vintagegeekculture:

It’s insane to me that the status quo for close to a decade was that the animated series wasn’t canon. The animated series had the entire voice cast of the Enterprise minus Chekhov, it had Mark Lenard return as Sarek, Majel Barrett as the computer and Nurse Chapel, Stanley Adams return as Cyrano Jones, and Roger C. Carmel return as Harry Mudd. It was written by the original series writers (D.C. Fontana, Samuel A. Peeples, David Gerrold), who in many cases submitted pitches. If this isn’t canon, literally nothing anywhere is canon.

When people tell the history of Star Trek and say that the seventies were a dark age where fans waited anxiously for the return of Trek, I am in stunned disbelief because an entire Star Trek series was made in this decade. 

The reason for TAS’s decanonization was that Gene Roddenberry (who was essentially checked out after TNG’s first season due to a series of strokes) had an overly zealous attorney who set policy, and that included the utterly insane belief that the animated series wasn’t canon. Shockingly, it is very likely they didn’t consider the original series canon at TNG, either; writers were discouraged from mentioning it. An episode of TNG was written to feature the Gorn, and it had to be rewritten. A line mentioning Spock was cut out of a script.

And that’s to say nothing of all the key pieces of Trek lore we first learned about on the animated series. Captain Kirk’s middle name is Tiberius; the existence of the holodeck (called the rec-room); the fact that Robert April was the first captain of the Enterprise; multiple different kinds of shuttles, including the aqua-shuttle and a warp shuttle that was basically an early runabout.

Honestly, I would love it if some future Trek project had a call out or two to the animated series. I don’t impress easily, and that would impress me. Like, have Arex in a scene, or even a joke where there’s an offhand mention about how, sure, Spock may die, but it’s a good thing there is a 30 foot tall identical clone of him out there somewhere.