10 Dumbest Things In Star Trek: The Animated Series

Bucking an industry trend, Filmation was the last U.S. cartoon studio to keep all of its production work in the United States rather than contract with lower-cost offshore production houses (as reported by the LA Times), and did so via its aforementioned cost-cutting shortcuts.

One such shortcut was to avoid redrawing characters by almost never depicting them out of uniform. However, since wholly alien settings are no more expensive to paint than conventional ones, there was no reason to limit the crew to Class M planets … except for the vexxing issue of how they stay alive. The solution? Life support belts and a glowing outline painted on a cel atop existing animation. (Though they sometimes forgot to add the belts or the glow or both.)

Simple? You bet. Believable? Hell no. Like the transporter beaming up from planets, how do these belts determine where the person ends and an object or the ground begins? In “Beyond the Farthest Star” it’s stated that the belt’s field prevents Scotty from being crushed. So how can a person surrounded by a forcefield pick up an object? Does the field automagically extend around it? How can you get traction on a floor with a force field between you and it? And these things must convert carbon dioxide back into oxygen, too. That’s alchemy. Just how much power do these things have?

In a different reality, we might’ve gotten these in the original series. A first draft of “The Tholian Web” suggests something like this, and a Bob Justman memo comments on the notion but, thankfully, we finally got spacesuits instead.

Filmation wasn’t done with the idea, though. In Space Academy (1977) characters had life support badges and its spinoff, Jason of Star Command (1978–79) had belt-mounted life-support units. Both functioned almost identically — and just as preposterously — as their animated Trek predecessors.