Star Trek Thoughts: More Tribbles, More Troubles
There's just one episode of "The Original Series" on one of the Blu-Ray discs in the second season Star Trek collection. A partial explanation for this might be that "The Trouble With Tribbles" is augmented not just with "bonus content" but two follow-up episodes from later series. Before I bought the Blu-Ray sets I had watched my way through two "Best of" DVDs, one of which had the original episode on it, and as for Deep Space Nine's thirtieth anniversary time-travel episode I can remember having seen it years before. In between them, though, I was interested for my own reasons in seeing one of the animated episodes from 1973...
In trying to contemplate what state animation had wound up in by that year, I did have to confront that I do still have many things to know. With what little I do know about animation just then, though, I can suppose an "animated Star Trek" could have seemed at once a standout work in a time long past Hanna-Barbera's prime-time cartoons and just another dismissible "cartoon versions of actual people" Saturday morning show, a sign Star Trek was starting to be something more than just "that space show that used to be on" and the sort of thing "Trekkies" might tune into out of idle curiosity while still sure the show could be brought back to actual live action. That just about all of the original cast had been brought back to do their own voice work was significant, but I did wonder a tiny little bit about criticisms of "celebrity voice acting" in some more recent productions. I'd already known James Doohan was the go-to guy for extra voices, Scotty's voice being just one of the ones he tried out at the first audition, and also that the person at Filmation who chose paints was colour-blind, as evidenced by the uniformly pink tribbles.
The show not being able to use the actual theme from the original series seemed a weakness, but some of the music in the episode itself didn't sound half bad to me even as I wondered how often it would have recurred in the episodes that followed. The animation itself was indeed "limited" and the stock angles were already getting familiar by the end of the episode, but there I thought it likely Filmation wouldn't have had the overseas "in-betweeners" now relied on. In any case, there was a not altogether sedate sort of space battle (although the "robot freighters" the Enterprise was escorting did make me think a bit of other "nobody ever dies in a cartoon" moments); I wondered about the Enterprise and the Klingon ship both "firing off-screen" and then remembered some are quick to point fingers at visual science fiction being dodgy when it comes to scale.
I did also, it's true, remember the original Space Battleship Yamato was made in Japan the next year, but actual intersection between the two shows might not have happened; by the time "Star Blazers" showed up on this side of the Pacific in the wake of Star Wars, Star Trek was getting back to live action. I'm aware the rest of the Star Trek animated series is available on DVD, but also of how selective I've been with these Blu-Ray sets. It was in its own way informative, anyway.
This entry was originally posted at http://krpalmer.dreamwidth.org/211044.html. Comment here or there (using OpenID) as you please.
In trying to contemplate what state animation had wound up in by that year, I did have to confront that I do still have many things to know. With what little I do know about animation just then, though, I can suppose an "animated Star Trek" could have seemed at once a standout work in a time long past Hanna-Barbera's prime-time cartoons and just another dismissible "cartoon versions of actual people" Saturday morning show, a sign Star Trek was starting to be something more than just "that space show that used to be on" and the sort of thing "Trekkies" might tune into out of idle curiosity while still sure the show could be brought back to actual live action. That just about all of the original cast had been brought back to do their own voice work was significant, but I did wonder a tiny little bit about criticisms of "celebrity voice acting" in some more recent productions. I'd already known James Doohan was the go-to guy for extra voices, Scotty's voice being just one of the ones he tried out at the first audition, and also that the person at Filmation who chose paints was colour-blind, as evidenced by the uniformly pink tribbles.
The show not being able to use the actual theme from the original series seemed a weakness, but some of the music in the episode itself didn't sound half bad to me even as I wondered how often it would have recurred in the episodes that followed. The animation itself was indeed "limited" and the stock angles were already getting familiar by the end of the episode, but there I thought it likely Filmation wouldn't have had the overseas "in-betweeners" now relied on. In any case, there was a not altogether sedate sort of space battle (although the "robot freighters" the Enterprise was escorting did make me think a bit of other "nobody ever dies in a cartoon" moments); I wondered about the Enterprise and the Klingon ship both "firing off-screen" and then remembered some are quick to point fingers at visual science fiction being dodgy when it comes to scale.
I did also, it's true, remember the original Space Battleship Yamato was made in Japan the next year, but actual intersection between the two shows might not have happened; by the time "Star Blazers" showed up on this side of the Pacific in the wake of Star Wars, Star Trek was getting back to live action. I'm aware the rest of the Star Trek animated series is available on DVD, but also of how selective I've been with these Blu-Ray sets. It was in its own way informative, anyway.
This entry was originally posted at http://krpalmer.dreamwidth.org/211044.html. Comment here or there (using OpenID) as you please.