Back in April, we were treated to a clip of Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Animated Series that imagined the show as if it had been animated in the 1970s by Filmation, just as the original Trek series had. Now, the heroes at Gazelle Automations have returned to reimagine Voyager in the same format, and it’s equally as perfect — but what makes it arguably better is that the scene comes from “Threshold,” arguably the worst Voyager episode of all time.
If you don’t know (or don’t recall), “Threshold” is the episode where flight control officer Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeill) managed to evolve several million years into the future in the course of a single day. It’s a classic Trek premise, but was wrecked somewhat by the show assuming that, for some reason, the future of humanity was in becoming yellow bipedal catfish monsters. But what really put “Threshold” into the annals of Trek infamy was how Paris kidnapped Captain Janeway (Kate Mulgrew) and they both further evolved into non-bipedal catfish lizards who had… well, I’ll let you see for yourself.
Yeah, they fucked and had babies. If that’s disturbing to you, I feel compelled to point out that the Voyager crew took Janeway and Paris and de-evolved them back to normal… while abandoning their offspring on the swamp planet. It’s messed up, but what it’s messed up is another perfect encapsulation of the classic Trek cartoon animated by Filmation back in the ‘70s. Even the incredibly goofy music that plays when Chakotay (Robert Beltran) discovers the brood is dead-on.
If past is prologue, then Gazelle should be tackling Deep Space Nine and Enterprise next, and god bless ‘em for doing so. But what I’m really looking forward to is the studio getting its hands on Discovery…
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