LOU SCHEIMER: CREATING THE FILMATION GENERATION

Lou Scheimer: Creating the Filmation Generation is Scheimer’s 2012 autobiography, which he wrote with Andy Mangels. Scheimer co-founded Filmation in 1962, and he was the only one left when the sale to L’Oreal shut the company down in 1989. As such, this book also serves as a comprehensive history of Filmation, which is best known for such cartoons as He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, and Star Trek: The Animated Series.

The book begins with Scheimer’s parents’ immigration to the United States and his childhood and schooling; from the foundation of Filmation onward, Scheimer keeps things mostly chronological but largely gives a show-by-show account of events. I only have one real complaint about the way the book is laid out—it would have been nice to get more information on the animation process earlier in the book so that certain portions would be easier to follow.

The book has a very conversational tone, which makes it extremely engaging. Scheimer’s personality really comes through unfiltered, and by all accounts, he was quite a character. He never met a tangent he didn’t like, but most of what he has to say is so interesting that it’s easily forgiven (e.g., his dad purportedly punched Hitler in the face).

Scheimer heavily emphasizes his passion and vision for animation throughout the book. He was a trailblazer, he says, for incorporating racial diversity into children’s cartoons, and for producing material that communicated values, morals, and instruction. He was also committed to keeping animation jobs in the United States when most studios were sending large amounts of work overseas (this is, in fact, one of the primary reasons for Filmation’s well-known and oft-maligned stock animation system.

This is a huge book—8.5” by 11”, and almost 300 pages—and it’s kind of unwieldy. It’s worth wrestling with, though, because of the vast number of pictures. Contrary to what its Amazon page would lead you to believe, however, the book is not in full color. Only pp. 209–224 are; the rest are in black and white, so caveat emptor. The book really could have done with some serious copyediting, especially to clean up Scheimer’s serial misuse of “I” when he should have used “me” and the redundancies in the writing (Mangels, isn’t that your job?).

For me, at least, the production and editorial knocks on the book are readily forgivable. Lou Scheimer: Creating the Filmation Generation gave me a new appreciation for Scheimer, for Filmation, and for some of the cartoons I grew up with; I’m grateful simply that the book exists.

If any of the Filmation shows you grew up with are still meaningful to you as an adult, odds are you’ll find Lou Scheimer: Creating the Filmation Generation well worth your time.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

STAR TREK: LOG FIVE by Alan Dean Foster

Star Trek: Log Five (1975) includes three TV-script-to-novella adaptations by Alan Dean Foster based on episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series: “The Ambergris Element,” “Pirates of Orion,” and “Jihad.” Here, Kirk and Spock get turned into fish people, Spock contracts a terminal illness, and an inter-species task force seeks to prevent a war.

Filling this many pages with stories from half-hour teleplays has been a challenge throughout this series, but here, Foster does a quality job of expanding and adding to these episodes in interesting ways. Foster opens, for example, with ten pages of backstory on M’ress; while this doesn’t make for the most fluid narrative (she doesn’t feature in any of the stories), it’s interesting enough. And Foster’s detailed descriptions give these exotic settings far more depth than the Filmation cartoon ever could.

The stories themselves aren’t phenomenal – “The Ambergris Element” is meandering, yet fairly predictable, and the reveal at the end of “Jihad” is underdeveloped, but Foster really gets the most out of his material here, and the pacing never gets too bad.

We also get the usual silliness and un-Trek-isms from Foster. We’ve got Scotty calling McCoy “Bones,” Spock using contractions and, more egregiously, such imprecisions as “a minute or so,” Kirk’s got a trash can built into his chair, and the Enterprise doesn’t seem to have a second science officer or navigator on board.   

In short, it’s nothing wonderful, but Star Trek: Log Five is certainly one of the more readable books in the Log series.

RECOMMENDED

STAR TREK: LOG FOUR by Alan Dean Foster

Star Trek: Log Four (1975) contains three TV-script-to-novella adaptations by Alan Dean Foster based on episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series: “The Terratin Incident,” “Time Trap,” and “More Tribbles, More Troubles.” Here, the Enterprise crew shrinks to Lilliputian dimensions, gets caught in a time warp, and re-encounters Cyrano Jones and his collection of tribbles.

Adapting a 23-minute teleplay to a seventy-page story is no small challenge, and Foster generally does a fair job, giving the stories a more leisurely pace that allows him to build some cosmic atmosphere and bring some depth to the ship and crew. When it doesn’t go well, however, things degenerate to a nigh-unreadable slog.

That’s the case here with “The Terratin Incident,” which is easily the silliest of the three stories here, but which is inexplicably dragged out over half the book. Foster really drops the ball with the logic of his explanations for the phenomenon: if the crew shrinks but retains their original weight, they must also retain their original strength – otherwise they wouldn’t be able to move; they should be little super ant people. Instead, they’re straining at knobs and building tiny ladders. Also terrible is Foster’s embarrassing failure at shamelessly contriving some suspense at the end.   

The other two stories are quite a bit better, however. They’re also significantly shorter and much better paced. “More Tribbles, More Troubles” is the best, and it’s the shortest. One can’t help but think that given the fixed length of these volumes, four episodes would be a better number for each than three.

Foster’s dialogue, a problem throughout this series, again doesn’t ring true for a number of characters in many places. And there are a number of other things that Foster inserts that don’t fit with the Star Trek world we know (or even the one we knew in 1975), including a wife for Scotty and Federation mind-wiping.

In short, the other two stories are pretty solid, but “The Terratin Incident” just kills Log Four.

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STAR TREK: LOG THREE by Alan Dean Foster

Star Trek: Log Three (1975) contains three more TV-script-to-novella adaptations by Alan Dean Foster based on episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series: “Once Upon a Planet,” “Mudd’s Passion,” and “The Magicks of Megas Tu.” Here, the Enterprise returns to the Amusement Planet from the TOS episode “Shore Leave,” encounters Harry Mudd for the third time, and travels to a magical planet at the center of the galaxy.

This is easily the weakest entry to this point in the series. For one, Foster is not at his best here. Foster’s treatment of the material lacks energy, and the pacing is sluggish. Throughout the series, Foster jumps abruptly from one character’s head to the next, and it’s worse here than ever, to a jarring degree. Unlike the previous Log books, this one is riddled with errors, including an egregious number of cases of “it’s” where it should be “its.”

Granted, these stories are based on cartoons, but the second and third entries feel especially cartoony, which is a problem Foster was largely able to avoid in the previous volumes. Not that this is completely his fault; the source material is frequently silly: dinosaurs, love potions, magic, a friendly Lucifer. And “The Magicks of Megas Tu” features much in common with the worst parts of the plot of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. Why they went to that well twice, I can’t imagine.  

Star Trek: Log Three gives you three mediocre adaptations of forgettable episodes. You can do better.

NOT RECOMMENDED

STAR TREK: LOG TWO by Alan Dean Foster

Star Trek: Log Two (1974) contains three TV-script-to-novella adaptations by Alan Dean Foster based on episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series: “The Survivor,” “The Lorelei Signal,” and “The Infinite Vulcan.” Here, the Enterprise rescues a long-lost celebrity humanitarian and travels to a planet that ensnares all the men, and Spock gets abducted by plant people who want to make a giant clone of him.

None of these stories is a world-beater, unfortunately, and they’re fairly predictable. “The Lorelei Signal” is particularly weak, and has little going for it other than a rare instance of Uhura in command. “The Infinite Vulcan” (screenplay by Walter “Chekov” Koenig), which bears a strong resemblance to the terrible TOS episode “Spock’s Brain,” was unimpressive as a cartoon; it’s much better here, due in large part to Foster’s excellent and imaginative portrayal of the setting and creatures. As in Log One, each novella is about sixty pages, and the length and pacing are strengths.

Foster is a good writer, and he does a solid job with weaker material here. However, some of what he does may cause the reader to wonder if he ever actually watched Star Trek. Most egregiously, he gets the Romulan personality (and more) completely wrong, and Scotty’s trademark repair time exaggerations are explicitly contradicted. As in Log One, Foster’s lighter moments don’t work as well as his cosmic reflections, as the interplay and jokes tend to be pretty lame.   

All told, Star Trek: Log Two is decent enough to carry the reader through it, but there are a hundred better Star Trek books out there.

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STAR TREK: LOG ONE by Alan Dean Foster

Star Trek: Log One (1974), by Alan Dean Foster, contains three novellas adapted from the first three episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series: “Beyond the Farthest Star,” “Yesteryear,” and “One of Our Planets is Missing.” Here, the crew investigates an ancient derelict ship, Spock travels back in time to save his child self, and the Enterprise is swallowed by a planet-eating cloud.

Each novella is about sixty pages, and generally, this is a good length for this material, although there’s quite a bit more setup, especially for “Beyond,” and the pacing tends to be on the leisurely side. Foster has a narrative flair for the dramatic, and his characters often ponder grand cosmic thoughts. The overall effect is a different tone and feel from either The Original Series or TAS. The stories themselves are solid if not spectacular; “Yesteryear” was easily the best TAS episode, and, with the most character focus of the three, it’s the best story here, too.

Foster’s characterization is adequate at best, and the dialogue doesn’t always ring true. The Kirk-Spock-McCoy interplay isn’t on the level that Trek fans will likely expect, and tends to lack both charm and humor. Kirk himself is uncharacteristically awkward at times, while the Spock-McCoy exchanges are more immature and less good-spirited than what we saw on either TOS or TAS.

The only scientific nitpick here is in “Beyond,” where the characters regularly experience sound on a ship with no atmosphere (although in fairness, every iteration of Star Trek going back to TOS has abused this).

On the whole, Star Trek fans should find Star Trek: Log One reasonably readable and enjoyable, whether they’ve seen TAS or not.

RECOMMENDED

THE BEST OF STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION by Michael Jan Friedman et al.

The Best of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1994) collects issues 5, 6, 16, and Annuals 1 and 2 from volume 2 of DC Comics’ Star Trek: The Next Generation. It includes three stories by longtime Star Trek writer Michael Jan Friedman and one by John de Lancie (who played Q in various Trek series), with art by Pablo Marcos, Gordon Purcell, Matt Haley, Peter Krause, and Carlos Garzon. In this collection, Geordi and Riker encounter old flames, Dr. Crusher has a birthday, Picard turns into a goat and has another encounter with Q, and Riker teaches a history lesson. TNG writer and producer Jeri Taylor has contributed the book’s introduction, wherein she talks about her involvement with the show and says virtually nothing about the comics.

Somewhat surprisingly, de Lancie’s story (“The Gift”) is the most interesting, although it takes its sweet time to get going (not surprisingly, it prominently features Q). Friedman’s stories are adequate at best – they would have made for fairly mediocre television episodes. Exacerbating the problem are the flow issues in Friedman’s stories – the comic book medium doesn’t lend itself well to the amount of exposition that a typical TNG story features.

The art here is decent – characters are mostly recognizable and don’t suffer too terribly from comic book over-muscleization. The book is garishly colored, though, in the manner of the day, and the backgrounds (which often feel somewhat sparse) suffer as a result.

So these are the “best” stories this series had to offer? Really? DC’s Star Trek: The Next Generation ran for 80 issues plus 6 annuals. If these stories are the best, then the comic must have been poor indeed.

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STAR TREK: COUNTDOWN

Star Trek: Countdown (2009), a prequel to the 2009 Star Trek film, collects the four-issue comic miniseries of the same name. The story is by Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman, Mike Johnson and Tim Jones, and the art is by David Messina. The primary function of this prequel is to provide back-story for Nero, who gets short shrift in the film.

Eight years after the events of Star Trek: Nemesis, Spock and the Romulan miner Nero work to prevent a star that is going supernova from destroying Romulus (and the rest of the galaxy). Aided by the Enterprise-E (captained by a resurrected Data) and Jean-Luc Picard, now the ambassador to Vulcan, they get bogged down in Romulan and Vulcan politicking.

Star Trek: Countdown feels rushed. There’s a lot going on, and the comic often focuses on the less interesting aspects (like all the political bickering). As a result, the focus on character is diminished. Even Nero, one of the book’s main characters, doesn’t get a worthy treatment. His shift from loving miner to power-mad tyrant is quick and glossy. And beyond Nero’s initial relationship with Spock, Countdown gives us little that we couldn’t figure out from the movie.

Other characters from The Next Generation pop up here and there, mostly for no good reason. All of the characters present from TNG, including Data and Picard, are just there to add a few familiar faces. These are well-developed characters whose personalities have been thoroughly explored in hundreds of Star Trek episodes, but here they are completely unremarkable and totally interchangeable. This is a distinct failure to link the new film to the world of TNG.

Messina’s art is fine, even if his people look a bit angular at times. But the familiar characters are mostly recognizable and the ships look good, and that’s what counts. Countdown’s coloring is murky; this is an obvious attempt to give the book a grimmer, more serious tone. But instead, it impairs the art and gives the reader the distinct impression that it’s trying too hard.

Star Trek: Countdown is not officially canon, although there are no canonical red flags. But it really doesn’t matter, because this book really doesn’t matter. It adds little to the new film, and it adds practically nothing to the world of The Next Generation.

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