Star Trek: The Animated Series premiered in 1973, when I was in my second year of nursing school. Of course I watched it. I was a first-generation Trekkie, and any new Trek, in those days, was like water to a traveler in the desert. The series was well written, and well made (in the limited-animation style for which Filmation was famous), and the music… yeah, that was memorable too. (Especially in those days when no one could use the original theme…)
After nursing school, many unusual things happened to me: getting a job in Manhattan at the East Coast’s most prestigious psychiatric clinic: discovering that not only were there such things as science fiction conventions, but Star Trek conventions: going to my first one, and meeting David Gerrold and many other people who’re still good friends: leaving my job (a year or so on from that convention) and moving west to work as David’s assistant: watching him write novels, and thinking “I could do that too…” (not least because I’d been writing Trek fanfic for years); writing my first book and seeing it bought and published; and shortly after that, being invited to “come write some cartoons” at Hanna-Barbera by a guy named Tom Swale.
After a couple of years of doing that on and off (and here I get to remind people that the writing of So You Want To Be A Wizard was financed by writing for Scooby-Doo and Scrappy), one day my screen agent called. “Hey,” she said, “Filmation called. One of the owners wants to talk to you about doing some series development work for them.”
…So I met up with Lou Scheimer at some cafe in Reseda, he described the project to me, I thought it sounded fun, and so that job came to pass: my first at a studio. It would have been the middle of 1982 when I moved into a little office at Filmation. In the next office down (at the end of the hall), Paul Dini and Robby London were working with their producer, the wonderful Art Nadel, on a new series called He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. (I used to slip in there sometimes, on breaks from what I was doing, and chat and brainstorm with them. This led to unusual occurrences such as me drawing the first map of Eternia, which [IIRC] made it into the series bible.)
And now matters take an unexpected late-afternoon veer.
It was late in the summer, and I was finishing up the assignment for which I’d been brought on board at Filmation—getting ready to go back to work on the novel that (the publication date of the book tells me) would have then been in progress: The Wounded Sky. Around sort of three one afternoon, Lou Scheimer paused by my office door and said, “Hey, we’re clearing some old cels out of the animation graphics library. You want some?”
Well, why wouldn’t I? I thought. I’d never been in that part of the building, anyway, and was curious about what might be in there. So I followed him around to “back of house” to a low dim windowless room full of long tables that were covered with hand-painted animation cels, and full of boxes with cels packed between leaves of tissue paper. “Take whatever you like,” Lou said; and as he went out, nudged me with one elbow in a friendly way and said “And don’t get too greedy.”
So I started going through what was laid out on the tables and filed in the boxes, and then realized: they were all cels from Star Trek: The Animated Series… and there were thousands of them.
Most of them were backgrounds, or shots from scenes that weren’t particularly interesting or exciting. It was plain to me that others had been through these before I had, and all the best pieces had been spirited away.
In any case, I did not get too greedy. I searched through much chaff over the next couple of hours to find one diamond—an image of someone with whom I’d been working closely for the previous year or so: a character I didn’t at all mind looking in the eye. That cel I took away. I made a background for it (out of a reversed image of the sky’s North Pole from Norton’s Star Atlas), and had it framed.
And here it is. A brush with greatness, and a part (or else a harbinger) of a most unexpected career turn…
dduane
