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1.1 Canonical Status
The animated series of Star Trek was produced by Filmation from 1973-4 and was a direct result of the pressure of the time to resurrect the show in some form. It introduces two new character to the Enterprise bridge crew: Lieutenants Arex and M'Ress. As the conventions boom picked up, Paramount began looking for ways to recoup some cash on its initial bad investment; a process which ran through the animated show via "Star Trek: Phase II" to Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979.
In the 1980s, around the time that Star Trek: The Next Generation geared up, Gene Roddenberry specifically instructed Paramount that the animated series was not to be considered to be 'canon' - that is, the events it depicted were not to be included in any official Trek timeline or reference work. For the purposes of this website, however, that instruction has been cast aside, for three reasons:
1) This was a show which, despite being animated in nature, featured the voices of all of the original show's actors, with the exception of Walter Koenig (although he wrote an episode) and even some of the guest cast as well.
2) The second point is related: the animated series ties in closely with the original show, bringing back Klingon Captain Koloth, Cyrano Jones from "The Trouble With Tribbles", Spock's parents from "Journey To Babel" (in one of the few animated instalments which establishes biographical detail about a major character considered canon), the amusement park planet from "Shore Leave", Harry Mudd and the Gorn. This level of detail is difficult to ignore and dismiss.
3) Producers from the original series were heavily involved with the animated show, particularly Dorothy Fontana.
It's also worth pointing out that TOS scribes such as Stephen Kandel, Fontana and "Where No Man Has Gone Before" author Samuel A. Peeples penned episodes. All in all, the relationship between the animated series and the original show is near symbiotic, especially when you consider the next point: the placing of the animated series within the Star Trek timeline.
1.2 Place in the Star Trek timeline
The official Star Trek Chronology notes that Dorothy Fontana has said that she would place the animated adventures directly after the conclusion of the original series' three years, presumably going straight from "Turnabout Intruder" to "Yesteryear" with no gap in terms of months or years or starbase layovers or whatever. However, the situation in terms of Final Frontier's timeline is a little different. In this version of the timeline, the episodes of the original series are placed in stardate order over the course of the five years from 2266 to 2270 (see section 2.2), in accordance with the advancement of those episodes' stardates from 1000 to 5999 - a period covering five years. (Whether this was by accident or design on the part of the writers is unknown, but as they had no idea that the show would end after three years, it would have been interesting to see what they would have done when they reached 5999.9 ... ) The animated series, with only 4 exceptions out of 22 instalments, follows the same 1000-5999 pattern. Accordingly, those episodes have been placed in tandem with the original series. The bulk of the animated episodes occur, in the Final Frontier timeline, in the years 2269 and 2270.
The 4 episodes which break with this pattern - "How Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth", "The Pirates of Orion", "The Counter-Clock Incident" and "Bem" - have stardates that begin with a 6 or 7 digit. If we are proposing a 2266-2270 timeframe for stardates beginning with a 1-5 digit, then it is logical to assume that stardates beginning with a 6 translate to 2271, and those beginning with a 7 translate to 2272. On the basis of these four episodes, a hypothetical two-year extension to the Enterprise's original five-year mission is postulated (see section 3.2), and Star Trek: The Motion Picture is dated in 2275 (see section 2.3).
1.3 "The Magicks of Megas-Tu"
The other notable episode for stardates in the animated canon is "The Magicks of Megas-Tu". The log here tells us that the stardate is 1254.4, which places the episode before the second pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before". Happily, this causes any number of data conflicts as regards cast variations, technology, etc., which are reconciled in the following ways:
1) Dr McCoy is onboard as part of a training programme with a view to replacing Mark Piper as full-time CMO of the Enterprise.
2) Arex and M'Ress, everyone's favourite inconvenient animated characters, are also in training, with a view to joining the bridge crew. They do join later on, and act in rotation with Sulu, Chekov and other bridge crewmembers. (This helps to reconcile their being aboard ship when the animated episodes start interchanging with original series episodes later on in the timeline.)
To see how all of this fits into the Final Frontier Chronology, visit the 23rd century page [click].
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