Trivia / Star Trek: The Animated Series

• Acting for Two: Almost everyone, besides the Enterprise crew and a few returning characters, is voiced by one of the already-present actors like James Doohan, Majel Barrett, or Nichelle Nichols. Even George Takei did a few. Though David Gerrold and Lou Scheimer also voiced a few guest characters.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: No, Kirk still doesn't say it in this series. He does say "Beam us up, Scotty" once, though - which is the closest he ever comes.
• Follow the Leader: Space Battleship Yamato borrowed from "Beyond the Farthest Star".
• The Other Marty: James Doohan originally voiced Sarek in "Yesteryear," but when Mark Lenard was available to reprise his role, the dialogue was rerecorded by Lenard, averting The Other Darrin.
• The Other Darrin: Lieutenant Kyle, played by John Winston in the original series, is voiced by James Doohan here.
• Role Reprise: For guest stars, Mark Lenard reprises his role of Sarek in "Yesteryear", Stanley Adams reprises his role of Cyrano Jones in "More Tribbles, More Troubles", and Roger C. Carmel returns as Harry Mudd in "Mudd's Passion".
  • The Brazilian dub uses the cast from the reboot films.
• Rotoscoping: How the animation of the Enterprise was created.
• Shout-Out: The Lactrans, the highly advanced race of aliens in the episode Eye of the Beholder, appear to be somewhat based on the Krell from Forbidden Planet. The Krell doorways, a clue to that race's body shape, would fit fine for the Lactrans.
• Troubled Production: The series had troubles mostly in the pre-production phase, as the producers initially only intended to bring back William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan and Majel Barrett, creating Suspiciously Similar Substitutes Arex and M'Ress for Sulu and Uhura respectively. However, the lead cast members put their foot down and refused to do the series unless George Takei, Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig were brought back. There wasn't the budget to bring back all three, however, resulting in them having to agree to a compromise measure whereby Takei and Nichols would return as regular cast members, and Koenig would be allowed to write an episode of the series (Arex and M'Ress were retained, albeit with the former replacing Chekov rather than Sulu). However...
  • The episode that Koenig wrote, "The Infinite Vulcan," was completely rewritten from top to bottom by Gene Roddenberry, ending up with nothing in common with Koenig's original script other than that it involved a giant clone of Spock, and plant people (the latter of which wasn't actually Koenig's idea in the first place, but rather Roddenberry's). Koenig fumed, but consoled himself with the thought that he'd at least be allowed to come back and voice the story's Big Bad — only to find out, at a Star Trek convention of all places, that he wasn't even going to be allowed to do that.
  • Another episode that suffered from heavy meddling by Roddenberry was the second season story "Bem". David Gerrold had first pitched it for the third season of TOS, but then-producer Fred Freiberger didn't like the story, and also didn't think it could be produced on a diminished third season budget. Gerrold instead submitted it for TAS, and Roddenberry bought it, but then told Gerrold he couldn't have two of his scripts put into production since it would create the appearance of favoritism. Gerrold understandably decided to have "More Tribbles, More Troubles" produced instead, as it was a sequel to a highly popular TOS episode... only for Roddenberry to then have two scripts by another former TOS writer, Margaret Armen, put into production. It was eventually made for the second season, but not until after Roddenberry had demanded the inclusion of a Sufficiently Advanced Alien antagonist, though Gerrold did at least turn this requirement to his advantage by demanding that Nichelle Nichols voice the resulting character, as she almost never got to voice anyone except for Uhura.
• What Could Have Been: Enough for its own page

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