I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect going in to The Animated Series. It was the only series that I had not seen a single episode of before starting on this project.[^1] Overall I was expecting something consistent with most 1970s animation, which is to say not very good.
So it was quite a pleasant surprise to find a surprisingly strong series. The production quality was very good. And a couple of the episodes are generally great classics.
The majority of the episodes are quite average as Star Trek goes. There isn’t a true rubbish episode in the season, although there are a couple that do flirt with bad.
Still, there’s only so far you can go with 23 minutes, and there is certainly a level of simplification that goes in to producing a show that is aimed at a different demographic to live action Star Trek.
But I would certainly rate it as a lot closer to the first two seasons of The Original Series than the third.
The rankings so far:
1. TOS Season 2
2. TOS Season 1
3. TAS Season 1
4. TOS Season 3
Next: the shortest of all Star Trek seasons. In fact, Season 2 of The Animated Series is 4 minutes shorter than the first of the movies.
[^1]: For the record, I’ve seen about half of The Original Series, most of The Next Generation from Season 4 onwards, almost all of Deep Space 9 through Season 6, scattered episodes of Voyager, and one episode of Enterprise.