Star Trek: The Animated Series music

Star Trek TAS music! Art by Kail.

Woah, spooky. I was only thinking today that I wished Arex and M'ress were in that famous TAS cast publicity shot you see around. And yay, M'ress without her sometime-black koala nose - but with her black collar.

Flashback: Buspak

The first annual Buspak Awards, coinciding with a gala preview night for "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home", State Theatre, Sydney (1986):


A memorable night for soooo many reasons.

Hanging out for Year Four!

Arex and M'Ress (of Filmation's "Star Trek: The Animated Series") really do cameo, as promised, in IDW Publishing's upcoming "Star Trek: Year Four" comic mini-series!

Check out the review at TrekMovie.com, which has links to online preview pages from IDW. It's actually quite a positive review, apart from the mention of the (same) writer's now familiar, sparse style.

I quite enjoyed "The Next Generation: The Space Between". (I guess it was only David Tischman's seeming reluctance to draw the threads together in the final TNG issue that left me cold.)

Morass for M'Ress

I've been searching high and low for my back issues of "Dreadstar" comics to share a particular frame. And I finally found them today.

Issues #63 and 64 (First Publishing, 1991) of "Dreadstar" by Peter David featured parody Star Trek pixie-like characters, who are amazed to meet Cookie, a felinoid alien who closely resembles Lieutenant M'Ress the Caitian of "Star Trek: The Animated Series" (TAS).

When Peter David took over DC's Star Trek comic (Series I), he inherited Arex and M'Ress (formerly of TOS) who'd only been recently been re-introduced to the Star Trek universe in comic book adventures set after "ST IV: The Voyage Home". Then Star Trek went on hiatus while Pocket Books' and DC Comics' tie-in licences were renegotiated. With DC's Series II #1 ready for release, the Peter avid and the editors were asked to change their plans for M'Ress - and antelope woman M'yra literally took her place.

But Peter David wasn't yet done with M'Ress. Changing her name to Cookie (and giving her a fluffier tail), he added a new felinoid character to "Dreadstar", as a vivacious love interest for regular felinoid alien, Oedi. Cookie and Oedi married in issue #62.

When "Dreadstar" was winding up its ongoing story arcs, Peter David went out with a bang when he unleashed the United Franchise of Worlds (a parody of Star Trek's United Federation of Planets) in "The Day the Urth Stood Still" and "Franchise & Empire".

As an all-powerful Great Bird of the Galaxy swoops down elsewhere, the Chekov-like pixie alien, "Navigations Officer Anton" (ho ho!), mistakes Cookie for a "Lieutenant Morass". Later, with Tibrus and his crew incapacitated, Captain Jean-Paul DeGaulle explains that "zee Benedyct [Arnold?] was something of an embarrassment to us". Someone later complained - of the United Franchise, in particular - that "with all the stuff they eliminated... they sound kind of dull..." Hilarious stuff, especially for those fans following both storylines, and the ongoing Richard Arnold versus Peter David feud.


ANTON:
"... Lieutenant Morass eess no longer een offeecial conteenuity.
She was only aneemated and doesn't count."

Uniformity

Over at the TrekBBS, someone asked for the Star Trek fans to name their favourite Star Trek uniform, and I hadn't really felt the need to contribute to that thread - until someone wondered aloud if "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" was going to get any representation. And it helped that I was "taking a break" from yesterday's epic moving of magazines from one pile to another. (Today I'd progressed to "free some action figures from their packaging" to free up more space. But it's okay, I've always been an "opener", not a "MOMC" - "mint on mint card" - collector.)

Okay, back to ST uniforms: well ST:TMP on the big screen was my first really memorable ST experience, after TAS repeats on TV. So, call me biased, but I love the ST: TMP uniforms (even if they do look a little - okay, a lot - like 'jammies). In 1980, if I coulda put one on and leapt into the silver screen of Sydney's old Paramount Theatre and onto that starship, I'd have done so.



Above: From an early fanzine story; art by my penpal, Kamu. Note that I'd asked her to include the Andorian partial exo-skeleton mentioned by the Ballantine "Starfleet Medical Reference Manual".



Above: At the first Medtrek Convention (1982), at the historic Hydro Majestic Hotel, Medlow Bath in the Blue Mountains. Therin was on the debating team: "Federation vs Empire: Which is the Better Form of Government?"



Above: Therin, Arex and M'Ress join the crew after ST: TMP, with a little help from Photoshop.

Getting animated!

The final series of "Star Trek" not-yet-available-on-DVD has been announced for commercial boxed set release! Filmation's "Star Trek: The Animated Series" (aka TAS), which I used to watch in glorious black and white limited animation on Saturday mornings in the 70s, and then in colour repeats on breakast television - "The Super Flying Fun Show" with Miss Marilyn (Mayo) - was my first real introduction to "Star Trek", consolidated by a few random TOS ("the original series") episodes, again to celebrate the arrival of colour TV Down Under, and then the mesmerising "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" in 1979.

I'm really looking forward to the DVD text commentaries by Michael and Denise Okuda on three of the episodes, including two of my favourites ("Yesteryear" and "The Counter-Clock Incident", plus "The Eye of the Beholder") and all the other bonus features. "Yesteryear" was a story involving the Guardian of Forever time gate from the live-action "City on the Edge of Forever", and "The Counter-Clock Incident" featured the first captain of the NCC-1701 Enterprise, Robert April, and his wife, Sarah.

References to TAS in latter day Star Trek tie-ins have been annotated at my site, Toon Trek. A work in progress, I've tried to annotate the list with every element of "Star Trek: The Animated Series" that has appeared in "Star Trek" episodes, movies, novels, comics, games, etc. Another great site about TAS is here.

A frequently asked question about TAS concerns its controversial "removal from the canon" via a memo from Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek Office at Paramount during that prolonged hiatus between Seasons One and Two of "Star Trek: The Next Generation". Why de-emphasise TAS stories? Who knows, the definitive answer is buried under red tape, but keep in mind that: TAS identities, DC Fontana and David Gerrold, had begun legal proceedings in regard to their departure from the staff of TNG; Peter David was asked to discontinue using Arex and M'Ress as characters in his post-ST IV comics; Filmation was being disbanded as a company; and SF writer Larry Niven was just about to launch "The Man-Kzin Wars" books and a licensed "Ringworld" RPG, both featuring kzinti. (It would not have helped him if the TOS and TNG comics and novels started playing with "The Slaver Weapon"'s animated kzinti with, or without, Niven's input.)

But it doesn't matter to us, the fans, any more if TAS is canonical or not. Paula Block, of Viacom (now CBS) Licensing, started letting back in references to TAS in the books within weeks of Roddenberry's death (and Richard Arnold's departure from the STO) in 1991. The novelization of TNG's Spock episodes, "Unification" by Jeri Taylor, briefly references the Phylosians, of "The Infinite Vulcan" and "The Time Trap" fame. Arex and M'Ress have since time jumped into Peter David's "New Frontier" novels (from "Gateways: Cold Wars" onwards) and a member of Em/3/Green's species - P8Blue the Nasat - has turned up in the "Starfleet Corps of Engineers" (SCE) eBooks.

By the way, the above Bill Redfern pic is not actually a still from TAS. Caitians and Andorians used to feature in the online parody, "Haul Trek: Misadventures of M'Iskiti" by the late Paul S Gibbs (who once started up an email correspondence with me, and long held a hope that his Admiral M'Ress fan stories might have had a chance to transform into professional, licensed Star Trek novels). After putting a lot of energy into his TAS-homage "M'Iskiti" strips, he decided to strip out all the "Star Trek" references, changed M'Iskiti's name, and concentrated on crafting a more original humorous science fiction pastiche in panelled cartoon form, presumably again hoping for a commercial sale. Andorian captain, Aydestinguis Thesspiahn, (above) of the freighter Pharsicle was turned into a non-ST green humanoid for the revamped "Freighter Tails". That's the real M'Ress below, between a kzin and Lieutenant Arex.