star trek animated series blu ray review

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REVIEW – Star Trek: The Animated Series on Blu-ray

| November 16, 2016 | By: Aaron Harvey 89 comments so far

Holodecks, Klingon cloaking devices, de-aged crew members, old crew members restored by the transporter, a Native American officer — all things from Star Trek of the 80’s forward right? Nope. All of these things and more (50ft. Spock!) can be found in Star Trek: The Animated Series (TAS) which arrives in a stand-alone Blu-ray set this week in North America.

The Blu-ray set features all 22 episodes, presented in 1080p HD, spread across three discs, with audio and text commentaries, storyboard galleries and a 24 minute documentary that includes interviews with TAS creators, as well as 22 poster-style cards, one for each episode, created by artist Juan Ortiz.

Star Trek: The Animated Series originally known simply as Star Trek but also known by the palindromic mouthful of Star Trek: The Animated Series — The Animated Adventures of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek is the 1973 animated Star Trek that is the defacto fourth season of the Enterprise’s original five year mission.

The series was critically acclaimed, it was the first Star Trek series to win an Emmy Award, and the stories still hold up today. Writers from Star Trek The Original Series (TOS) penned many of the episodes so it has that original series feel even though it was made for Saturday morning television.

And speaking of Saturday morning television, let’s address the animated pink elephant in the room so we can move on. I spend a large majority of my time when I talk about TAS defending Filmation, the animation studio that created the show. People wish someone else had animated it because it would have been “so much better”. Have you seen other cartoons from the early 70s? ANY Saturday morning cartoons from ANY other animation company? None of them hold up to our current standards of animation. Batman The Animated Series, Justice League, Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra , those were all decades away. TAS is of its time, but if you really pay attention you notice very few repeating backgrounds, unlike The Flintstones where they run and pass the same building over and over and over again, and the backgrounds are gorgeous. The characters are dead on including getting certain facial expressions down pat and Kirk even balls up his right hand when he rests it on the arm of the captain’s chair, just like in TOS. So I hope people will be able to project themselves back to a time when this was the new Star Trek on TV and have fun!

I own the DVD should I get the Blu-ray?

Unless you just got the DVD on a lark, if you purposefully sought out The Animated Series and intend to watch it again, that’s an emphatic yes!

Video Quality

The video, presented in the original TV 4:3 ratio, is glorious! If you have watched TAS on Netflix you’ve had a preview of the what the Blu-ray is like, but even I was unprepared for the clarity and vibrancy. The colors pop and you can see line and background detail that is mushy on the DVD.

Audio Quality

The audio has a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio track in 5.1 surround, and for the purist there’s an option for a mono Dolby Digital sound track. It sounds extremely clear, no scratches or pops. The clarity of the music and voices given the technological limits of the recordings of the 1970s, and the inconsistency of the recording devices as from time to time the actors would record while on the road, is quite good!

It’s so clean and clear, in fact at times the sound effects feel a bit more overwhelming, but this may just be a TOS/TAS preference of those behind the scenes.

Bonus Content

• Text commentary by Michael and Denise Okuda for “Yesteryear”
• Audio commentary by David Gerrold for “More Tribbles, More Troubles”
• Storyboard gallery for “The Infinite Vulcan”
• Text commentary by Michael and Denise Okuda for “The Eye of the Beholder”
• Audio commentary by David Gerrold for “BEM”
• Audio commentary by David Wise for “How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth”
• Text commentary by Michael and Denise Okuda for “The Counter-Clock Incident”
• “Show History” – a brief introduction to the show.
• “Drawn to the Final Frontier: The Making of Star Trek: The Animated Series” – a look at the production’s history as well as its place in Star Trek history.
• “What’s the Star Trek Connection?” – shows how TAS ties into other Star Trek series

Here’s where the Blu-ray falls down. OK, let me walk that back. If you don’t own the DVD, these extras are fine. They were shot and created in 2006 and nothing has been done to them to upgrade them. The short “Drawn to the Final Frontier: The Making of Star Trek: The Animated Series” is a good overview of the series. The text commentaries were created by Mike and Denise Okuda who love the animated series as much as anyone, and even incorporated parts of TAS into the TOS Remastered project.

The “connections” vignettes are nice and the storyboard galleries are interesting to compare to the final version, but there is a lot more they could have done.

A look at the Alan Dean Foster’s “Log” series adaptations of the episodes into novels, new episode commentaries, early script drafts, even a ‘remaster’ of the 1970s “Keep America Beautiful” PSA staring the animated cast and a trip to the “Rhombian Pollution Belt”. I started working on cleaning it up a few months back but without a good source copy it’s kind of fruitless. But there was a lot of low budget extras that could have been added. Much to my delight there is no dearth of people who want to talk about their time working on TAS.

New to the set are 22 colorful poster-style cards, one for each episode, created by Juan Ortiz. I really like Ortiz’s style, but he didn’t really nail the concepts like he did for TOS. For example “One of Our Planets is Missing” a quintessential original Star Trek story about a living cloud that devours planets. All the crew works together, everyone gets a chance to shine and after Spock does a “Vulcan mind-touch” with the cloud they convince it not to eat the planet. So the poster is a Andy Warhol-esque picture set of Lt. Arex? Don’t get me wrong, they look great, but I don’t feel they capture the episodes as well as his TOS sets did.

I have to say this is where the DVD has an advantage. The DVD comes in a hard shell with a translucent Trek delta and all of the extras are clearly spelled out on the included booklet. It’s really nicely built.

The Blu-ray comes in a cardboard box, the Ortiz cards come in a very nice, slick black cardboard pouch, but the discs are in that standard thin blue plastic case that every Blu-ray comes in and you have to look through each episode on the menu to find the extras (we’ve noted what each disc holds in the Bonus Content section, to make things easier to find). Granted, it’s a bit thinner and will disappear on a bookshelf easier, but I really liked the attention to design put into the DVD case. I may get a used DVD set and put the Blu-ray in there.

So, should you get it? Yes! If you are a fan of the animated series or even just a completist and want to have all the Trek media on your shelf it’s a great addition. Is it disappointing we didn’t get new extras? sure, but the quality of the audio and video is pretty good compensation! Besides, you know you want to see Kirk, Spock and the devil have a pint of ale!

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My kids have recently become quite interested in TAS. I didn’t even have to push them that way, it just happened naturally. They saw the Animated series picture on Netflix and wanted to know what it was. The episodes might sometimes be a little more scary than Paw Patrol but I actually feel a lot better about them watching a cartoon like TAS than all the other drivel out there.

Would be great if CBS / Paramount were on top of things like this and got an animated Kelvin Universe series going with the movie cast. I could see an animation style like the one used in Archer working splendidly. It would harken back to TAS a bit, but look spectacular.

There was a Kelvin universe cartoon pitched (we are going to talk about it on the podcast) but it didn’t pan out sadly.

If you’re going to do an animated show in today’s market I wouldn’t suggest going the Archer route. Archer works because, well it’s Archer. The same way that Family Guy works because it’s Family Guy and South Park as well. For Trek and the multiple audiences it could reach, you do want it to visually look great if it’s animated. I look at Star Wars and their animated series. Clone Wars and Rebels both got it right and the visuals look great. Their shows are able to cross pollinate between age groups and really appeal to all of them. The same goes for the DC animated series and animated movies.

Well, I didn’t mean a direct copy of how Archer looks but rather the bold lines and likenesses. It would feel like there was a bit of a lineage between the original animated series, with the added benefit of actually looking spectacular. It could look like an animated comic book.

I personally dislike the style of the Star Wars cartoons.

I don’t think I am the only one who would love to see some of these re-worked into more contemporary pieces with the same audio tracks, but state-of-the-art animation.

agreed,as long as ,you don’t do a lucas

How true! Others may not dare to hope. And some will disparage changing things. But me, as a besotted fan of TOS (TAS), I can think of no better money spent, nothing I’d dig more than a reimagining of TAS with new state-of-the-art animation.

The hard shell DVD package has not aged well. Originally white, mine is now a yellowish cream color.

Odd, mine is brilliant white still. The cardboard part may be a bit more yellow however.

mine to,the case was not in direct sunlight

Mine was well looked after and kept out of sunlight, but is now yellow. The packaging was rubbish anyway! It looked nice, but was utterly impractical. The same with the TOS earlier release. Loads of plastic with the discs dumped in some taped-together inlay trays in a bit of card.

Mine did okay, but the plastic DVD locking mechanisms for the individual discs did not fare so well in the move.

Aaron Harvey,

After reading the disastrous things Hallmark did with its Filmation archives in general, I am curious as to exactly what source materials Paramount retained of it in their personal STAR TREK archives and how it was cleaned up for this set of blu-rays?

The story has long been that the original music could never be released as a CD box set because the audio masters simply no longer exist. If true, how was a “lossless” 5.1 surround audio mastered for this set?

Just because it is presented in 5.1 “lossless” doesn’t mean it started that way. Lossless just means the compression doesn’t lose anything from the source, whatever the source may be. And I’m pretty sure it’s from the broadcast medium, but I am doing some research to see if I can answer the question. I know it’s the same source that they worked from for the DVD in 2006, whatever that was.

This is the same scan of the film they did in 2006 for the DVD set, they did the scan at HD resolution. That’s how Netflix has been able to offer HD streaming versions of TAS for a few years now. CBS has never really talked about where the 35mm film that they scanned came from, that I can find.

The audio wasn’t remastered from original elements, because as you said the isolated elements don’t seem to exist any more. However there are no claims of the audio being remastered. You seem to be conflating how the audio data is stored on disc with the idea of remastering the source audio.

The term “lossless” is about data compression. It has nothing to do with the source audio in-and-of-itself. It simply means whatever the source was, it is stored on disc with a lossless algorithm, so the data (bits) end up coming out bit-for-bit the same as it was when the master digital audio track was fed into the disc authoring software at the studio.

Aaron & Matt Wright,

Re: I am doing some research to see if I can answer the question

Tanks. Your efforts are much appreciated.

Re: The audio has a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio track in 5.1 surround, and for the purist there’s an option for a mono Dolby Digital sound track.

That statement implies that somehow there’s a difference between the two, mono Dolby Digital and DTS-HD Master Audio lossless 5.1 surround, sound tracks.

If I heard correctly, and Matt says I did, then there’s no difference between the two audio options as the only surviving source for both was the original mono mixed track. I was merely trying to ascertain why there was an implication that the “purist” option was somehow different and why the lossless edition differed noticeably from it somehow?

Given the sparsity of extras, I’m surprised CBS didn’t find the making of the set itself worthy of documenting and including as such?

No you’re still missing something.

As mentioned, the mono verson is there for purists, as that’s how TAS was broadcast originally. There is also a 5.1 surround mix, this is something CBS Home Entertainment created in 2006.

Mentioning the lossless part is two fold: 1. It’s a marketing thing, pretty much all Blu-rays have a lossless track, since they have plenty of storage space. 2. The DVD version of the 5.1 track is compressed into lossy standard Dolby Digital, so it is technically an upgrade in the data storage technology of the audio.

The “losssless” jargon isn’t the part the focus on.

The important difference between the two soundtracks is mono versus 5.1 surround.

Matt Wright,

Re: No you’re still missing something.

Ah, I think I get it. You are saying even though both still had only the mono mix to work from, the DVD audio techs were able to trick up a 5.1 surround mix out of it. But other than an added creative speaker placement positioning of some of the sounds and dialogue, there’s no qualitative audio difference between the two of the 1970s’ final audio mix source?

Ah, I think I get it. You are saying even though both still had only the mono mix to work from, the DVD audio techs were able to trick up a 5.1 surround mix out of it.

But other than an added creative speaker placement positioning of some of the sounds and dialogue, there’s no qualitative audio difference between the two of the 1970s’ final audio mix source?

Not sure I’d say they’re the same. They’re similar. The 5.1 track sounds a bit better simply because of it being mixed to try to sweeten things up a little and add a little bit of bass to things, plus add some surround activity, mix the music into surrounds, etc. The mono is of course, just mono.

Paramount, as the rights holder had sets of master elements on STAR TREK and THE BRADY KIDS and those were never in the filmation archives, but safe in the hands of Paramount. Similar situation with Warner Brothers and The DC Superhero Cartoons filmation produced in the 1960’s and MGM/UA/Turner and the Gilligan animated series. (Now also held by Warners)

Herb, thank you! My regular contacts are either out of town or otherwise occupied so I hadn’t heard back. I suspected as much, but didn’t want to say without some more solid information. I know all the raw cells have been scattered to the wind (and with random backgrounds which makes collecting a pain), but figured there had to be a master somewhere.

What about He-Man?

If you like TAS, I guess that’s a good thing for you. When we were watching Star Trek in chronological order*, with the exception of 2 TAS episodes (“Yesteryear” and “More Tribbles, More Troubles”), we really didn’t like the series. The sound effects were later destined for the video arcade coin-op game “Asteroids” and the episode that paints Lucifer as a good, but just a misunderstood guy, really didn’t sit right in a Christian family. By that time, we’d pretty much cemented our low opinion of that particular series and were just wanting to get it done asap and move on to TMP.

* We followed a chronology I found on the internet and watched all of Star Trek from “Enterprise Season 1” to “Voyager Season 7” (with “The Cage,” TOS and all the movies and series in order as they would have occurred, in the middle). We got done only about a month before “ST09” hit the theaters. We’re now doing it again, and so far we’ve gotten through TOS-R Season 1 and are waiting for our TOS-R Season 2 to arrive. The new FX in S1 were really hit and miss. We’re hoping S2 to be a bit more established as to what they’re doing with them.

Piss on the christians, even that idiot that wrote the Narnia books! The base image of Lucien/Lucifer was taken from Greek mythology, Satyrs, {with Centaurs}, that were even in the Narnia books. The visual representations were also in error, as Lucifer was a fallen angel, the first son of god, and the one who led a rebellion. So should be depicted to be every bit as beautiful as an angel, which again was derived from Greek mythology creatures called Cherubs, {aka Cupid}. Indeed there is nothing original at all in christianity or the other two Abrahamist religions. Mere creations of the mealy-mouths to set up patriarchal systems.

I get what you’re saying but there is much more respectful ways to say what you’re saying. It may not be your belief (or mine) but let’s keep it civil. Thanks!

Ignore Mr. Browncoat. Some people love to attack any and all mentions of religion, even if it was simply a passing reference. The tolerant left tolerates all things except those that counter their beliefs, or lack thereof. Good luck with the chronological order!

And painting the left or right with one sweeping brush is not any better.

Respectfully, just how tolerant was it of you to proudly state that your christian views made it impossible for you to accept a simple plot-device within a Saturday-morning cartoon from 1973? Since I have many friends, who practice various religious faiths, I prefer to refrain from talking down another person’s beliefs. However, once anyone asserts those beliefs as the primary reason to arbitrarily condemn other people’s art, beliefs, morals or sexuality, then haven’t they invited the criticism upon themselves?

Just FYI the special effects for the remastered weren’t done season by season, but all at once on the same project timeline. And episodes like “The Trouble With Tribbles” were done first and the very last episode they worked on was “The Cage” so they effects were not done sequentially from first to last episode.

I was amazed they got the Lucian/Lucifer thing on the air, but absolutely loved they managed to do so. Wish it had been in a better episode, but man, it got folks in jr high talking that next week, and I was eating it up!

Larry Brody originally wanted it to be god but the networks said no, they switched it to the devil and it was ok’d. They also got no calls of complaints as far as he or Dorothy Fontana heard.

Glad its been released but Hate the cover, hard to tell what it is from a distance & the Art on the back looks like a photocopy of a photocopy. The art cards are ok but I’d rather have a portfolio of cards with art from the series or production. Paramount cheaped-out using Fan Art.

I still want STAR TREK: REANIMATED…. ditch the terrible 70’s animation and just lay the old soundtrack over new CGI work. I do like the background art and use of bright colors, but can’t stand the constant recycling of the same shots, and all the static scenes were only mouths move.

I wouldn’t mind seeing new animation in ADDITION to the “terrible 70’s animation” (which my friends who worked at Filmation and I would argue about your description) but not ditching the original all together. The ‘constant recycling’ was actually innovative in the industry. They manually created the equivalent of computer macros that allowed them to put pieces together to create animation that would be prohibitively time intensive if re-drawn every time–remember the majority of the money was going to the voice actors making it the most expensive cartoon on TV at the time. And Filmation’s feature length films like Flash Gordon The Greatest Adventure of All (1979) are on par with the other non-Disney features of the time.

Not to say that Filmation was doing any worse than HB, but this time period was really the nadir of the art. Budgets were tiny, the market shrinking, feature animation was dead, the star animators and voice artists were getting elderly, the whole xerography-inking work looked terrible, lots of youngsters without classical training, no CGI assists yet, etc. Thank God Trek had the best writers available and not the Evanier-level drek of the era.

Despite my other criticisms, I definitely applaud the character designer who captured the actors’ likenesses extremely well.

Of course, they could always do STAR TREK: RE-ANIMATOR, with Jeffrey Combs in the lead… [gdr]

UGH, not CGI. The Archer style of animation would work nicely and kind of echo the original animated series. http://cdn.awn.com/sites/default/files/styles/original/public/image/attached/1027325-archerepisodicimages-9-1200.jpg?itok=ZYWwgjHk

I don’t see Capt. Archer in that cel, but I do see ’09 Uhura and a whole lot of Trump supporters!

I was wondering…. Is there a reason they did not/could not use the original music in TAS? Anyone?

It probably would have cost more more money than they wanted to spend, especially with Roddenberry taking his unjust 50% cut from Courage.

Why ‘unjust”? Roddenberry created and produced the show. Without him, Courage wouldn’t have earned a thin dime.

Anthony Thompson,

Re: Why ‘unjust”?

Good question, since Courage himself has said in several interviews that it was just business and didn’t bother him in the least. In fact, the only dig he consistently makes about it is he wished Roddenberry was a better lyricist so that they’d have both made more money from them by having a hit song.

Well if you consider the company GR keeps in taking co-credit on themes from composers, the name that comes to mind is Glen ‘Larceny’ Larson (ALIAS SMITH AND JONES from BUTCH CASSIDY, MCCLOUD from COOGAN’S BLUFF and if you do any research, you can find plenty more), who did this with Stu Phillips’ GALACTICA music. So whether it is business as usual, it still doesn’t demonstrate ethical behavior. Then again this country doesn’t seem to appreciate ethics unless it is in some digestible form like Peck in TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, or not eating the talking pig because he is so cute in BABE.

As I said and verified by STAR TREK FACT CHECK:

https://trekmovie.com/2016/11/17/forgotten-roddenberry-genesis-ii/#comment-5329642

Even a semi-slime like James Cameron didn’t take credit away from Horner on TITANIC, though from your stance I guess he’d’ve been entitled, since he spearheaded the project. Maybe there’s some way GR could have stiffed the cast for some of their meager residuals that would also fall under your, ‘without me you wouldn’t have earned a dime on this show’ notion?

Cameron did take money and time away from Horner’s score on Aliens to put it into special effects.

The publishing would have been owned by Paramount and had to be licensed, and the original score recordings would have had to have been licensed, as well as AFM Union payments made to the musicians to re-use them in another series. Much less expensive to create new original compositions and recordings — which were possibly performed non-Union. It is still impressive “orchestral” music for a Saturday morning cartoon, something Rodenberry likely insisted on. It’s actually a nice change of pace over what had become all to familiar during most of the first three seasons.

I figured it was something like that. It was just HUGELY disappointing NOT to hear the traditional 9 note fanfare at the beginning. Instead, we got that slightly different version that just reeked of “this is as close as we can legally get to the original”.

I will be getting this. It would have been nice to get a reanimated version of TAS. Add the computer game episodes from the 1990s and presto, we get the final two years of the five year mission. I also am a fan of the animation of TAS. I have always liked how well they got the characters to look like their real like counterparts. I wouldn’t mind seeing the computer game episodes end up look like the original TAS animation. If it was cheaper to do; do it.

Apart from the pilots, TOS begins about a year into the mission. So TAS would be year five.

By the way, official chronology for a while had the second pilot a year into the mission and the next episode a year after that. Some claimed that was deliberately to remove the possibility of TAS fitting in. Now the more logical chronology- the second pilot six months in, the next episode six months later- gives us a year for TAS at the end.

In my mind, The second pilot is very early in the five year mission. The Corbomite Manuever is just a couple of months later. Maybe 1-2 months or maybe 3-4 months later. Enough time to get a change in the uniforms and bring in Dr. McCoy, Uhura and Rand as the new crew members. Also, I do not think that the five year mission ended right at 5 years. It probably lasted longer than that. Five years and six months or so. Plenty of time to consider TAS as around the 4th year and the Computer Games as the 5th year. It does not really matter. TOS lasted 3 years(79-80 episodes), TAS lasted the equivalent of one year(22 episodes). The games, if we include 25th Anniversary (7episodes) Judgment Rites(8 episodes) and Secret of Vulcan Fury(5 episodes according to Dorothy Fontana),equal about 20 episodes which would be the 5th year.

It’s interesting when you think about the correct chronology. It was the first real series episode but was the tenth to air. And one of the main plot points was really a continuing thread from the second pilot. In his attempt to replace Gary Mitchell, Kirk was overzealously pushing Lt. Bailey toward a nervous breakdown. This gets lost in the shuffle, especially since we regularly see various crewmembers at the helm or navigation station without any comment.

I remember watching the “Keep America Beautiful” TAS public information ‘film’ and the “Rhombian Pollution Belt” on TV when I was a kid in the States and wondered if it would be in the DVD, but was disappointed when I found that it was not. Now, again, it seems it was forgotten in this attempt; shame as it was a nice vignette. Is it available on the web? The theme reminded me of Nimoy’s song “A Visit to a Sad Planet”, but in that case it was the population of Earth that had wiped itself out, not through pollution, but nuclear war.

It’s right in this post.

Pollution moves at warp 6?

A subspace eddy? It moved a Bajoran light ship to warp should be able to do the same to garbage I suppose!

Is there any discussion to have TAS available on ITunes?

CORRECTION needed on the “first Star Trek series to win an Emmy award” line. See Marc Cushman’s “These Are the Voyages”, Vol. 3. “The Tholian Web” received the original series’ one and only Emmy award, in recognition for the visual effects in that episode.

That’s been a consistent error that started in a companion book. It was nominated but did not win. Even TAS got a daytime Emmy award not a “regular” Emmy. it wasn’t until the next generation when they started winning more consistently.

http://m.emmys.com/awards/nominations/award-search?search_api_views_fulltext=Star%20Trek&field_is_winner=1&field_show_details_field_network=All&field_show_details_field_production_company=All&field_nomination_category=All&field_award_category=All&field_nominations_year=1948-01-01%2000%3A00%3A00&field_nominations_year_1=now&field_celebrity_details_field_display_name=&field_show_details_field_nominee_show_nr_title=

Sorry, I should have scrolled down, you beat me to it.

Don’t rely on Cushman to get you FACTS, dude. THOLIAN was nominated, it didn’t win. There are plenty of sources that claim otherwise, but since he gets his history second and third hand and often distorts what is first-generation, he is not the go-to for any of this kind of stuff.

You are wrong, Kev. Cushman never definitively wrote that the effects had won an Emmy. But you wouldn’t know that. Because you have never read the book. You get all your info second and third hand and often distort what is first generation.

That’s right, I won’t read the book, for all the reasons I’ve cited, usually while disputing your own (mis)history of events.

But I’m QUITE interested in your ‘never definitively wrote’ line. So does he hint it won an emmy, or just say there is rumor to that effect? Either would suggest no scholarship at all, since all anybody – not just me – has to do is type in emmys.com and spend 30 seconds finding what happened in the 60s awardwise.

As for your 2nd/3rd crack … I’d love to see you point to something that I got from the great folks at startrekfactcheck — who are genuine scholars, not fastbuck artists — that I distorted in ANY way shape or form. In fact, I’d like you to try to find any distortions in the 300 or so published articles I’ve done in the last 26 years – you’ll find a few errors, a few omissions, and some crazy goofs introduced by a lame editor or two in the 1990s — but one thing I do NOT do is print the legend, ANY legend, unless I am reporting it AS such.

However, distorting 1st gen sources does seem to be Cushman’s thing, given he had access to documents that others have also now checked, and found don’t mesh with his accounting/reporting. So the invention and spin seems to be that ‘author’s’ — what’s the explanation for that, if not incompetence mixed with an intent to deceive?

Very good! Guess this is a good time as ever to review this dear old cartoon series.

I have such affection for this show. It takes me back to Saturday mornings when it stood out like a star against everything else. (Has anyone binge-watched “Scooby’s Laff-a-lympics” anytime recently? I mean anyone on earth. I think the answer is no.)

I wonder if they managed to extract the soundtrack from the original audio. The musical cues — that they used over and over again — have etched themselves indelibly into my brain.

In research for our “Supercrew” episode I think I watched any 70s cartoon I could find including that!

I don’t know for certain but the music has been used so much over the course of the shows that there has to be the ability to stitch together ever moment where someone isn’t speaking over the music to create a clean(er) soundtrack. There’s also the ability to remove dialog with audio editing so combine those 2 ideas and maybe that’s how? That’s on my list of questions to ask the team who did the blu-ray.

Glad that they’ve created ‘archive’ HD versions of these old shows. I watched a lot of the old Filmation shows when I was very young, in the late 1970s, but I don’t remember seeing TAS. I remember Space Sentinels and Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle very well, with that rotating Sutherland-Scheimer (I think) rotating name credit. So sad to hear Hallmark trashed so many of the original materials from these shows. It was a bad enough thing to do in the pre-home video era, but by the mid-1990s, there’s no excuse.

It’s no dismissal of the work of the original animation artists when I say that I’d like to see new animation created to go along with the soundtracks of the shows. There are some cracking stories and, given the amount of visual reference material for the original actors in character, there’s a chance to add a range of facial expression and body language that can lift what can seem otherwise somewhat stilted vocal performances. Along with that, some of the obvious multiple uses of James Doohan and Majel Barrett for other characters’ voices can be reduced with some additional voice actors.

On top of that, if there are 22 episodes that can be rebuilt with modern animation, why not hire a new production team and voice actors to make more episodes after these have been done? You can probably find someone who can do an imitation of Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty in every pub in the the English speaking world, let alone professional voice artists!

And, as for the tragic loss of so many Filmation shows… it would be nice to see the some of them remade.

It’s so sad how many cartoons have had the original material lost or are badly treated. Just look at the first season of The Mysterious Cities of Gold: materials burned in a fire. The brilliant Ulysses 31 available restored on French DVD, but only available cut and with unrestored visuals on English language video and still in SD.

Bravo for releasing TAS in its HD glory.

The biggest problem is TAS isn’t the animation or the scripts (though those could be really bad) but the acting. Everyone is very obviously just reading the dialogue off the page in a take or two. It almost seems like it’s the first time they’re seeing it. Shatner, especial, has no intonation or any of his usual rhythm. That’s why it would be pointless to take the audio and attempt a reanimation in cel or CG. The low energy of the visuals at least matches the audio as is. I can’t imagine these mellow performances on something action packed.

I think, perhaps, this is a problem across the board with animation: just because someone is a good screen actor, doesn’t mean he is necessarily a good radio or animation voice actor. It’s a very specific skill. We see cartoons being churned out left, right and centre with celebrity actors lending their voices when there are likely much better voice actors out who aren’t known faces.

However, a lot can be done in a sound mix to lift aspects of the performances. I bet Shatner would love to return to revoice Kirk, anyway – I hear he’s playing Two-Face in the next Batman ’66 movie with Adam West and Burt Ward.

The same problem is, to a lesser extent, on the two Star Trek computer games of the 90’s – 25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites. The games are enjoyable especially with the voice acting but there’s something about it and I think you hit the nail on the head – they are reading from a script into a mic in a sound booth with no real context of what’s going on. Not the actors fault per se but a result of the disconnection from the actors to the material. Doesn’t seem to be an issue with a lot of modern animation but it seems apparent here.

I remember seeing a couple of episodes when I was a kid in the 70’s and I was pleasantly surprised when it showed up on Netflix. . . then I started watching some episodes. Oh dear God this cartoon is horrrrrrrrrrrible. It was so bad I actually watched Nemesis and Insurrection to clean my palate. To spend good hard earned money on blurays or dvd’s of this kids cartoon is. . . not logical.

To each his own. “Yesteryear” consistently shows up on “Best Trek Episodes” lists so many people do like it.

I tried to watch it and got half way through. Just wasn’t interesting. I did see what appeared to be the basis for Spock’s childhood teasing and bullying about his being half human which made it into the 09 Trek.

I really wanted to love the Blu-ray version, but the sharpness and clarity of the Blu-ray is TAS’s undoing, imo. This is the review I wrote on Amazon.com:

“The video quality and audio in this brand new Blu-ray edition of “Star Trek: The Animated Series” is exceptional. The picture is rendered in a clarity that could only have been dreamed of back in the ’70s when this show was produced. Therein lies the problem. Filmation tended to use and reuse their animation cells a LOT, and they would eventually get dirty, scratched, etc. On broadcast TV of the day, these flaws would never have been noticed. With the sharpness of modern HD televisions and media, these flaws become glaring. Each scratch and grain of dirt just “pops” out and, at least for me, makes for an unpleasant viewing experience! You’d think that, for the 50th anniversary of Star Trek, CBS would’ve cleaned the video up for an AMAZING HD presentation but, sadly, that isn’t the case. The DVDs have these same flaws, but they’re not as noticeable. My advice is what I put in the headline: Save your money and buy the DVD set!”

I’ve really been enjoying MeTV’s new 14:9 aspect ration presentation of Trek, and other 4:3 SD series.

By the way, has this ever been covered on this forum? It’s an amazing poster for the 50th Anniversary.

http://www.dustyabell.com/products/poster

Curious Cadet,

I find their compromise oddly acceptable. I think it’s because I was an a/v guy that repaired and adjusted monitors and sets where I discovered the vast majority of them left the factory set to overscan because it created the impression the screen was larger than it actually was. This is sort of the MeTV’s version and I’m fairly sure most shows were produced back then fully aware that most sets overscanned cutting off some of the top and botton, so as a presentation this compromise doesn’t annoy me as much as their other attempts.

Yes, TVs in the 1960s did not allow for display of the overscan area, in fact many cut into the TV-safe area, if not by adjustment, by the frame bezel around the screen. I have long argued that the current framing we see in the DVD and BluRay scans already destroys the picture composition we were meant to see. When the original shots were framed in the camera viewfinder, they viewed them through a ground glass plate that marked the area that would end up on TV. In the example I’ve attached of an original 35mm film frame from TOS, the red outlined area is the Academy Aperture. The yellow outline is the TV scan area, and the green out-line indicates the only part of the shot guaranteed to end up on TV. The red-shaded area is therefore a protection, in case someone’s TV was adjusted inappropriately. Often, this area was not even kept clear of foreign elements to the shot, such as microphones, further confirming this idea.

What the 14:9 aspect ratio does is essentially crop the shot from the top and bottom, down to the TV Action Safe area — the only area guaranteed to be seen on a TV in the 1960s. If you compare the full frame shot to the crop, it’s obvious how much wasted vertical space there is in the shot, while at the same time, there’s much more horizontal information. While this is going to vary from shot to shot, with the exception of close-ups, I’d say there’s almost always too much wasted vertical space in TOS. It’s particularly painful when they try to capture several characters spread out horizontally, especially when two widely spaced characters are barely in frame, with tons of wasted vertical space where nothing interesting is being framed.

So, again, the cropped-out vertical overscan area was never meant to be seen in the first place. So yes, it’s an arbitrary decision to show only the horizontal overscan area to the sides, but arguably there’s much more interesting imagery there, which gives the TV safe imagery some much needed breathing space, while simultaneously eliminating wasted, uninteresting vertical imagery, and helping tighten the viewer’s focus. And it helps fill modern TV screens, without cropping any original framing.

And it can’t go unnoticed that there’s even more information available in the area outside the TV scan area, which is pretty consistent in Academy Aperture frames — note the top and bottom are the areas to avoid due to variances aperture masking. When TOS was restored, CBS scanned the entire film frame, which means they can take any portion of the Academy aperture they want. If they managed to keep the entire Academy aperture “clean” throughout the series, CBS could do a new mask approaching 15:9 without cropping any part of the image originally meant to be seen. Now granted, that would create a shot no one ever expected anyone would see, and this be a legitimate complaint for a cinema purest. But personally, watching these 14:9 crops on MeTV actually seem to tighten the focus of the scenes, which makes perfect sense, as we were never meant to see all that extra space on the top and bottom of the frame.

Often, of course, US shows were shot wide enough to be cropped to 1.66:1 for European cinema screenings. The scanning for HD has long been an issue for me: all too often, boom microphones and the types of cycloramas slip into shots where, naturally, they shouldn’t be visible. I spotted a mic watching Encounter at Farpoint and it’s very common watching the 1960s Avengers shows.

It’s so silly and only requires a bit of commonsense either during telecine or during mastering.

Actually, TNG was especially sloppy, and one of the reasons that they couldn’t do a wider screen crop of the film, which used a wider frame than TOS per the example below:

And this shows how messy the frames often were …

Lou Scheimer worked hard to keep animation by Filmation in the United States. He did an amazing job with this show and many many others!

Well they could have at least painted the eyes their own color.

TAS is such an interesting anomaly and unlikely detour in Trek history that it’s hard not to have an affection for it. And as many have observed the scripts are often good, if abbreviated, Trek.

There’s just something… dead about it. The animation usually takes the brunt of the criticism but the show’s problems are more all-encompassing. The sound is just somehow off. Seemingly endless pauses between lines, scant ambiance, discordant, arbitrary music, a lifeless mix… And those performances. As with most animation the actors were recorded separately, which might account for a certain listlessness. The fact that most were not voice actors can’t have helped either — in animation you have to exaggerate a bit and if anything this cast went the other way. All I know is it all adds up to a show that reeks of nobody involved with it having any fun. Watching it, both back in the day and now, it always just kind of bounces off my eyeballs.

Some have suggested the whole thing could be re-animated using CG and made much more exciting. There would still be the blah sound to overcome but maybe that can be helped too if the original elements survive.

A quick footnote about the novelizations: Alan Dean Foster did a perfectly fine job with his “Star Trek Log” books, but when the show was canceled late into his book series he seems to have realized he was going to soon be out of a job. So instead of three episodes a book, he expanded each of the last few into their own full-fledged Trek novel. Some of these are quite good

On the fence. Amazon has so few actual reviews of this series on BD! But the few that exist are hardly kind. The episodes are re-mastered, but NO form of restoration was performed on the prints. 1 reviewer claimed the video playback reveals aged images with same flaws from frequently used cels, it glaring revealing marks, scratches, etc. When I pop my DVD set in my Blu-ray player viewing on my 46″ HDTV……it looks ok, but it’s obvious flaws are evident in the prints to me. Grainy painted cels, matting is charming to these 58yo eyes…..but this series was NEVER meant to perform on anything other than dated old school analog tv screens. I can appreciate the BD may make the colors pop, but also the flaws in the less than stellar animation( barely adequate cel painting…especially background plates) process utilized. The static character/planets/Enterprise cels when compelled to simulate movement against a back ground cel definitely reveals slight variations in filmation quality. I personally find that my dvd’s are quite serviceable, and is a blessing in that it is more forgiving on a HD tv in relation to a Blu-ray upgrade……..and not necessarily a better aspect to view a dated cartoon circa 1973-74.

Yes, this set fails somewhat in terms of extras; some more new content would have been nice. But the main disappointment for me is no effort made to clean up the image. I couldn’t say I expected them to go frame-by-frame and remove all the little light specks. The traveling specks that are part of the moving animation cells would, I assume, have to be removed laboriously. And that may be too much to ask of an old cartoon made for TV. But such a clean up would have been a welcome surprise and a substantive way that the Bluray edition could have added value for those buying the series a second time. I don’t think a review of the Bluray release is complete without informing the potential buyer that those pesky specks remain flittering about the screen in abundance. Also, isn’t the sound a bit out of sync, especially during the first episode?

That said, as a besotted fan (especially of TOS Trek), TAS looking sharper than ever is well worth the price. Next phase, a totally redone state-of-the-art reanimation effort? Well . . . I can dream can’t I?

I’m shocked that the audio is noticeably out of sync in most episodes. This is surprising since the audio was matched up very well on the DVD set. WTF happened?

I found that on a blu-ray player it’s not out of synch, on Playstation a little out of synch and on an external drive connected to a computer running the disc through an app, the most out of synch. It seems like more of a hardware issue than software. I’ve noticed the same thing on other blu-ray discs on ocasion.

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[REVIEW] Star Trek: The Animated Series on Blu-ray

Star Trek: The Animated Series is now available for the first time as a standalone release in high definition Blu-ray. Originally available in HD as part of the Star Trek 50th Anniversary TV and Movie Collection earlier this year, the three-disc set includes all twenty-two episodes of The Animated Series along with audio and text commentaries on select episodes and additional bonus features.

Star Trek: The Animated Series Looks Great on Blu-ray but Lacks Bonus Material

The special features included in the set are exactly the same as those found on the original 2006 DVD release (and in the 50th Anniversary box set). The most-notable of which is “Drawn to the Final Frontier,” giving TAS fans some great insight into the making of the series. Other bonus material includes “What’s the Star Trek Connection?,” which looks at the continuity of TAS in the 1970s from TOS, a storyboard gallery and the aforementioned audio and text commentaries.

The twenty-two Animated Series episodes are presented in their original 4:3 aspect ratio in 1080p high definition with Dolby and DTS surround sound. Subtitles include English, French, German, Italian and Dutch with French, German, and Italian alternate audio tracks.

While not much has changed with this standalone Blu-ray release, some fans may appreciate the twenty-two Juan Ortiz mini prints that are included in the slipcase. Plus, having The Animated Series discs in a separate snap case from The Original Series (as they were packaged in the same case previously) may be an added bonus to some. In conclusion, if you didn’t purchase the 50th Anniversary Blu-ray set, this is the best these TAS episodes have ever appeared on a home video release.

Star Trek: The Animated Series on Blu-ray is now available on Amazon .

Official description :

Boldly continuing where Star Trek: The Original Series left off, these animated adventures chart the progress of Captain Kirk and his crew in a universe unconstrained by “real-life” cinematography! With all characters voiced by their original actors, join Kirk, Spock, Bones and the crew for 22 new adventures: to boldly go where no animation has gone before!

Christopher Dalton

November 20, 2016 at 11:50 am

With David Gerrold’s involvement in the Axanar scandal, I’m surprised that CBS/Paramount did not edit out Gerrold’s segments.

Impecunious Joe

February 11, 2017 at 8:05 am

What involvement has he had other than offering his own opinions, and why would the producers of home video releases remove his supplement contributions over it?

February 14, 2017 at 12:05 am

Being guilty by association. He also worked on the production in some executive capacity.

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Star Trek: The Animated Series (Blu-ray Review)

Boldly continuing where Star Trek: The Original Series left off, these animated adventures chart the progress of Captain Kirk and his crew in a universe unconstrained by “real-life” cinematography! With all characters voiced by their original actors, join Kirk, Spock, Bones and the crew for 22 new adventures: to boldly go where no animation has gone before!

Star Trek: The Animated Series was the first revival of Star Trek following its Cancellation in 1969.  Known just as “Star Trek” back then, it began airing in 1973.  Syndicated episodes of the original series in the past 4 years had proven so popular that this was the response to bring the show back.  It was met with critical success, winning a Daytime Emmy Award, but not so much with its ratings (Like the original show).  Especially, it wasn’t connecting with the kids’ demographic that the series was aiming for.  It was let go, and the last we would have from Star Trek until The Motion Picture in 1979.

While there has always been debate and back and forth about the show being canon, at the time it was released, it was pretty much believed to be.  Ported over from the original live action series were its writing staff and all but one of the original cast for vocals (Walter Koenig was left out due to budgetary reasons, but did write an episode becoming the first cast member to write for the show).  Also coming on board in the writing room were many notable science fiction authors of the time.  Since it was animated, the show would be able to show some bigger ideas, like more elaborate aliens, places and events.

Said animation, though, was of the Filmmation style, which was popular among Saturday morning cartoons of the 1970s.  And because of that, this show becomes a hard sell for me.  If you’re not familiar with the animation, its very primal.  Basic color are used and the image is a very stationary one with lots of “stock” animated footage that gets repeated.  You basically are treated to a stationary picture with a mouth moving and then maybe a slight movement.  Coming with that are a lot of glaring mistakes in the animation, due to the repetitious use of some shots.  Yes, it looks cheap because that’s exactly what it was.

However, for me, and I think many of my fellow Trekkers, the scripts in this show are strong enough to get past the kind dumpy animation.  There are a handful of episodes that are follow ups to ones on the original series, which actually kind of play like retreads or remakes of the episode they are linked to.  But, there are others and ones that bring about fun, unique and new adventures for the like of Kirk and company.  While it is enjoyable, you kinda just have to forgive or look past the animation.

While the debate wages on of whether this show “counts” or not, I say count it.  I’m one who is fine with looser continuity and things and also have an understanding and forgiveness for things like that.  I get it, I know how things are made and work and don’t get bothered by things being super neat in their connection. Plus, we get things that are still in play today from this series, like the “T” for Tiberius as Captain Kirk’s middle name.  This show also sets up the holodeck which would come into play later for Star Trek: The Next Generation.  So, really this animated series is not even close to being a loss.

To me, as tough as it can be to watch or whatnot, I still consider this to be that 4th season of Star Trek that we never got.  Year four of the five year mission.  Boldy going where many an animated show in the 1970s had gone before.  And for Trekkies of that era who were fans of the show, I understand the embrace you have and people probably can’t imagine a time with so little Star Trek to consume and the worry that there never would be any more.  This show is a little bit of a cult item within a cult item and is a great little bonus to have as well as a collector’s item within having all things Trek.

Beyond The Farthest Star

One Of Our Planets Is Missing

The Lorelei Signal

More Tribbles, More Troubles

The Infinitive Vulcan

The Magicks Of Megas-Tu

Once Upon A Planet

Mudd’s Passion

The Terratin Incident

The Time Trap

The Ambergris Element

The Slaver Weapon

The Eye Of The Beholder

The Pirates Of Orion

The Practical Joker

How Sharper Than A Serpent’s Tooth

The Counter-Clock Incident

Encoding : MPEG-4 AVC

Resolution : 1080p

Aspect Ratio : 1.33:1

Layers: BD-50

Clarity/Detail :  As incredibly simple as the animation was on this show, the previous DVD iteration looked pretty great.  This here is a step up, but marginally. The image features the obviously improvement in sharpness and a crisper look.  There’s a little thicker look to it as well, creating a more bold and confident appearance.  Overall, I think people will be happy though.

Depth:   This is a pretty flat, 2D as you can get 2D of a show.  That’s the animation, not this Blu-ray’s fault.  Its not too bad though, as movements are smooth and there is some sense of loose fluidity between characters, ships and backdrops.

Black Levels :  Blacks are solid and dark.  They do a good job of outlining characters and objects as well as filling them in with solid color.  No crushing witnessed on this one at all during my viewing.

Color Reproduction :  Color is an area of noticeable improvement.  While still not maybe as big of a change as I’d have liked (They’d probably actually have to recolor the whole thing), its still impressive.  Reds, blues and yellows are all stronger and bold because they are primary and not a lot of different tinting and shading is going on.

Flesh Tones :  N/A

Noise/Artifacts:   There are some dirt/specs in the episodes, but for me, it kind of adds to the look and charm of the show.

Audio Format(s) : English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, English Mono, German Mono, French Mono, Italian Mono

Subtitles : English SDH, German, French, Italian, Dutch

Dynamics :   Star Trek: The Animated Series features a surprisingly well realized 5.1 audio track.  The audio sounds pretty clear and clean and less analog than you think it would.  The effects, vocals and score are all much more loose of one another in a well balanced mix.  Effects have a good distinct full sound to them.  Its a loud track that will fill the room more than the show ever has before.

Height: N/A

Low Frequency Extension : Some decent rumbling gets done with the subwoofer in this mix.  Some explosions, ship shaking and bass in the score feels a nice, while not thunderous boom.

Surround Sound Presentation :  What this one does quite well is fully realize the environments, names the bridge.  You can hear beeps, computer hums and more.  There are some distinct sounds and the like that carry in the rear speakers too.  Movements and actions are documented pretty decently.  No, this isn’t going to be Star Trek Beyond, but its pretty solid for a piece of vintage animated television.

Dialogue Reproduction :  Dialogue is plenty loud and well captured here.  Everyone is clean and clear.

Star Trek: The Animated Series is a 3 Blu-ray Disc set.  The bonus material appears on Disc 3.  This set comes with a collectable gather of cards featuring some poster art for some of the episodes.  All the bonus features are ones carried over from the 2006 DVD release of the series.

Drawn To The Final Frontier: The Making Of Star Trek The Animated Series (SD, 24:31) – A little retrospective with writers going over the life span of this short lived animated series that kept Star Trek alive.

What’s The Star Trek Connection (SD, 7:12) –  This goes over things in the animated series and their relation to all the other films and TV series in the universe.

Show History –  Playing like still gallery, this is a written history of the show.

Star Trek: The Animated Series is definitely for Trek fans, but I doubt it’ll extend much beyond that.  Hampering that is how you feel about the animation. This Blu-ray is a nice step up, but due to the simplicity of the animation before, the DVD already looked quite good.  But, hey, an upgrade is an upgrade and this looks and sound better. Also cool are the little posters they have inserted and its appreciated that the extras are carried over.  The price is a little steep for this (Especially since its been on Netflix), but for a fan its worth it.

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Movieman's Guide to the Movies

Star trek: the animated series blu-ray review.

Star Trek: The Animated Series (1973-75)

Genre(s): Animation, Science Fiction, Adventure Paramount | NR – 525 min. – $57.99 | November 15, 2016

Date Published: 12/01/2016 | Author: The Movieman

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Star Trek: The Animated Series

Boldly continuing where Star Trek: The Original Series left off, these animated adventures chart the progress of Captain Kirk and his crew in a universe unconstrained by "real-life" cinematography! With all characters voiced by their original actors, join Kirk, Spock, Bones and the crew for 22 new adventures: to boldly go where no animation has gone before!

Storyline: Our Reviewer's Take

To the dismay of its many fans, 'Star Trek' was canceled by NBC in 1969 after just three seasons on the air. As we of course know now, the series would be revived starting in 1979 as a very successful feature film franchise. However, the show was not completely stagnant during the decade in between. Its popularity in broadcast syndication built a sizable cult audience hungry for more 'Star Trek'. In the fall of 1973, creator Gene Roddenberry and other key talent found a way to produce more episodes, in the form of a Saturday morning cartoon. No mere cash-in spinoff, 'Star Trek: The Animated Series' was scripted by some of the original show's writers and featured almost the entire cast reprising their iconic roles. Although often forgotten today, it's the closest thing 'Star Trek' got to a legitimate fourth season.

Despite airing Saturday mornings on NBC immediately preceding 'Sigmund and the Sea Monsters', 'The Pink Panther Show' and 'The Jetsons', the animated 'Star Trek' was neither conceived nor executed to be a kids' show. As far as Gene Roddenberry (who sanctioned the series and had a supervisory role) and head writer Dorothy Fontana were concerned, they were simply making more 'Star Trek' as if the original show hadn't been canceled. The majority of episode scripts could well have been produced in live action a few years earlier. The writing level skews more toward adults than children, and is heavy with science technobabble and philosophy. Stories feature many familiar themes and concepts fans will recognize, including time travel, aliens parading as gods, sentient gaseous clouds, and malevolent forces hijacking the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Providing voices are none other than William Shatner as Captain Kirk, Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, and DeForest Kelley as Dr. McCoy, plus George Takei, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, Majel Barrett and more. The only major Enterprise crewmember not to appear in animated form is Pavel Chekov, whose role was cut for budgetary reasons. (As compensation, Walter Koenig was allowed to write one episode, called 'The Infinite Vulcan'.) From the opening credits, which play with a jazzed-up version of the old theme music, to the framing and blocking of scenes, everything here is designed to closely mimic the original show as much as possible, within the restrictions of a much-reduced budget and limited animation resources.

Unfortunately, the biggest failing to 'Star Trek: The Animated Series' is that the show was produced by Filmation, a very budget-conscious animation studio notorious for its stiff character movements and endless recycling of stock shots and motions. Whenever the visual information in a scene gets too complex, the characters are often reduced to silhouettes moving in front of background plates. Sometimes this is used for interesting stylistic effect, but more often than not the show simply looks cheap. To a certain way of thinking, this might be considered consistent with the dodgy production values of the original live action series, but the absence of whites in any character's eyes is weird and disturbing, and the fact that a small handful of actors voice the majority of supporting and background characters is frequently very distracting. James Doohan generally does a good job of disguising his voice when playing different roles (and he does dozens of them), but the other stars have a much harder time of it. From start to finish, every single female character in the series is played by either Nichelle Nichols or Majel Barrett. They're both fine, talented actresses in their key roles, but neither can hide her voice.

On the other hand, the freedom of animation allowed the show to attempt some ambitious ideas that couldn't have been enacted on a live action series at the time. The Chekov role was replaced with a new navigator named Lt. Arex, an alien with three arms and three legs. Many episodes introduce other bizarre aliens or take us to elaborate planets, including an extended visit to Spock's Vulcan homeworld.

'Star Trek: The Animated Series' includes a number of elements we'd now describe as "fan-service," in the form of references to characters or plots from the live action show. Among these are the Guardian of Forever time travel portal, the shore leave planet, a return visit from those troublesome Tribbles, and a new scam perpetrated by con man Harry Mudd. Some work better than others. The Tribble episode is genuinely funny and a worthy follow-up to the original, but the Harry Mudd episode is a total dog. (The plot essentially amounts to Mudd selling the gullible Nurse Chapel a date rape drug that she doses Spock with.)

Unlike the original show, 'The Animated Series' had relatively little network interference or pressure from NBC, who had minimal expectations for it and largely left the creators to their own devices. Nevertheless, the episode scripting quality varies wildly from near-classics ('Yesteryear', 'The Terratin Incident') to painful duds ('The Magicks of Megas-Tu', 'Mudd's Passion'). To be fair, that puts it about on par with Season 2 or 3 of the old series. Fortunately, the final run of episodes that comprised its shortened second season, from 'The Pirates of Orion' through 'The Counter-Clock Incident', are among the show's strongest.

One of the potential gems, 'The Slaver Weapon' written by 'Ringworld' author Larry Niven, has some great sci-fi ideas but is undercut a little by the goofy animation design of the cat-like alien villains and the pink coloring of their costumes. (As it turns out, the show's main animation director was totally colorblind.)

'Star Trek: The Animated Series' ran for a total of 22 half-hour episodes from September of 1973 to October of 1974. During that time, it was critically acclaimed and won a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Series. Sadly, it didn't much catch on with the actual children who watched Saturday morning cartoons. The show was canceled due to poor ratings shortly after its second season had begun.

Over the years, there has been much debate about whether 'The Animated Series' should be considered canon within the 'Star Trek' franchise. For a long time, even Gene Roddenberry claimed that it wasn't. However, several things introduced here (including James T. Kirk's middle initial standing for "Tiberius" and the holodeck seen in episode 'The Practical Joker') worked their way into the official canon. Nothing – or at least nothing significant – from the animated show overtly contradicts other incarnations of 'Star Trek'. The show was written by real 'Trek' writers, blessed by Gene Roddenberry, and stars William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. In recent years, the sentiment among both fans and other 'Trek' creators has swung toward making it official.

'Star Trek: The Animated Series' comes to Blu-ray from CBS Films, distributed through Paramount Home Entertainment. The show was previously released on DVD back in 2006. The box set contains all 22 episodes of the show's run spread across three Blu-ray discs. All three are stored in a plastic keepcase within a slipcover box. Also included is a folder with 22 art cards (one for each episode) by illustrator Juan Ortiz, whose similar work for the original 'Star Trek' series can be found in the book ' Star Trek: The Art of Juan Ortiz '.

All three discs require you to select a menu language at startup. All three also have a (short) trailer for DTS audio before the menu. Disc 1 is additionally burdened by another forced trailer for the 'Star Trek' franchise's 50th anniversary. Once you finally get to it, the menu itself (identical on all discs) has a fun animated design, but the layout makes it difficult to find the audio and text commentaries without knowing in advance which episodes have them – information not provided anywhere in either the menu or box set packaging. A booklet with a content listing would have gone a long way.

Video Review

As should be no surprise for a television cartoon of this vintage, 'Star Trek: The Animated Series' was drawn and broadcast at a 4:3 (1.33:1) aspect ratio. Much like the Blu-rays for 'Star Trek: The Original Series' and 'Star Trek: The Next Generation', CBS Films has opted to preserve the original composition. Episodes are pillarboxed in the center of the 16:9 high-def frame with black bars on the sides.

One episode of the series, 'More Tribbles, More Troubles', previously appeared in high definition video as a bonus feature in the ' Star Trek: The Original Series – Season 2 ' Blu-ray collection. The copy there was covered in dirt and debris, some of which may have been artifacts of the original production. At the time, it was not uncommon in animation (especially quickly-produced television animation) for dirt and hairs to get embedded between the cel layers during photographic compositing and wind up a permanent part of the image. Before watching the new Blu-rays, I expected the entire series to suffer similar problems. To my great surprise and relief, CBS Films has obviously put a lot of work into cleaning up the worst of these issues. Although some specks and damage remain, they're relatively minor and forgivable. The most distracting of the dirt has either been scrubbed from the film elements or digitally painted out.

The 1080p/AVC MPEG-4 encode is fairly crisp and colorful. The artwork itself is often limited in the amount of detail drawn into it, and some shots are outright fuzzy due to the way the animation was composited, but the series still looks decidedly better than standard definition. Film grain is present but not overwhelming. Black levels in outer space are respectable and colors are mostly vivid and appealing, though the occasional shot here or there will look faded. Some episodes also exhibit image stability issues. Keeping in mind the age and origin of the program, this is overall a fine and worthy presentation.

Audio Review

By default, the Blu-ray's primary audio option is a 5.1 surround remix encoded in lossless DTS-HD Master Audio format. Fans who consider themselves purists may opt for the original mono mix instead, though that has been relegated to lossy Dolby Digital.

The main benefit of the 5.1 remix is that the show's musical score has been expanded to stereo across the front soundstage. At its best, the music sounds bold, brassy and robust. At other times, it's a little thin.

The remainder of the audio is mostly still monaural. Surround activity is rarely noticeable. Dialogue and sound effects are very clear, but the dynamic range of the track is limited and bass never extends too deep.

In comparison, the pure mono option sounds more centered and constrained, with dialogue that's been pushed forward to dominate over the music and effects. All things considered, I think the 5.1 mixing is quite tastefully done and I found it to be the preferable experience.

Special Features

All of the bonus features found on the Blu-ray first appeared in the DVD set from 2006.

HD Bonus Content: Any Exclusive Goodies in There?

The Blu-ray has no exclusive features.

The Cutting Room Floor: What Didn't Make the Blu-ray?

The Blu-ray packaging lists a "Storyboard Gallery" that is nowhere to be found on any of the discs. Apparently, the older DVD edition had such a storyboard gallery for episode 'The Infinite Vulcan'. The DVD also came with a booklet not reproduced here.

Regardless of whether you feel that 'Star Trek: The Animated Series' deserves to be treated as part of the official 'Trek' canon or not, the show served a critical purpose in keeping 'Star Trek' alive during a period where it almost disappeared from the public consciousness. That makes it an indispensible part of the franchise's history. Although an uneven show, it's no more uneven than the last couple seasons of the original series.

The Blu-ray box set is a pretty straightforward upgrade from DVD. It doesn't offer any new bonus features, but the video quality gets a decent boost in high-definition. 'Star Trek' fans will find a lot here to savor.

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Star Trek: The Animated Series The Animated Adventures of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek Blu-ray Edition Created by Gene Roddenberry Directed by Hal Sutherland, Bill Reed Cast: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, Majel Barrett Paramount Home Entertainment Release Date: November 15, 2016

When the original Star Trek was cancelled in 1969 after three seasons, it left a void with fans who wanted NBC to renew the television series about the starship Enterprise and its crew’s five-year mission to explore new worlds and new civilizations. Audiences grew to love William Shatner ‘s Captain Kirk and his first officer, the half-human half-Vulcan Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy , but the ratings just weren’t high enough after the show was moved for the third season to a Friday night “death” slot. While Star Trek got to live on in syndication, it wasn’t until 1973 that new life was breathed into it with Star Trek: The Animated Series , produced by Filmation, the company behind Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids .

The animated series ran for two seasons, and basically served as a continuing, “further adventures” from the live-action show. A major bonus was that all of the main actors save Walter Koenig (who played Chekov) returned to voice their animated counterparts — Shatner, Nimoy, DeForest Kelley (Bones), George Takei (Sulu), James Doohan (Scotty), Nichelle Nichols (Uhura), and Majel Barrett (Nurse Chapel) — and many people on the original show’s creative team were involved, with the approval of creator Gene Roddenberry .

Though the series, which ran for 22 episodes over two seasons, was part of the Saturday Morning Cartoons line-up, its creative team treated it not as a children’s cartoon, but as an animated version of the prime-time show. And it’s obvious. Some of the same writers were hired, so the storytelling has the same feel, as does the direction. Although, since the audience for the animated Star Trek show had expanded to include kids (though teens and adults were still watching!), it allowed for some more fun and lighthearted moments in certain episodes.

Themes and storylines are revisited, such as Harry Mudd (from “Mudd’s Women” and “I, Mudd”), Tribbles (from “The Trouble with Tribbles”), and the planet from “Shore Leave.” For “Yesteryear,” Mark Lenard provides the voice of Spock’s father, Sarek (who he played in the original series) in a story that sees Spock use “The Guardian of Forever” gateway from the live-action episode “The City on the Edge of Forever” to travel back in time to his childhood.

Of note, it was in this animated series that James T. Kirk’s middle name was revealed to be Tiberius, which went on to be included in the live-action films and in the recent rebooted film franchise from J.J. Abrams. Also first seen in the animated series is the Holodeck, which was a major part of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine .

Previously available on DVD, the animated series is now being released as a 3-disc slipcovered Blu-ray box set with remastered versions of all 22 episodes — which run around 24 minutes each — along with bonus features. The episodes include options for subtitles in French, Italian, German, and Dutch, as well as English for deaf and hearing impaired. Audio options include English 5.1 DTS-HD MA and English Mono, with dubbing available in French, German, and Italian. Inside the Blu-ray disc casing is a list of episodes with their corresponding Star Date and original airdate. The set also contains 22 one-sided Collector’s Cards illustrated by Juan Ortiz that beautifully represent each animated episode; these are housed in a separate black envelope with the Star Trek insignia on it.

For anyone who loves the original Star Trek and wishes it had continued after the third season, Star Trek: The Animated Series is the logical place to go.

Special Features

There are Audio Commentary and Text Commentary tracks on select episodes. To turn these tracks on, you have to select Episodes from the main Blu-ray menu, and this will give you a list of episodes on that disc. You then have to click on each title; if there’s a commentary available, then two options will pop up on the left to either Play Episode or to play the episode with commentary on, and it includes the name of the person providing it. If there’s NO commentary for that episode, unfortunately, when you select it, it will just start playing, which is frustrating. What you can do is scroll to the episode, and then click the Right arrow on your remote, and that should make the submenu show up (it did on my player). This same functionality applies to the select episodes that include a Storyboard Gallery , which you click through screens to view (it does NOT show during playback of the episode). Aside from that minor issue with menu navigation, the commentaries are great, especially the audio ones, which really give a lot of behind-the-scenes information. Definitely watch the “More Tribbles, More Troubles” episode with the audio commentary on.

The following Special Features are housed on Disc 3, with the two video bonus features are in Standard Definitions and include options for subtitles in French, Italian, German, and Dutch, as well as English for deaf and hearing impaired.

– Drawn to the Final Frontier: The Making of Star Trek: The Animated Series (24:31) — Season 1 director Hal Sutherland, writer/associate producer D.C. Fontana, and producer Lou Scheimer, along with some of the show’s writers, talk about how the animated series came about after the original live-action series was cancelled. For the animated continuation, most of the original cast signed on to do the voice work, and this was likely the first time they were all together in the same room since their first show ended. Majel Barrett did a lot of the female voices, while James Doohan did more than just lead character Scotty. The people behind the animated show also got to give Nichelle Nichols more to do and give her room to stretch than she did on the live-action series. While the Star Trek franchise in general has a massive audience, most people don’t know about this hidden gem, or what went into making it. So this lengthy bonus feature is a definite must-watch.

– What’s The Connection? (7:12) — This is a featurette that shows the connections between the animated series and other Star Trek properties, like Spock’s childhood pet Sehlat and the Tribbles. Each of the 10 connections can be watched separately, or you can choose the “Play All” function to view them all straight through, including the Introduction. This bonus feature is very cool, and will be a treat for trivia buffs.

– Show History (2006) — This is a short text history of the animated show that you have to click through the screens to read.

Boldly continuing where Star Trek: The Original Series left off, these animated adventures chart the progress of Captain Kirk and his crew in a universe unconstrained by “real-life” cinematography! With all characters voiced by their original actors, join Kirk, Spock, Bones and the crew for 22 new adventures: to boldly go where no animation has gone before!

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Blu-ray Review: Star Trek: 55th Anniversary Original Series Steelbook Collection

October 20, 2021

Blu-ray Reviews , Reviews , Top Story

We are living in a glorious time for Star Trek. First was the recent trip into space for William Shatner. For all the years he talked about “Space… the final frontier,” the man who played Captain Kirk was only pretending he understood the enormity of the universe. Then at 90 years old, the actor was launched upward for a 10 minute ride that took him high enough to see the dark vastness that surrounds our fragile blue planet. Making it even more special for fans; this is also the 55th anniversary of Star Trek being beamed to televisions from coast to coast. To celebrate this monumental occasion, all the original episodes and the pilot episodes have been released in Star Trek: 55th Anniversary Original Series Steelbook Collection . There’s something so proper about seeing the series with metal covering the Blu-rays instead of mere plastic.

Star Trek  defined cult television on so many levels. First was after a debut season with non-spectacular ratings; fans across the country reached out to NBC to plead that the series return. Even after the show was canceled after three seasons, fans held onto the show. Books were written to continue the adventures of the U.S.S. Enterprise. Fans flocked to conventions so they could meet other Trekkies and hope for a glimpse of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. The cast reunited for a Saturday morning cartoon that captured the atmosphere of the show without turning it into animated schlock. When home video hit the marketplace, fans were able to get all the episodes on various formats including laserdisc and RCA SelectaVision. Sun Coast Video stores used to have entire wall of VHS tapes because fans were willing to pay for individual episodes. This was replaced by the DVDs that feature 2 episodes. Fans rejoiced when season sets were released on DVD. The boxsets saved shelf space. The ultimate treat arrived with the new high definition transfers on Blu-ray that allowed fans to see so much more detail. Their eyes had gone somewhere that fans used to old transfers on standard definition television had never seen. Now the Blu-ray has been upgraded with the Steelbook that make the collection look more prestigious on your shelves. The new boxset has each season in its own Steelbook with images from the episodes on the exterior.

The first season of  Star Trek  was a rush. “The Man Trap” starts off with a simple tale of Captain Kirk (William Shatner), Mr.Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley) beaming down on a planet to check on a researcher and his wife. Turns out Bones was friends with the wife. But before there’s any reuniting, a red shirted crew member turns up dead with weird sucker marks on his face and no salt in his system. “Mudd’s Women” has Harcourt Fenton Mudd (Roger C. Carmel) bringing ladies across the galaxy. But he’s not an ordinary pimp transporting human cargo. The lady have a secret that make this episode more than a PSA on the evils of prostitution. “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” introduces us to a suspicious man who has Ted Cassidy (Lurch on  The Addams Family ) as his muscle and a cute woman (Sherry Jackson). He has a plan to take over the Enterprise. “The Menagerie” is the only two parter in the series. Why? Because it allowed the series to use the pilot episode without confusing fans as to why Captain Pike (Jeffrey Hunter) is in charge of the Enterprise bridge. The original cuts of the first pilot are included as “The Cage.” “The City on the Edge of Forever” is Harlan Ellison’s masterpiece about time travel. Spock goes through a time portal to a pre-World War II America. He gets cared for by Joan Collins. Shatner has to come after his man since something happens to allow Hitler to win. It’s a heartbreaking ending.

Season two gives us “The Trouble with Tribbles.” A space station gets overwhelmed by cute furry creatures that eat everything. At the same time Kirk has to deal with those darn Klingons. The big bonus is an episode of  Star Trek: The Animated Series  that features the return of the Tribbles. “Amok Time” brings Spock back the planet Vulcan in order to marry his promised bride. Turns out the bachelor party is a bit out of control and involves a battle to the death between Spock and Kirk. “Catspaw” is a nightmare episode as Kirk, Spock and McCoy beam down on a planet that looks like an episode of  Dark Shadows  hosted by Anton LaVey. “Bread and Circuses” has a culture that has embraced a modern Roman life. The gladiator fights are now televised for the masses.

The third and final season is often maligned since cast and crew had a sense they wouldn’t get a third reprieve from the network when they got moved to Friday at 10 p.m. But the show didn’t completely give up. “Spock’s Brain” has an alien swipe his noddle. The crew has to find the logic center before Spock’s body dies. “And the Children Shall Lead” has a colony destroyed with only the children remaining. What happened? The big thing that matters is the brilliant Pamelyn Ferdin is one of the kids. “The Way to Eden” brings on the space hippies. Among those rocking their way across the galaxy with a message of love is Charles Napier ( Silence of the Lambs  &  Squidbillies ). The final original episode is a strange one in “Turnabout Intruder.” A woman swaps bodies with Kirk in order to commit havoc. It’s not the best way of ending the five year voyage in mid-flight. Does seem hard for a science fiction series to have a good final episode as witnessed by  Battlestar Galactica . Thankfully this episode was not the end of the  Star Trek  universe. On the third season boxset, you get the two cuts of the original pilot “The Cage” that was recut into the two part “The Menagerie” from season one.

Star Trek: The Original Series  holds up so well after 50 years on the air. Not only are the character iconic, but so are the actors. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, James Doohan and Walter Koenig might as well be considered for a new Mount Rushmore. And they look so much better in high definition. It’s so nice to get all 74 episodes in beyond pristine quality along with “The Cage” pilots. Star Trek: The Original Series  remains the standard to which all other science fiction TV series are measured against in both content, fandom and legacy. The series might be a bit of a shock for recent fans of the J.J. Abrams reboot movies that focus on over the top action. The series was a bit more cerebral in its approach to dealing with alien worlds. This more about high tension negotiations than massive special effects and stunt spectaculars.  Star Trek: The Original Series  will always be considered the pinnacle of science fiction on TV.  Star Trek: 55th Anniversary Original Series Steelbook Collection  is the perfect way to pass the passion onto a new generation who can appreciate how Kirk and Spock explored brave new worlds. This is how you allow a cult to endure after half a century and five years with new fans who enjoy repeatedly viewing the series.

The video is 1.33:1 full frame. The good news is that you can choose between the updated HD CGI special effects or transfers of the old special effects. There’s nothing too wrong with the old SFX although you see the limitations of making spaceship shots on a TV budget. The 1080p resolution brings out the vivid colors on the screen. If you have an older relative that introduced your to  Star Trek , get them this collection so they can see more. The audio is DTS-HD MA 7.1 to make the Enterprise computer noises wrap around you. There’s also a Dolby Digital 2.0 mix along with French and Spanish dubs. The subtitles are in English, Spanish, French and Portuguese.

Reflections on Spock Life Beyond Trek: William Shatner To Boldy Go…Season 1 The Birth of a Timeless Legacy Sci Fi Visionaries Spacelift: Transporting Trek into the 21st Century Billy Blackburn’s Treasure Chest: Rare Home Movies and Special Memories Kiss ‘N tell: Romance in the 23rd Century Interactive Enterprise Inspection Starfleet Access Billy Blackburn’s Treasure Chest: Rare Home Movies and Special Memories Part 2 (HD) Starfleet Access episode – Amok Time Creating Chekov Listening to the Actors The Trouble With Tribbles Audio Commentary by David Gerrold The Trouble With Tribbles preview trailer More Tribbles, More Troubles Episode From Star Trek: The Animated Series (HD) Audio Commentary by David Gerrold Trials And Tribble-ations From Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (HD) Trials And Tribble-ations: Uniting Two Legends Trials And Tribble-ations: An Historic Endeavor Star Trek: The Original Series On Blu-ray Starfleet Access episode – The Trouble With Tribbles Spock’s Mother “To Boldly Go…” Season Two Designing the Final Frontier BD Live and Mobile Blu enabled Preview trailers for each episode Star Trek’s Favorite Moments Writer’s Notebook: D.C. Fontana Life Beyond Trek: Leonard Nimoy Kirk, Spock & Bones: Star Trek’s Great Trio Star Trek’s Divine Diva: Nichelle Nichols Enhanced Visual Effects Credits Life Beyond Trek: Walter Koenig Chief Engineer’s Log Memoir From Mr. Sulu Captain’s Log: Bob Justman Reflections on Spock Life Beyond Trek: William Shatner To Boldy Go…Season 1 The Birth of a Timeless Legacy Sci Fi Visionaries Spacelift: Transporting Trek into the 21st Century Billy Blackburn’s Treasure Chest: Rare Home Movies and Special Memories Kiss ‘N tell: Romance in the 23rd Century Interactive Enterprise Inspection Starfleet Access Where No Man Has Gone Before (The Unaired Alternate Version of the Pilot) David Gerrold Hosts “2009 Convention Coverage” “The Anthropology of Star Trek” Comic-Con Panel 2009 “The World of Rod Roddenberry” Comic-Con 2009 Billy Blackburn’s Treasure Chest: Rare Home Movies and Special Memories Part 3 “To Boldly Go…” Season Three Collectible Trek Star Trek’s Impact

CBS Blu-Ray presents  Star Trek: 55th Anniversary Original Series Steelbook Collection . Starring: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, James Doohan and Walter Koenig. Boxset Contents: 79 episodes on 20 Blu-ray discs. Released: October 26, 2021.

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