This was difficult to get through, VERY difficult. The plots were the best part of these episodes, but it was almost painful to get past the stilted and reused animations, along with the stilted and extremely over reused music and sound effects. I really think every episode used the same exact sound effects and same exact music with no changes at all.
Additionally it was clear they didn’t have the budget for VO, the original crew is well represented, but all the non-original series roles were being filled by the original crew using funny voices. It’s weird to look at animation VO from today and compare it to VO from the ’70s, but you can immediately recognize Majel Barrett-Roddenberry or Nichelle Nichols in nearly every female character, and you can tell they’ve had no training to hide their normal voices.
Because of how poorly done the animation, music and audio special effects are, this is a great candidate for a modern remake. I’d even throw money into a kick starter for it if they have the original VO work around, with today’s animation standards for both the art and audio I think we’d get some of the best Trek on TV out of it. As is though, I can’t suggest this series to anyone other than hardcore Trekkers that want to watch everything that’s been released.
For both hardcore fans and casual fans, I’d actually recommend reading Alan Dean Foster‘s excellent novelizations of the Star Trek Animated Series. The stories are more in depth and you won’t have to slog through the same danger/attack song 50 times.
