I'm looking at the 3rd disc of the Star Trek Animated series today. There are only 5 shows on the disc and the stories are a good mix. Gene Roddenberry and DC Fontana were Executive Producers on the show and that helped keep the level of the scripts fairly good. Good considering that they stories aimed at kids watching saturday morning TV. The animation on the show is so-so, some average, some below average for tv production in the 70's. No CGI back then. I do like some of the location drawings. The voices of the main cast are the same as the original live action series.
The Ambergris Element was part of the 1st season. It was the 13th episode and it first aired on December 1 1973. On the Planet Argo the landing party is attacked in their aquashuttle. Kirk and Spock are knocked out and disappear. The search finally finds them 5 days later floating in the water. They are still alive but they're now water breathers. The two return to the watery world and go looking for the reason they can't live in air anymore. They find an ancient water breathing race that used to live on the surface. Eventually the guys get back to normal. Kind of a standard ST plot. There's a giant sea monster that was kind of fun but goofy.
The Slaver Weapon was written by SF writer Larry Niven and, at a suggestion by Gene Roddenberry, it's based on his short story The Soft Weapon. The story introduced the Kzinti into the Star Trek universe. There's a Slaver Stasis box on the Enterprise. The Slavers were a race that existed a billion years ago. Long gone they have left artifacts of their existance in the Statis boxes. The boxes react to other boxes and that leads the ship into a trap set by the Kzinti. The cat like creatures have been a thorn in the side of the Federation for a long time. They've fought four wars and the Kzinti have lost all of them. The kidnappers hope to find a weapon in the Stasis box and they luck right out. They want to use it to gain an advantage and get back to taking over the galaxy. They're pretty much dicks. Oh yeah, they'd also eat people if the Federation allowed them to. They tell the landing party they will be eatin' some of them real soon. Well, Kirk and Spock have a pretty good aversion to being lunch so they fight back and nearly get away. The weapon turns out to be a fairly powerful smart gun that helps out. It blows up the Kzinti when they can't tell it what the access codes are. Good thing too. It was a pretty good story and the only episode of the series that had characters being killed.
In The Eye Of The Beholder the Enterprise is investigating the disappearance of a science team on the planet Lactra VII. They find their ship orbiting the planet and beam down. Giant super intelligent slugs put the landing party into a zoo where they find the science team. Eventually Spock gets some mind contact going and things get back to normal. The super smart aliens tells Spock, come back when you're smarter, say a few hundred centuries. Kind of a repeated plot device from the original series. It was ok.
The Jihad has Kirk and Spock join a group of other aliens to retrieve a sacred object stolen from some winged humanoids. Without the holey object the war likin' bird people of that planet would go on a rampage and the leaders don't want that. There's fighting and running around and a woman who's got the hots for Captain Kirk but he's not giving her any action. I guess that's the real difference between the live action Captain and the cartoon Captain. The group find the object and stop the war. Another pretty good episode.
The Pirates of Doom was the first episode of the second season and it aired September 7 1974. Spock has a rare disease and the medicine on the way to him gets stolen by space pirates. They Enterprise gives chase and catches up to the Orion pirates. They get the cure and arrest the pirates. There's a bit of stuff going on in there but it's pretty much a standardkind of plot, nothing too special.
So not a bad bunch of stories, all of which could have been helped by having better animation. One more disc to go and it's got 5 episodes too. Next week will come pretty soon.
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