Star Trek: The Animated series...

[Raven Crowking]

I remember seeing it first run. It was definately ahead of it's time in terms of animation scripting. Too bad it didn't have more than one season.

Good thing there were two, then:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Star_Trek:_The_Animated_Series_episodes

 

[Richards]

One of the episodes (the one with the Kizin, "The Slaver Weapon") is a pretty straightforward adapatation of a classic Larry Niven story "The Soft Weapon".

This is also the reason the kzinti are a race in the Star Fleet Battles game.

Johnathan

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

What they ought to consider is to take the sountrack or at least the vocals from the animated series and supplying better animation. THAT I'd buy.

 

[trancejeremy]

I dunno - I'm not saying the animation is great technically, but I think it's got a certain style to it that I like.

But it being animated really does open up the stories to be far more science-fictiony than the live action show. Besides having actual alien looking aliens (since they don't have to be guys in suits or with makeup), they can visit very strange planets, have things like flying aliens/monsters, a lot more action scenes, etc. (Yeah, they could do that with CGI, but cheap CGI looks terrible, and out of place compared to other stuff).

Number of seasons aside, it's a shame they only made 22 episodes of this. I really think they should consider making new ones. I noticed that the show seems much more open to giving the lesser characters a starring role as well - Uhura gets a lot more screen time, Sulu too. (Chekov seems to have disappeared, though)

 

[Mouseferatu]

(Chekov seems to have disappeared, though)

That would be because Walter Koenig didn't participate in the animated series.

 

[trancejeremy]

That would be because Walter Koenig didn't participate in the animated series.

Well, yeah. I think that was sort of the point of them adding 2 new crew members - to replace the crew roles of actors they couldn't afford to hire to reprise their role (Besides Chekov, Rand and Leslie and that annoying guy). However they did have others do the voices of some of the other lesser characters, like Scotty doing the voice of Kyle (though they added a mustache, presumably to explain why he sounded different )