Star Trek: The Animated Series

Skippable, and more interesting than its reputation. Twenty-two half-hours made for Saturday mornings in 1973, with almost the entire original cast returning to voice their own parts and several of the original series' writers returning with them, including D. C. Fontana as story editor.

The reason it is worth a mention is that animation removed the budget ceiling. The live-action show could not afford an alien who was not a person in a costume; this one has a three-armed navigator, a felinoid officer, and planets that do not look like a quarry outside Los Angeles. Several episodes do things the parent show physically could not, and one of them, Yesteryear, is a genuinely good piece of writing about Spock's childhood that has been treated as canon by later series.

Everything else about it is a 1970s Saturday-morning cartoon. The animation is limited and repetitive, cels are reused constantly, and the twenty-three-minute format leaves no room for the second act turn that the best original episodes depend on.

Nothing requires it. Watch Yesteryear on its own if you are curious, and leave the rest unless you are completing the set.