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Why it's the Second Greatest ST series after TOS

posted 12 years ago by gavbrown01
2 replies | jump to latest

1) They got all the original actors to voice-over their characters.
2) Even though 70s Saturday morning animation was limited by today's standards, they did a good job.
3) The stories used the freedom of animation to stretch the boundaries of what could be told onscreen. It wasn't wimpy. For example, the very first episode features the Enterprise encountering a 300-million year old spaceship which was destroyed under mysterious circumstances. A very spooky ep!
4) It introduced really cool sci-fi effects. It is this series which introduced the holodeck, which appeared again in TNG. It also had a really cool other effect: the "Life Belt," which allowed you to go to a vacuum environment and have this yellow force field around you which allowed you to live.
5) The music was different from TOS and good. Every other ST series since the original has just sucked, music-wise, but not this one: the theme song was exciting, the incidental music was appropriate: when there was mysteriousness going on, the music was spooky; when there was battle happening, the music was military.
6) The reason TOS has survived to this day is simple: it had a quality of human pathos, that is, the stories had a quality which transcended being merely stories and spoke to the universal human condition which we all experience today. This series did as well, and this is the single most important reason why it is the second greatest series in the ST next to TOS, the greatest SF series to date.

[–] mxb2001 11 years ago

Right on. I've not seen all the episodes but I did read all the adaptations by Foster. The animation was quite sophisticated I read. Unfortunately it ddidn't come across that way because it looked a bit jerky. But the quality of the painting was as excellent as reported. As you said a lot of very interesting ideas were premiered in this series. The holodeck, the life belts, the aqua shuttle, the automatic bridge defense system. The plots were also quite novel. One episode was part of Larry Niven's Slaver stories in fact.

Best thing of course was that it was set in the same universe as the original and made only a short while after.

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01/01/01

[–] Doctor_Mabuse1 11 years ago

1. Voices of Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley, etc.
2. It's Kirk, Spock and Bones!
3. First-class stories and scripts.
4. Good draughtsmanship in depiction of original cast members and Enterprise.
5. Excellent audio production; stands up as good audio drama when heard without visuals.
6. It's truly Season 4 of Classic Trek!

(I could have done without Mudd, though.)

Doctor Mabuse, Evil Genius, King of Crime