TAS was great for what it was. Animation at the time was super cheap and outsourced, so you can't really put them blame on them for something that was pretty standard at the time.
One of the neat things about Star Trek: The Animated Series is that they were able to have crew members and aliens that were more than just humans with a couple of prosthetics. Aside from the Horta, and a couple glowing space things, basically every alien in The Original Series was a quickly painted extra.
You'd be hard pressed to find someone who says TAS was their favorite Trek, but it's probably in my top 4 Trek series.
It's my favorite for that very reason. I find myself more immersed in the world when aliens look alien. Humans with minor cranial differences just don't do it for me.
Wait until we find out that us humans look like some other species but with a
rubber prostheticprotruding chin, and male pattern baldness. Then imagine the episode where the Captain teaches a lesson to us humans about a compromise.
Aside from the Horta, and a couple glowing space things, basically every alien in The Original Series was a quickly painted extra.
How could you forget the [Alfa 177 canine](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Unnamed_non-humanoids_(23rd_century\)#Alfa_177_canine)? 😁 (and, on a more serious note, the M113 salt creature which was my introduction to Star Trek and which looked pretty awesome)
I bow to your trek knowledge
btw, your link doesn't work for me (an errant backslash), but I see it at https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Unnamed_non-humanoids_(23rd_century)#Alfa_177_canine.
Anyway, I feel I've seen the salt vampire in another sci-fi, although whether it was meant as an homage I can't say.
I only have vague memories of most of it from watching it as a kid, but recently my spouse and I decided to give it a watch one night and made it through the first 7-ish episodes. About half of the stories were "meh" but the other half were actually pretty good by TOS standards.
Mind you that's just the stories. The animation itself is definitely a limiting factor, and a lot of what happens is either very sparsely animated or they literally have characters explaining what's happening rather than fully animating the events. A weird upside of that is that most episodes are practically radio plays, and you can just listen to the audio and understand what's going on.
No Star Trek fan would claim to love them all equally. We tend to have very strong opinions about this ever since the first Kirk vs. Picard debates back in the 80s
Which one? ;)
Ha! I hadn't thought of that actually. Since some people don't like Lower Decks I guess it works for both. Or heck all three since there are Prodigy haters too.
Lower Decks is too fast paced for my older brain. I tried to get into TAS but I wasn't identifying with the characters well.
But I ADORE Prodigy and am apalled that it got cut while we continue to run Discovery.
Star Trek peaked with the show that I specifically watched when I was twelve years old. Everything else is too cheesy, tastless, tacky, or boring, but not the show that hooked me when I, specifically, was twelve years old. That's a fact.
