by Tim Gordon
Star Trek: The Animated Series did something that would become essential to the survival of Star Trek: it brought the Enterprise back.
The Animated Series Proved Star Trek Wasn’t Finished
When Star Trek: The Animated Series premiered in 1973, four years had passed since NBC canceled The Original Series.
The Enterprise was gone from television.
But Star Trek wasn’t.
Syndication was introducing Kirk, Spock, McCoy and their crew to viewers who had missed the original broadcasts, while a growing fan community was keeping Gene Roddenberry’s universe alive beyond its three-season network run.
Then something remarkable happened.
The voyage resumed.
The official Star Trek: The Animated Series archive revisits the animated adventures that returned Kirk, Spock and the Enterprise to television after the cancellation of the original series.
Animation returned the USS Enterprise to television with many members of the original cast providing their voices, including William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan, George Takei and Majel Barrett.
For audiences discovering Star Trek in reruns, the series offered something that had seemed increasingly unlikely.
New adventures.
And although its animated format initially suggested a smaller continuation, The Animated Series quickly demonstrated that animation could actually make the Star Trek universe larger.
Animation Removed the Walls Around the Enterprise
The original Star Trek had been limited by the realities of 1960s television production.
Alien worlds had to be constructed on soundstages. Creatures had to be created with costumes and makeup. Starships required physical models. Every extraordinary idea eventually encountered a very ordinary question:
Can we afford to put that on television?
Animation changed the equation.
Star Trek: The Animated Series could imagine environments, creatures and civilizations that the production realities of 1960s live-action television had placed beyond reach.
Suddenly, alien environments could become stranger. Non-humanoid life could appear without requiring someone inside a costume. The Enterprise could visit worlds that would have strained the budget of the live-action series.
The crew itself could expand.
Lieutenant Arex, an Edosian navigator with three arms and three legs, joined the bridge. M’Ress, a Caitian communications officer, brought another distinctly non-human presence aboard the Enterprise.
These characters represented something Star Trek had always promised but television technology had struggled to deliver: a Federation populated by beings who did not necessarily resemble humans with altered ears, eyebrows or foreheads.
Animation made the Final Frontier look more alien.
But the stories remained recognizably Star Trek.
The Voyage Could Look Back as Well as Forward
One of the strengths of The Animated Series was its willingness to reconnect with ideas introduced during the original voyage.
One of the strengths of Star Trek: The Animated Series was its willingness to reconnect with ideas introduced during the original voyage.
That becomes especially clear in “Yesteryear.”
Written by D.C. Fontana, the episode sends Spock into his own past and explores his childhood on Vulcan, his relationship with his parents and the painful conflict between his human and Vulcan identities.
It expanded a character audiences already knew while deepening Vulcan culture in ways the franchise would continue exploring for decades.
Other episodes pushed outward.
“The Slaver Weapon,” written by science-fiction author Larry Niven, brought his Kzinti into the Star Trek universe.
“The Magicks of Megas-tu” ventured into territory involving magic, religion and humanity’s history.
“The Counter-Clock Incident” gave Robert April, identified as an earlier captain of the Enterprise, an onscreen place in the mythology.
And “More Tribbles, More Troubles” returned to one of The Original Series’ most beloved comic creations.
The series wasn’t merely repeating old adventures.
It was beginning to do something Star Trek would eventually become extraordinarily good at:
building upon its own history.
The Original Crew Got One More Mission
There is another reason The Animated Series matters.
Seven years after “The Man Trap” introduced Star Trek to television audiences, Kirk, Spock and the Enterprise were once again exploring the Final Frontier.
It reunited much of the original Enterprise crew before the feature films did.
Star Trek: The Animated Series gave those familiar characters new missions while preserving the relationships that had made the original Enterprise crew work.
Kirk remained captain.
Spock remained at his side.
McCoy still bristled at Spock’s logic.
Scotty still kept the Enterprise functioning.
Uhura and Sulu remained at their stations.
The familiar voices created a bridge between the television series that had ended in 1969 and the cinematic revival still years away.
That continuity also allowed characters who had sometimes been underserved by the original series to receive additional opportunities.
In “The Lorelei Signal,” Uhura assumes command when the male members of the Enterprise crew become incapacitated, giving Nichelle Nichols’ character an authority the live-action series rarely allowed her to exercise.
Moments like that make The Animated Series more than a historical curiosity.
It became another laboratory for what Star Trek could become.
Twenty-Two Episodes Helped Keep the Future Alive
The Animated Series lasted two seasons and only 22 episodes.
That sounds like a footnote beside a franchise that would eventually encompass hundreds of television episodes and multiple generations of characters.
But its position in the history of Star Trek is considerably larger than its episode count.
Star Trek: The Animated Series became an unlikely bridge between the original television phenomenon and the franchise that would eventually emerge from it.
It arrived during the wilderness between the cancellation of The Original Series and the eventual release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
There was no guarantee that another live-action Star Trek television series would ever exist.
There was no Next Generation waiting around the corner.
No Picard.
No Sisko.
No Janeway.
No Burnham.
What existed was a canceled television series that refused to disappear and an animated continuation demonstrating that its universe still contained stories worth telling.
The voyage was becoming larger than the medium that had created it.
That would prove enormously important.
Decades later, Star Trek would return to animation with Lower Decks and Prodigy, two very different series that again demonstrated how animation could explore corners of the universe that live action might approach differently.
The franchise would eventually return to animation with series including Lower Decks and Prodigy, extending a storytelling tradition that began with the Enterprise’s animated voyages.
What seemed like an unusual detour in 1973 now looks more like an early glimpse of the franchise’s adaptability.
The Voyage Continued
The Original Series created Star Trek.
The Animated Series helped prove it could continue.
That distinction matters.
The Enterprise had survived cancellation.
Its actors had returned to their characters.
Its universe had expanded.
Its mythology had grown.
And its audience had demonstrated that the voyage didn’t have to end simply because a network had decided the television series was over.
The next great transformation would take Star Trek somewhere even bigger.
The Enterprise would move from television screens to movie theaters.
Eventually, another captain would sit in the center chair of another Enterprise, proving that even Kirk and Spock were not the limits of what Star Trek could become.
But before the movies, before Picard and before the franchise grew into generations of interconnected stories, there were 22 animated adventures quietly keeping the Enterprise in motion.
The television series had ended.
The voyage continued.
Continue the Voyage
← Previous: The Original Series: Where the Voyage Began
Explore the Hub: Star Trek 60 | Celebrating 60 Years of the Final Frontier
Upcoming → The Next Generation: A New Enterprise for a New Generation | September 11
TheFilmGordon’s Star Trek 60 celebration continues throughout September with new stories exploring the voyages, captains, crews, starships, worlds, adversaries and ideas that have shaped the Final Frontier.
