Original subtitles

- Where are we, sir? - At another place in time, I think.

Open hailing frequencies, Lieutenant.

- Message coming in, sir. - Put it on the view screen.

I've always felt it was pad of Star Trek.

And a very important part that has been long overlooked.

Oh, I thought... Yeah, I thought it would make a terrific show

for youngsters and for oldsters.

Wouldn't make any difference because you could do the same kind of stories.

It was really different and it was a pleasure to work on,

but frightening at the same time because you didn't wanna

do a lesser job than the public might expect.

Working.

One of the best things about The Animated Series

is it's like buried treasure.

It's like, you know, every fan of the original series

knows that there are those 77 episodes or however you want to count them out.

And it's as if somebody said,

"Hey, we just found this other episode that no one's ever seen before."

I think that Star Trek: The Animated Series

was really important because it kept Star Trek alive.

It gave it to a whole new generation of viewers.

It was the last iteration.

The last opportunity to play out that,

what can we do with Kirk, Spock and McCoy and the others

in an episodic sense before we went on to do the movies,

where the movies all eventually ended up in this kind of long story arc.

And at the time, you know, it was real Star Trek.

Cartoon, no cartoon.

With Shatner and Nimoy in it,

as far as I was concerned, it was real Star Trek.

None of us ever said, "Cartoon." Never.

So we were going to do Star Trek in animation.

Star Trek was produced by the company that

I was founder of, one of the founders of.

We did The Archies,

we did the first Superman show for animation, for television, we did.

We did the Batman and we did...

If it flew and had a cape

and it was painted red, white or blue, we probably did it.

I find this scientifically fascinating.

The way we became involved with Star Trek: The Series,

was actually it came right from NBC.

We got a can one day from Joe Taritero

who was Vice President of children's program there

and they'd been negotiating with Gene Roddenberry.

And they made the choice that they wanted Filmation

to produce this show, which was quite an honor,

and scared the devil out of me a little bit.

I cannot tell you how impressed I am by your splendid spirit of cooperation.

And then I got in touch with Roddenberry

who was easy to talk to, and actually he'd liked the idea,

but he said he can't do it.

He said, you know, "Paramount owns it, I own it.

"I can't do anything without them. They can't do anything without me."

I said, "Why don't you two guys talk?

"I mean, you know, sit down in a room, make a deal.

"Then we could do this thing." He said, "You know, that's a good idea."

- That seems logical. - Thank you.

Filmation, it was just a hoot.

Lou Scheimer was... I don't know how to describe Lou.

He was so enthused about focusing on,

"Let's just do fun, exciting television for Saturday morning,"

but he was also willing to do shows.

He understood better than some places

that a lot of your Saturday morning audience is not kids,

it's grownups or teenagers or you know.

People are laying around Saturday, "What's on TV?"

Dorothy Fontana, D.C. Fontana,

was introduced to us by Roddenberry

and he wanted her to do the story idea because he felt very, very comfortable.

She was an assistant of his in the live-action shows.

She was terrific.

And we all just wanted to do Star Trek, still.

We had it in our bones and... No pun, but...

I mean, in 1969 when it went off the air, we felt unfinished.

We hadn't had a chance to complete the next voyages we had in mind.

And this was one way to do it, even though we didn't get the fifth year.

I mean, that's... And then we ended up doing a show

that basically was the same as the nighttime show,

same writers in many cases, same actors obviously,

and the same audience, too.

- Bones, any opinion? - There's some resemblance.

I am inclined to agree with the Doctor, Captain.

The problem was the audience was all in their 20s and 30s

and our normal audience was like eight to ten.

They're all teenagers and children.

The way I got involved in Star Trek: The Animated Series

was that I had previously worked with Dorothy Fontana

on a show called The Sixth Sense and one day...

In the middle of a writers' strike, I was a young starving writer in my early 20s,

she called and said, "Do you wanna write an episode of Star Trek?"

Well, that was a lucky or unlucky stroke of fortune.

The Writers Guild happened to be on strike in 1973.

During those early months, I think we went for about a three-month strike.

And that meant none of the writers could write,

you know, live-action dramas or comedies, whatever they were writing,

but it did mean that we could hire them to write at least one script

for animation without their becoming a member of that union.

And so we turned to all our... Not all, but many of our Star Trek regulars

and said, "Do you wanna do this?"

Our first script was by Sam Peeples.

He had done the very first episode for the live show.

It's a starship like nothing I've ever seen.

There were these two or three ideas

I'd had for the original series that we had never done.

And so now I could do them in The Animated Series.

And one of course was the "More Tribbles, More Troubles,"

and the other was "Bem."

We got David Gerrold to do two.

We got Margaret Armen to do two, and several other people who

had wanted to write Star Trek but hadn't gotten a chance

on the original series, came in and did something.

Joyce Perry was one.

Larry Brody, who was just starting out, was another.

Meeting Gene Roddenberry was an experience all in itself

because I'd been in the business just long enough

to have encountered a lot of people who really crapped on writers.

And I'm in the office of a guy who to me is a legend,

who is the most gracious, warm, friendly, sweet guy I've ever met,

who respects everything that every writer does,

listens closely to every word I say.

And I did mostly just sat behind his shoulder

and looked at what he was doing and listened to what he was saying

and he'd make changes, changes, changes,

and then he'd make some more changes.

I don't like it at all, sir.

Nor do I, Mr. Scott, but we've got to do it.

Roddenberry was... He was great.

It was the only time that I can remember that we sold a show to a network

and the network didn't have any right to make any changes in the scripts.

And that was heaven.

Everything went past Gene, he saw it all,

but he wasn't there every day.

When he had comments, he put them in.

Otherwise, he just said, "It's fine, go for it."

And we all did the show.

I do remember one day, it was getting pretty frightening.

Lou and I talked and he says,

"Hey, if we don't get started pretty soon, you know, we're dead in the water."

And I said, "Well, I'll just see if I can tell that to Gene," you know.

So it happened, I think, the next day

and when we were going over things and I said, "Gene, I have to talk to you."

I says, "If we don't start this production this week, in the next couple of days,

"we've only got six-week-window here,

"we're not gonna make the first deadline."

He says, "That's it."

He stood up and he says, "I'm not gonna bother you anymore."

He was happy and he walked out the door and he left me.

Thrilling to work with somebody like that.

Wait a minute. There is a method to this madness.

Please elaborate, Captain.

So the first approach was, "How are we going to tell these stories?

"What form are we going to use?"

And the second one was, "Who are we going to use?"

And they opted to hire almost everybody

except for poor Walter Koenig,

but who did get a chance to write a script,

which was the beginning of his writing career.

So, you know, it wasn't all that bad.

We could barely use all the characters they had to use in the shows.

I mean, just the set characters.

Anyway, you couldn't have fit into the damn little room we were recording in.

Nice to be back aboard, sir, and fitting the room again.

The glorious thing was getting them all together for the first recording session.

I know that's of interest to the fans.

And I think it's the first time they'd all been together,

at one time, in the same room, and it was a joyous occasion.

You don't know how good it is to have you back on the Bridge,

alive and well.

We're as happy about it as you are, Jim.

I'll just tell you, I get chills up my spine any time Leonard would do Spock

because he'd just get all serious and do that Spock voice,

you know, and, "Fascinating, Captain."

Fascinating.

And he'd do that and then, of course, Shatner is just, he's very playful.

You will remind me to report my conduct to the Federation,

-won't you, Mr. Spock? - Of course, Captain.

Shatner had one thing that was immensely important to him

and that was to be true to the original show.

To make sure that we didn't do anything in our show that would...

Not really work with the bible.

It is our responsibility to take care of our own,

just as it is your responsibility to take care of yours.

He's one of the hardest working actors I've ever seen

in front of a microphone or in front of a camera.

But, you know, he'd say, "All right, we need a take,"

and he would just, "barn," just like that, first time, right up.

You know, "That was perfect, Bill, one more." And he'd do it again.

Well done, Jim.

There were some actors who did multiple roles.

Majel Barrett did.

She did a lot of the female voices.

Well, I can't find anything wrong with these instruments, Doctor.

I am Theela, the Head Female.

Hostile behavior doesn't fit its program.

Lieutenant M'Ress, I want a printout of the guidance computer's last orders.

Jimmy Doohan did a lot of voices that were...

Other than his own, obviously, as Scotty.

He was very good on other characters' voices

that we would have had to bring in different voice actors.

And Jimmy could do a wide range of not only types of voices

but types of accents.

No matter where I've traveled in the galaxy, Jim,

this bridge is more like home than anywhere else.

We will live no longer like worms crawling in the did.

Good. All hands to battle stations.

And, of course, my favorite is all the stuff that Nichelle got to do.

I'm just in love with Nichelle. That's just me.

And in the episode "Bem," she shows her range.

She gets to show Uhura being a very strong voice on the Bridge,

but then she does the voice of the alien intelligence

and there she's a whole different character.

And the range there is spectacular.

What gives you the right to intrude here?

Then in another episode Uhura says that the men are all

captured or something and they're not available.

- What are you doing? - Taking command of this ship.

"At last!" She just had so much fun with that

and that goes back to who Nichelle is.

So watching her stretch herself and grow as a performer, that was great.

Ship's Log, supplemental.

I am assuming command of the Enterprise.

Once the actors have recorded all the voices

then it can go to animation,

to actual ink and pen to be sketched out.

Storyboards were being done at the time, off the scripts.

They were doing storyboards at the same time.

So every script was storyboarded out.

Scene for scene, line for line.

Tactically well-planned.

Putting an episode together from start to finish

for our schedule was about three months.

I know the animation was six weeks allowed for that.

Animation takes a long time.

And there's a whole procedure:

You have to write it, then you have to do storyboards,

then you have to do layouts, then you have to do backgrounds,

then you have to animate it. And we would start

about six months prior to the first show going on the air

and just deliver them in time.

I mean, we were delivering wet... Well, in those days it was film.

I mean, when I say "wet film,"

we'd ship out on Friday for Saturday morning.

I mean, it was really gruesome.

Have you covered every possibility? Every factor?

The facts remain unchangeable.

You had to keep that Steamroller going

in order to make the final deadline.

That's what! was saying earlier about working with Gene,

you know, there was a certain time frame.

If we didn't start, we were gonna be late.

- Status, Mr. Spock? - All systems affirmative, Captain.

The Enterprise is on course and on schedule.

Hal Sutherland, the dear man who was our director,

was colorblind. We didn't know that.

And as a result, on Larry Niven's "The Slaver Weapon,"

his Kzinti, these are his creation.

They are eight-foot orange cats, very fierce, very predatory,

and they were flying around in a pink ship.

It will not be pleasant for her.

Which startled me when I saw it broadcast

and I immediately called Larry and apologized.

But I didn't know, until that moment, that Hal was colorblind

and probably only saw that color as a shade of gray.

- Captain, what happened? - I would rather not discuss it.

The people who work on these things are artists.

I mean, I had the joy of working

with up to 2,000 artists over the time that we were in business.

At one time we had 875 artists working for us.

And you could see your work onscreen.

Fantastic architecture.

Only an incredibly advanced race could have built it.

The show had a visual canvas that was...

It sod of incorporated the original show but it also expanded it

into this realm that couldn't be done at the time.

We could do new and different creatures that actually

still aren't being done as well as they were done in animation

because you could do anything.

And the environments, underwater.

All sorts of lovely things that we wouldn't have been able to easily do

in live-action.

You could show the most bizarre-looking aliens that,

you know, could never have been produced in the '60s or even the '70s.

I mean, you had... There was Lieutenant Arex, I guess,

the three-!imbed navigator who replaced Chekov,

who was a very interesting alien, a very cool design.

Well, in the episode "Bem,"

in my original conception of "Bem,"

which was going to be a live-action story,

I had sketched a kind of a two-pad creature that would be played by

a very sturdy, shod person who would be carrying a very shod,

shorter person on his back and then... And so you would have this character

that could then split apart into two symbiotic creatures.

And The Animated Series,

we didn't have to worry about building a costume or finding the actors.

The animators just had Bern split apart

into as many different pieces as they needed.

I mean, the first time we saw a Vulcan city

was in the episode "Yesteryear."

And then later, on Enterprise, we did...

In season 4, we did a three-episode arc that took place on Vulcan.

And we wanted to see that city again.

It was Spock's hometown and we thought,

"Well, it'd be cool to visit it before Spock came along."

So we brought that city to fife. I think it was called ShiKahr.

So The Animated Series

had a look, I think, that certainly influenced later Star Treks-.

I wish to visit the planet Vulcan, 30 Vulcan years past,

the month of Tasmeen.

Location, near the city of ShiKahr.

I had some ideas that I'd always had for years

about what Star Trek as a series should have,

so I was ready to go with them.

I decided to lead with my favorite, which was,

"Why can't the Enterprise encounter God in space?"

Gene thought that was the greatest thing he'd ever heard of.

He said, "I've been trying for years to just get that out in that way.

"I never really thought about just doing it. So all right, let's do that.

"You know, go home. We're gonna make a deal."

Well, a week later, Dorothy called me and said,

"The good news is that we're making a deal

"and you're gonna write that episode we talked about.

"The bad news is we can't use God but we can use the devil."

So it became "The Magicks of Megas-Tu,"

which was a story about a planet of devils.

Lovely primitive humans.

Can't you do anything right?

Well, the thing that we could do is

we could go anywhere and do anything we wanted to do

as long as it could be drawn.

Nowadays, you can do it with computers,

but in those days, you did it by hand and pencil and paint.

And Gene could write about or think about

going any place he wanted in the universe.

In any planet, any color, any shape, any size.

What we did have was a really good research company

that pointed out when we contradicted ourselves,

when something didn't follow.

"Remember you said this over here in this episode

"and then over in this episode you're saying something else.

"Well, it has to follow, it has to make sense.

"And they have to agree." "Okay, fine." So we did that.

We were doing Star Trek.

We were doing the Star Trek as described in the writer's guide

and the writer's guide for the animated show

was the same one we had for the live-action show, pretty much.

Something awfully familiar about it.

What do you make of all this, Spock?

Well, my take on whether or not this fits into the Star Trek legacy

is that it fits into my version of the Star Trek legacy.

I mean, I think it should.

All this argument about canon is stupid.

All this argument about canon is stupid.

It has Gene Roddenberry's' name on it.

It has William Shatner as Kirk.

It has Leonard Nimoy as Spock.

It has D. Kelley as McCoy.

It has Jimmy Doohan as Scotty.

It has Majel Barrett as Nurse Chapel.

It has Nichelle Nichols as Uhura.

It has George Takei as Sulu.

We were fortunate to be in position, in the last season of Enterprise,

as co-producers on the show

to actually take some elements from the animated show

and put it into live-action on-air continuity so it becomes canon.

And one of the best examples of that was the sehlat,

which had been seen in The Animated Series.

Mentioned in The Original Series.

It was in "Yesteryear,"

Dorothy Fontana's episode which showed that

pretty poignant glimpse of Spock's early years,

and with his pet.

And he has an adventure out in the wilds of the Forge.

And that became the episode.

"The Forge" was the name of the episode we wrote for Enterprise.

And we too included a sehlat.

Yeah, I mean, I think the first time we saw a holodeck

was on The Animated Series.

There was an episode, I believe it was called "The Practical Joker,"

where the ship's computer went a little bonkers.

It is lovely, but I'm more in the mood for a nice, quiet walk in the woods.

I did an episode called "Catwalk"

and I think there were a couple of moments

where I dropped in some references to the old show.

One where Dr. Phlox had these...

A lot of creatures in his sickbay and he had some slugs.

And we called them, in a couple different episodes,

we revealed that they were Edosian slugs.

So they were from the same planet as Lieutenant Arex.

Although, the reference I like the most was the kahs-wan ritual,

which is what young Spock was going through in "Yesteryear."

And there was a lovely little scene

between Captain Archer and T'Pol,

and the Captain makes a reference about how it's a lot like going camping

and he asked T'Pol, "Have you ever gone camping?"

She says, "Well, no, but

She tells him a little bit about the kahs-wan ritual

and how she spent all these days in the desert,

the Vulcan idea of camping.

Well, number one, I know the animated show helped the franchise

because it helped give birth...

Because they suddenly realized there was an audience out there.

I love that at the time, the LA Times reviewed it

and though it was part of a Saturday morning line-up

they said it was a Mercedes in a soapbox derby.

NBC was elated.

Just absolutely elated.

I remember getting a personal letter from them saying

how wonderful the show looked and how happy they were at the results.

I'd never heard anything like that

in all the years we'd been in business, 20 odd years.

It's the only Emmy I've ever gotten for a show.

I did 1,500 half hours or whatever it was and it really wasn't...

It should not have been given to us.

It was an Emmy for best children's show Saturday morning

and it was not really a children's show.

It was a show for the entire family

and anybody who was really a fan of the original live show.

They recognized it.

My son overheard the rehearsals and he heard it was Captain Kangaroo.

So I don't know what to say except a very, very special thanks

to my very, very, special friend, and co-producer, Norm Prescott,

and my lovely family, my wife, Jay,

my son and my daughter, Lane and Erika,

and to all those great, great people who produced for us

in the ad of animation at Filmation those wonderful shows.

Thank you very, very much.

I was pleased that it won the Emmy. It was the only Emmy we got.

Star Trek was nominated a number of times,

more in technical categories than anything else,

which always insulted us because we felt we were doing really good drama.

But I was pleased that we got an Emmy.

I was thrilled to death.

Our trip into the negative universe gave it a second life.

It gave all of us a second life.

When they were thinking that Star Trek was gone,

when the series ended, the live show,

and then all of a sudden the animated show came back

all our hopes became rejuvenated.

And to me that was important

because I think it gave us a sense of closure

that we just hadn't abruptly ended our five-year mission.

That we were still out there doing our job.

It was the further adventures. It was the fourth season

that we didn't get to do live-action, but we did get to do in a different way.

The reason why The Animated Series still holds up after all of this time

is the same reason The Original Series holds up all of this time,

-and it's stories. - Stories.

So I'm glad that, you know, almost 40 years later

we're still remembering it and honoring it.

I don't think we should forget the storytellers who worked on it.

These were the people who created the series in the first place.

Most of us were involved whether it was the writers,

the actors, Gene himself.

We were all there doing Star Trek.

Take us out of orbit, Mr. Sulu. Let's go home.

Captain, I'm picking up a message.

Go in peace. Yes. Go in peace.

You have learned much. Be proud.

You have learned much. Be proud.