Star Trek: The Animated Series - Production

Production

The series was produced by Filmation in association with Paramount Television and ran for two seasons from 1973 to 1974 on NBC, airing a total of twenty-two half-hour episodes. An early Filmation proposal for this series had children assigned to each of the senior officers as cadets, including a young Vulcan for Mr. Spock. According to interviews with Norm Prescott, Paramount offered Roddenberry a substantial sum of money to abandon creative control of the project and let Filmation proceed with their "kiddy space cadet" idea. Roddenberry refused. Filmation would later develop the idea into its own original live action program, Space Academy, in 1977.

The writers of the animated series used, essentially, the same writers' guide that was used for the live-action Star Trek: The Original Series. (A copy of the "series bible", as revised for TAS, is held in the science fiction research collection at the Samuel Paley Library, Temple University, Philadelphia.)

While the freedom of animation afforded large alien landscapes and believable non-humanoid aliens, budget constraints were a major concern and, as was typical of most Filmation productions, the animation quality was generally only fair, with very liberal use of stock shots. There were also occasional mistakes, such as characters appearing on screen who were elsewhere, or a character supposed to appear on the bridge's main viewing screen, but then appeared in front, indicating bad ordering of animation plates. These were typically isolated errors however. Occasionally, though, parts of episodes would be animated at a near-theatrical quality level.