be a little nicer to the entity.  ML