by Edward Gross
Roddenberry’s oddest notion to date was derived from an original pitch of his called “A Question of Cannibalism.” In it, the Enterprise encounters a race of intelligent “cowlike creatures” being raised and slaughtered by ranchers for food. It wrestles with the moral quandary inherent in such a high-concept allegorical scenario. Despite Paramount and Solow’s avowed enthusiasm for the project, Roddenberry ultimately balked at the comparatively modest writer’s fees being offered by the studio and walked away from this strange little project with an aggrieved Roddenberry and Solow never talking again.
However, with the unprecedented success of Star Trek in syndication as well as the ever-growing runaway success of the conventions receiving increasing media attention, NBC was revisiting the possibility of bringing back Star Trek. The hitch: they wanted to repilot the show, but with the expensive sets long razed, Paramount wasn’t interested in producing a new pilot and incurring the massive construction costs without a full season order.
As Roddenberry once put it, “They had seventy-nine pilots already.” He elaborated on the situation to Circus, a popular music magazine at the time: “Right after the show was canceled by the network in America, Paramount, who owned the show fifty-fifty with me, decided they needed the studio space. So they tore down and broke up the sets. The costumes were sold or broken up! All that was left was seventy-nine cans of film … and memories … and fans … hundreds of thousands of them. There were rounds and rounds of meetings about reviving Star Trek. You would think that after laying an egg the size of Jupiter, the network would accept any offer … No! They wanted another pilot show. Paramount refused because the sets would cost seven hundred fifty thousand dollars to replace, too much of an investment for anything short of a whole season’s worth of new episodes. That was the stalemate.”
But Star Trek would, in fact, return to television, this time as an animated series produced by Filmation, the company responsible for such popular shows at the time as Archie’s Funhouse, Groovie Goolies, The Brady Kids, and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. Invoking a refrain that would become familiar in subsequent years, Roddenberry told SHOW Magazine, “I just didn’t want space cadets running all over the Enterprise saying things like, ‘Golly gee whiz, Captain Kirk!’ You know, like Archie and Jughead going to the moon. There are enough limitations just being on Saturday morning.”
As William Shatner observed in his book Star Trek Movie Memories, “Story editor Dorothy Fontana would assign scripts, shepherd them through a rewrite or two, and pass the completed manuscripts along to Gene, who had assumed the title of executive consultant. Gene would then read each script, perhaps make a suggestion or two, and sign off. It was that simple. Roddenberry had found the perfect vehicle. The animated Star Trek required almost none of his time, it kept his most durable brand name alive, and it served as a lightning rod, rallying the forces to cry, ‘Bring back Star Trek!’ In their minds, and this was carefully groomed by Gene at countless conventions, they won their first battle. The animated Star Trek should be seen not as a reward in and of itself, but as the first step back toward new and improved live-action Treks, be they on television or the silver screen. Over and over again, fans were urged to keep fighting.”
LOU SCHEIMER (president, Filmation)
It was 1972 or 1973 and I thought it would be a great time to do an animated Star Trek. Gene loved the idea, but there had been some problems between Roddenberry, Paramount, and NBC, and basically they weren’t speaking to each other. The root of the problem was creative control. In those days, it was difficult to deal with networks on Saturday-morning shows without them getting involved creatively.
HAL SUTHERLAND (director, Filmation)
Roddenberry was victorious and he was given carte blanche creative control.
GENE RODDENBERRY (executive consultant, Star Trek: The Animated Series)
A number of production companies approached me about an animated series, but it was important to me that I have complete creative control so that we were sure the show was done properly. That was the reason I wanted control. We had to eliminate some of the violence we might have had on in the evening shows, and there was no sex element at all. But the idea was that it would be Star Trek and not a stereotypical kids’ cartoon show.
DEFOREST KELLEY (actor, “Dr. Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy”)
I questioned it at the time when Gene said he was going to do it. I thought it was the death blow. Gene said, “No, I don’t feel that way at all. I think it’s important to keep some form of Star Trek alive and in the minds of people.”
DOROTHY FONTANA (associate producer, Star Trek: The Animated Series)
When Gene approached me to do the show, he asked me if I would like to come on as story editor and producer. Since I wasn’t a part of another regular staff at the time, I decided to do it. I had not worked in animation, which I do enjoy, so I had a good time on the show. I left after the first season because I wanted to move on to something else and not get stuck in animation. The business is funny. If you stay too long in one thing, people start to buttonhole you there and say, “You can’t do anything else,” regardless of all your other credits.
FRED BRONSON (publicist, NBC Television)
We would announce the fall schedule in May, so I knew in September of 1973 we would debut the animated series. That whole summer I was in touch with Filmation and Lou Scheimer and [his partner] Norm Prescott. Dorothy had an office at Filmation. She was the showrunner. Gene would read the scripts, but she was running the show.
DOROTHY FONTANA
It takes three months to do an animated half hour, which is not a half hour, it’s twenty-one minutes, and that’s a lot of time. That is far more time than an active production company will be spending. If you’re hurrying with live action, it would take—at minimum—six weeks. We’d like to have more time, but you can do it in six weeks. Three months is different. It’s twice that, and it has to be done by hand. Everything was done by hand, except that they could Xerox the cells’ backgrounds and some of the animated pieces. If allowed, we could draw any type of alien we wanted, because we didn’t have to worry about whether the makeup looked right, just does it look right on a cell? We could have any kind of background we wanted, which was nice because we didn’t have to worry about the cost of the set. You could say Rome burned and they could draw it.
HAL SUTHERLAND
Filmation was extremely busy and Roddenberry never knew when to quit. At one point on the first episode, we had just three days to start production and meet our deadline, and Gene kept pushing for improvements. I finally said, “Gene, we’re locked into the deadline, we’ve got to do this!” To his credit, he stepped back and said, “Okay, we’re done.”
DOROTHY FONTANA
I had an office at Filmation, and I was in the same building where the animation was done. Unlike many companies, they didn’t farm out their work to foreign countries. Everything was done in-house, and the artists and recording studio were all together.
FRED BRONSON
I went over to Filmation a lot. We would go and watch each episode, and Lou was just the best. I was a network publicist, but I was a kid. I was twenty-four years old. But he treated me like an equal, which I really appreciated. I set up interviews with him and Norm. They took great care of us when the Broadcast Standards guy, Ted Cortez, and I would go have lunch at Filmation and watch an episode.
I’ll never forget, we were watching an episode and there’s this scene with McCoy with his back to camera, and you can see a yellow stream coming out of the lower part of his body. We’re onto the next thing, and I said, “Wait, what did we just see?” And Ted says, “I don’t know.” I said, “I think we should go back.” And, sure enough, McCoy’s peeing. This is animated, this is not a blooper, this was put in on purpose. Then they all cracked up and said, “We just put it in for you to see if you would catch it.” But Ted was really concerned it would end up on the air, so he made sure it did not. It was very funny.
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p; LOU SCHEIMER
Dorothy and her writers wrote the scripts, Gene would offer his input, and then it was storyboarded.
DAVID GERROLD (writer, “More Tribbles, More Troubles,” “Bem”)
Roddenberry started out by saying he was going to be personally involved in every script, but as time wore on, he didn’t have the strength to continue. Gene didn’t write any of the scripts himself. The real problem was that Gene was having some difficulties at the time and he couldn’t always remember what he’d previously said about a story; so from one draft to the next, he was always changing direction. His notes on “Bem” were very confusing, and he added elements that I felt pulled the story way off its original premise. When in doubt, Gene always had Kirk get into a fight with God.
HAL SUTHERLAND
After reading the scripts, I’d create instructions for the animators, working from storyboards. More often than not, I’d work well into the night, sometimes at my office, sometimes in my dining room at three a.m.
FRED BRONSON
I wrote a lot of press releases, I did a lot of interviews, I wrote feature stories that went out to the press. I gave this show a lot of attention, which obviously I thought it deserved.
DOROTHY FONTANA
We did not write our scripts as kiddie shows. We were writing for the Star Trek audience, and we did not think they were twelve-year-olds, so we tried to keep the quality of the show in the first year. Second year, I didn’t have anything to do with it, so I don’t know. I do know that they did most of the scripts we rejected in the first year, but, again, I had no say in this.
FRED BRONSON
I went to the first recording session where the cast showed up. I was there with an NBC photographer and wrote a story about it. I treated the animated Star Trek like it was a prime-time series.
LOU SCHEIMER
People are surprised that you record the actors’ voices before you start animating. Everyone thinks the voices are added later, but the animator wouldn’t know how to do it. He needs to hear the voices before he knows what the emotion is. So we’d record the voices from the storyboards, which are basically illustrated bibles. Then we’d do the full animation. And everything was done by hand. There were no computer graphics, and we did a lot of stock scenes of the characters walking and talking. We reutilized that material in different settings and different combinations.
In her autobiography, Beyond Uhura, actress Nichelle Nichols said of the animated series, “Far from a ‘kiddie’ show, the animated series was quite good, with many of the scripts written by the same writers who had worked on the original series, all under the supervision of Gene and D. C. Fontana. The producers immediately signed up Bill and Leonard to voice their characters, but planned to hire other voice-over actors to provide everyone else’s. This was not intended as a slight to any of us; it was just cheaper and made the most business sense. Bill saw nothing wrong with this plan and agreed to it. Leonard, however, asked, ‘Where are George and Nichelle and the others?’ When he was told that they did not have us, he replied, ‘Well, then you don’t get me.’ It was only Leonard’s deep sense of fairness that kept the classic crew together for that show. In June 1973 we reunited once again, and it was great to be working together as a team. I thought some of the scripts were quite good and in one—at last—Uhura got to take command of the ship.”
LEONARD NIMOY (actor, “Mr. Spock”)
We started to read through two or three scripts and I said, “Where are George and Nichelle?” You know, just out of curiosity. I thought, “Maybe they’re out of town and they’re doing what I was promised I could do later, if necessary, which was to record from out of town.” I would go to a local recording studio in Boise or anyplace, wherever it was, and record my dialogue and send the tape back by mail. Then I found out they were not being hired. That’s when I took my stand. Not only had they not been hired, but their characters were written in the show and were being played by other people. Their images would be on the screen and you would see an image of Nichelle and you would see an image of George Takei, but other people would be hired to play the voices. I was appalled. How could they do this?
FRED BRONSON
That’s true. Leonard did come to their rescue. It’s Saturday morning. It’s a half-hour show and I don’t think it was meant to be cruel or malicious. They had a budget. But he stood up and they got them.
WALTER KOENIG (writer, “The Infinite Vulcan”)
I was upset with the way I found out that I wasn’t a part of the show—at a convention. Everybody thought someone else had told me apparently. Dorothy thought Gene had, Gene thought Dorothy had. To save money, Filmation wanted Majel to do Uhura’s voice also and Jimmy to do Sulu’s voice since in cartoons at the time you got paid one check to do two characters’ voices. To Leonard’s credit, he said he would not do the series unless they hired George and Nichelle since they had been there from the beginning.
JAMES DOOHAN (actor, “Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott)
I think the show was ordinary. It was ordinarily drawn. It was kind of fun doing it because I did three characters and in ten of them I did four, and I pushed for that because once you did more than three, they had to double your pay. Strangely enough, I didn’t use any accents. I just changed the tone of my voice. It was kind of like being back in radio again, and we made a little money. We certainly hadn’t made any on the live-action series, because the residuals ran out in April 1971. The unions remedied it because of Star Trek, absolutely. They never thought any show would run like Star Trek has run.
LOU SCHEIMER
De Kelley was one of the sweetest human begins I ever met, and Jimmy Doohan was highly versatile. Jimmy worked with Filmation again on Jason of Star Command. On Star Trek, Jimmy and Majel Barrett did a lot of voices for us.
MAJEL BARRETT (actress, “Christine Chapel”)
It’s like seeing a caricature of yourself. I was the wind, the trees, a mountaintop, and anything that spoke. It was very imaginative. You almost couldn’t give a bad performance.
LEONARD NIMOY
Frankly, I never really felt any sense of gratification doing it or a real sense of the communion that we had when we did the show in the flesh. For me, it was rather an exercise. Reporting to a recording studio during an occasional free moment in L.A., or in some Midwestern recording studio, doing your lines on tape and saying, “Thanks, fellow!” and walking out to the car was nowhere near as gratifying as acting in three dimensions. There were moments, but nothing spectacular.
One of the strengths of the series—which ran for only twenty-two episodes from 1973 to 1974—is the fact that the scripts were far more literate than anything else on Saturday morning, many of them having been created by writers from the live-action series. Helping in this area was the fact that there was a Writers Guild strike at the time, thus freeing many live-action writers to work on the animated show, which wasn’t covered by a WGA contract. The series was honored with an Emmy in 1973 for Best Children’s Program.
ROD RODDENBERRY (son of Gene Roddenberry)
I had never watched the animated series; I dismissed it as nonsense without ever seeing it. But the caliber of the stories was on par and even better than a number of TOS episodes. The animation, of course, was terrible. But storywise, for what they had to work with, it was phenomenal. I like to think of it as the fourth and fifth year of the voyage.
DOROTHY FONTANA (writer, “Yesteryear”)
“Yesteryear” resulted from my looking back at the things we had done on the series and remembering the time portal from “The City on the Edge of Forever.” I thought we could use that for a legitimate trip, but then have something happen so that Spock has to return to Vulcan to his childhood. We could probe into these characters and see the beginning of some of the trouble with Spock and Sarek, Amanda’s problems back then, and part of what made Spock Spock. I had wanted to see Vulcan in “Journey to Babel” with a matte shot, but it got cut out. So with the script for “Yesteryea
r,” I went back to the description from that script and said, “Let’s do this now.” I wanted to see a city with parkways and trees with growing things, and with unique spires. And we achieved that with animation.
LOU SCHEIMER
A pet’s death had never been done on a children’s program, but it was in “Yesteryear,” and it was touching and provocative. Dorothy was instrumental in making it so creative.
DOROTHY FONTANA
I felt strongly about dealing with the death of a pet, in this case Spock’s sehlat [a large teddy bear with fangs, as it was described in the show]. It was a very serious thing for kids. We were trying to put across a lesson to children, that when it comes time for an animal to die, if he must go, it should be with dignity.
MARC DANIELS (writer, “One of Our Planets Is Missing”)
Gene Roddenberry encouraged me to write this episode of the animated series. I have to admit that it was fun to do some writing rather than just directing.
DAVID GERROLD
My two script ideas had been pitched to the third season of the original series. Surprisingly, nothing was cut. In fact, the animated scripts were almost as long as the live-action scripts, but they played faster as animation, which provided the chance to do the stories in depth. The only thing we didn’t do was give Kirk a love affair in every episode. That gave us an extra twenty minutes per episode for more story and more action.
During third season of the original series, I went to Fred Freiberger and had been developing a thing called “Bem.” When Freiberger said he didn’t like “Tribbles,” I said, “Well, Gene said he wanted a sequel,” and he said that he had no interest in it. So I offered “Bem,” which had to do with a practical joker, which he also didn’t like. We did do the animated version of “Bem,” but it was nowhere where we wanted it to be because, again, Gene kept rewriting it. He’d read something and say, “No, I don’t think so,” and he’d give Dorothy a memo saying, “Change it,” because he wouldn’t let you write the story you wanted to write. You had to write the story that he wanted you to write. Yet here’s a guy who says, “I’m doing a show where you can write any story that you want to write.” That’s a great deal of frustration.
