Wednesday, May 27, 2009

Animated Star Trek, Animated Shakespeare

“How Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth.” By Russell Bates and David Wise. Perf. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan, and George Takei. Dir. Bill Reed. Star Trek: The Animated Series. Season 2, episode 5. NBC. 5 October 1974. DVD. Paramount, 2006.

We leave behind The Original Series for the time being, planning to return to it later to examine a few plot similarities between it and various Shakespeare plays.

Our next stop is at a place I didn’t even know existed—at least, not until I spotted it at our local library about two years ago: Star Trek: The Animated Series!

The only Shakespeare reference that I noticed in the series is both a title reference and a quote. The episode itself is mainly forgettable. An ancient Aztec alien returns to earth to see how his children are getting along, and he finds that they don’t need him anymore. Hence the aptness of the title and the quote. Because the reference is so brief, I’m not including a clip; however, I offer these subtitled screen shots for your edification:




Links: A Gateway to Star Trek Information at Wikipedia.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
All material original to this blog is copyrighted: Copyright 2008-2039 (and into perpetuity thereafter) by Keith Jones.

The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest