After writing that most of the Star Trek animated episodes seemed to have a direct tie to an original series episode¹, I was interested to see that most of the next set of episodes (from the late first season and second season) are more stand-alone. The last episode of the show, “The Counter-Clock Incident,” was a little bit surprising, though. There was a mention of the planet Babel (from “Journey to Babel”), and then immediately the episode introduces Robert April, first captain of the Enterprise. This is a major connection to the rest of Star Trek—or was it?

My years of Trek fandom had cemented this character and his background into my mind, so it took me a moment to remember that, in fact, this episode is the only place where Robert April is ever mentioned, let alone appears on-screen. As a kid, I had read so many Star Trek reference books and novels that of course I knew that Robert April was first captain of the Enterprise, before Christopher Pike and before James T. Kirk.

Amusingly, when I heard Robert April speak, I immediately identified his voice with the character. As with most of the male “guest stars” on the animated series, the character was voiced by James Doohan². One of the Star Trek novels that April appears in was Final Frontier, by Diane Carey. As it happens, I used to have a cassette tape with the audiobook version of this novel, which was read by—wait for it—James Doohan.

Finished the second disc, so now I’m at episode 12, more than half way through the series. I’ve been enjoying it; like the original show, but more cartoon-like in appearance.

One thing that is notable compared to the original: There are far more internal references. Of the dozen shows I’ve seen so far, three are direct sequels to a TOS episode (“Yesteryear” from “The City on the Edge of Forever”, “More Tribbles, More Troubles” from “The Trouble with Tribbles”, “Once Upon a Planet” from “Shore Leave”), and a bunch others feature direct references or characters from TOS episodes (e.g., Robert Wesley from “The Ultimate Computer” in “One of Our Planets Is Missing”, the Eugenics Wars reference in “The Infinite Vulcan”, Harry Mudd in “Mudd’s Passion”, Kor from “Errand of Mercy” in “The Time Trap”).

In part, this is so because the original series was so lacking—by modern standards, at least—in continuity. I suspect, though, that it is not so much that the animated show’s creaters felt differently about episodic television, but more that they were excited to be working on Star Trek (by then a pop icon). Tying back to the original series as often as possible was probably fun, and helped “prove” their Trek-ness. Also, since Trek was well-known by 1973, many of the viewers probably enjoyed the back-references.

On a side note: The TAS DVDs are, unfortunately, similar to the other series’ box sets in their annoyance factor. All the Star Trek DVDs I’ve watched so far make you sit and wait for several minutes after inserting the disc before you can select an episode and watch it. I believe the first four DVD series (TOS, TNG, DS9 and Voyager) were all produced basically at the same time, and are similar in form. Since TAS was just released this past year, I had hopes they would have made the discs more usable. Instead, they added previews for other shows. This does not bode well for the Enterprise DVD sets, also produced more recently than the others but before The Animated Series

I finished watching Star Trek: Voyager last week. Overall, I enjoyed the final few seasons of the show, which I had never seen before (except for the series finale, which was not spectacular). Even the parts of Voyager I had seen before I thought were much better than I remembered them. Perhaps I had lowered expectations, or less to compare it with. When Voyager was on the air the first time around, I was watching it along with Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5, both superior shows. So maybe the lack of direct comparison helped it.

I’m now watching the Star Trek animated series. It’s out of order, but it was just released on DVD recently, so wasn’t around when I finished the original series almost two years ago. I had seen a couple of these episodes before (Nickelodeon used to show them), but long enough ago that I don’t remember anything about them. It took a few episodes to get used to the animation—the episodes feel very slow and static (even though they’re only half an hour long), because there’s not much motion in most scenes. Presumably this was to save money when drawing the animation.

I was surprised that both the episodes I had heard of and was looking forward to seeing (“Yesteryear” and “More Tribbles, More Troubles”) were on the first disc, so I have no idea what to expect from the rest. There are only 22 half-hour episodes, so it won’t take long to find out.