Addressing an animated lacuna

I'm almost ashamed to admit it. I am a huge Star Trek TOS fan and yet I have never seen the animated series, which featured the voices of all of the TOS actors and the talents of many of the TOS writers, put out by Norway Corporation in the early 1970s.

Yes, I had read Alan Dean Foster's literary adaptations of those animated episodes but I had never seen the shows themselves.

A big lacuna in my Star Trek experience, if I do say so myself.

So I was quite pleased when I discovered the other night that our recent addition of Crave TV to our television menu brought with it access to the entire collection of the Norway animated series.

For some reason, I managed to miss the first episode of Season 1 ("Beyond the Farthest Star") when I started to watch then 24-minute shows but I have now seen episodes two and three ("Yesteryear" and "One of our Planets is Missing") and I have some preliminary thoughts to share:

1. I am impressed by how many characters are voiced by James Doohan and Majel Barrett. It would seem that, as a money saving measure, the producers simply asked these two very skilled performers to take on the voices of almost every non-central character that might appear in a single show -- in some cases, Doohan especially has more than half the lines of dialogue in the episode;
2. I find the plots very simple and slow moving, perhaps because they are aimed at a younger audience, but I am consistently surprised with the complexity of some of the themes concepts that are explored in the shows;
3. The creative team seems to recognise that, with animation, they can do a lot more and a lot more creative things that would be impossible to film in live action. That doesn't mean the animation is particularly impressive (it's very dated these days) but it's nice to see a willingness to take chances from a visual standpoint;
4. The two episodes that I have watched to date include a lot of references to the original 79 live-action episodes (the Guardian of Forever, Spock's family and pet, etc.) as well as some clear foundations for what is to come: as has no doubt been noted elsewhere, the plot of "One of our Planets is Missing" seems to have been revised to create the story for Star Trek: The Motion Picture only a couple of years later.

I feel that the Norway Series is as close to additional TOS episodes as we can come. Gene Roddenberry was still involved, the original cast is there to provide voices and many of the original writers are providing scripts. So I'm pleased that I finally found a way to see them.