urban@trwspp.UUCP (04/09/84)
The animated episodes are certainly a cut above 99% of what happens on Saturday morning. Filmation is inconsistent; they can do good stuff like Trek and their limited Flash Gordon serial, but then do junk like "Space Academy," whose main virtue was that it wasn't animated. But I digress. The story editor for the animated series was D.C. Fontana, who was of course story editor for the first two seasons of the live series. When they announced the series at a Trek convention in L.A., Fontana said "we're picking up right where the series left off -- at the end of the second season." One of the episodes was an adaptation by Larry Niven of his Known Space story, "The Soft Weapon," in which the Kzinti get grafted onto the Star Trek universe. "The Soft Weapon" and "Yesteryear" were the only animated episodes in which anyone died (the Kzinti in TSW and young Spock's pet sehlat in Yy). NBC Standards and Practices have funny ideas about children's television, but that's still another story. In another episode, "The Lorelei Signal," Lt. Uhura finally takes command of the Enterprise. Nichelle Nichols once said that she tended to record her dialogue without reading the script first, since she had the character down pat. When the big moment came, it was a surprise for her, and a "blooper" tape would contain something like "Nurse Chapel, I'm assuming command of the Enterprise...? I get to take over the ship?! I'm finally taking command of the ship!!!" The Outer Limits episode in which Shatner appears casts him as an astronaut working on something called "Project Vulcan," another example of weird synchronicity to go with Dr. McCoy's previous medical incarnations. Mike