Star Trek Animated: The Animated Adv of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek [Blu-ray]

DVD Wholesale Quick Overview:

The further adventures of Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of the USS Enterprise, as they explore the galaxy and defend the United Federation of Planets.—Kenneth Chisholm

This was actually the very first Star Trek I ever saw (or knew to exist) when I was a child in the early 1970’s. This Emmy Award-winning Saturday morning cartoon introduced me to Star Trek and I was so excited when, shortly thereafter, I realized that there was also a live action show “with real people from the cartoon!” I was hooked from my earliest years and I’ve been Treking ever sense. If you haven’t seen The Animated Series, you have missed out on a historically important, vastly underrated and too often forgotten part of the Star Trek saga. If you think we only got three years out of the five year mission, you’re wrong–the final two years of it is right here. And it is not you’re typical Saturday morning fare. It is actually Star Trek–with all the drama and depth of the original series, written and produced by the original series team, and voiced by the original series cast. It also features several sequels to TOS episodes–and they are actually good! Furthermore, much of the animation is quite stunning. These days, Filmmation (which produced the series) is often made fun of for the cost cutting “stiffness” of their animation, but I think that’s unfair. Maybe the characters movements are a bit stiff (they were on a budget), but look at the amount of detail they put into their settings, backgrounds and matte paintings. Some are true works of art–and the slow Enterprise flybys look as detailed and beautiful as the live action version. If your assumption is that TAS would be too cheesy, it’s a cartoon, etc., you are missing out on a rich experience. By the way, there are a number of Trek elements first introduced in The Animated Series which have since found their way into the mainstream canon of modern Trek through homage and even direct reference–especially in “Deep Space Nine,” “Star Trek: Enterprise,” and “Star Trek (2009).” TAS also introduced the holodeck aboard the Enterprise over fifteen years before “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Furthermore, the critically acclaimed episode “Yesteryear” detailing a traumatic event in Spock’s childhood is widely considered not just TAS’s most important episode, but among the most important canonical episodes of the Star Trek franchise. Also of note, TAS characters such as M’Ress and Arex have often appeared Star Trek novels and comic books, and the Orion slave girl, Devna, introduced in “The Time Trap” is now a major character in the “Star Trek: Enterprise” relaunch novels–and her story arc in the novels is anything but cartoony.

DVD Wholesale Main Features:

Actors: James Doohan, DeForest Kelley, William Shatner, George Takei
Format: AC-3, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, Dubbed, Full Screen, Subtitled
Language: English
Subtitles: Dutch, English, French, Italian, German
Dubbed: Italian, French, German
Region: Region A/1
Number of discs: 3
Rated: NR-Not Rated
Studio: Paramount
DVD Release Date: November 15, 2016
Run Time: 526 minutes
ASIN: B01M0K1OUC