Episodes
The 22 episodes of TAS were spread out over two brief seasons, with copious reruns of each episode. Most were directed by Hal Sutherland.
All the episodes of this series were novelized by Alan Dean Foster and released in ten volumes under the Star Trek Logs banner. Initially, Foster adapted three episodes per book, but later editions saw the half-hour scripts expanded into full novel-length stories.
Star Trek: The Animated Series was the only Star Trek series not to feature a cold open ("teaser") and started directly with the title sequence (although some overseas versions of the original live action series, such as that run by the BBC in the U.K. in the 1960s and 1970s, ran the teaser after the credits).
The writing in the series benefited from a Writers Guild of America, East strike in 1973, which did not apply to animation. A few episodes are especially notable due to contributions from well-known science fiction authors:
- "More Tribbles, More Troubles" was written by David Gerrold as a sequel to his famous episode "The Trouble With Tribbles" from the original series. Here Cyrano Jones is rescued from the Klingons, bringing with him a genetically-altered breed of tribbles which do not reproduce but do grow extremely large. (It is later discovered that these are really clusters of tribbles who function as a single tribble, and it is decided that the large numbers of smaller tribbles are preferable to the larger ones.) The Klingons, due to their hatred of tribbles, are eager to get Jones back because he stole a creature they created: a predator called a "glommer" that feeds on tribbles. This episode was originally written with the intention of being an episode of the live-action original series during the third season, but this was vetoed by Fred Freiberger who wanted serious sci-fi episodes instead, stressing that Star Trek is not a comedy.
- "Yesteryear" is a time-travel episode in which Mr. Spock uses "The Guardian of Forever", a time gateway from the original series episode "The City on the Edge of Forever", to travel to his own childhood past. This is the only animated Trek episode written by original series and later Next Generation writer D. C. Fontana. This was the first actual appearance of Spock's pet sehlat, first mentioned in "Journey to Babel" and finally named I-Chaya in this episode. One element from Yesteryear that has become canon by depiction within Star Trek: The Original Series is the Vulcan city of ShiKahr, depicted in a background scene wherein Kirk, Spock and McCoy walk across a natural stone bridge (first depicted in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock) in the remastered "Amok Time". Elements of Spock's childhood from "Yesteryear" are also referenced in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Unification".
- Larry Niven's "The Slaver Weapon", adapted from his own short story "The Soft Weapon". It includes some elements from his Known Space mythos such as the Kzinti and the Slavers. This is the only Kirk-era TV or movie story in which Kirk didn't appear. This episode also has the distinction of being the only exception to the animated episodes usually showing nobody dying or being killed onscreen.
- "The Magicks of Megas-tu", by Larry Brody, sends the Enterprise to the center of the galaxy. Its crew find themselves befriended by a devil-like alien named Lucien, whom they must defend against accusations that he has brought evil to the world of Megas-tu.
Read more about this topic: Star Trek: The Animated Series
Famous quotes containing the word episodes:
“Twenty or thirty years ago, in the army, we had a lot of obscure adventures, and years later we tell them at parties, and suddenly we realize that those two very difficult years of our lives have become lumped together into a few episodes that have lodged in our memory in a standardized form, and are always told in a standardized way, in the same words. But in fact that lump of memories has nothing whatsoever to do with our experience of those two years in the army and what it has made of us.”
—Václav Havel (b. 1936)
“What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men’s existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)