Have you actually seen any of the animated shows? Except for one or two, all of them are worse than Spock’s Brain, Shades of Grey, Journey to Eden, or The Final Frontier ever thought of being.
They were Saturday morning cartoons (poor ones, at that) and they just don’t fit in with the more believable (it’s all relative) live-action series.
Every generation needs its Tina Louise.
So what? Why does the quality of the product make it non-canon (see earlier remark re ST5)?
And I saw the animated shows first-run. Heck, I even used to have the viewmaster reels. They aren’t compelling television but they aren’t bad either for what they are. More importantly in my mind, they feature (basically) the original cast and above all, Gene Roddenberry executive produced. You don’t get any more canonical than the Great Bird of the Galaxy. There’s no reason for them not to be canon.
Don’t you mean “Into every generation a Tina Louise is born. She alone…”?
Ah, nevermind. 
This cartoon sounds like a really bad idea to me. I’d rather give the Buffyverse a year off to catch its breath, wait for “Tru Calling” to fizzle – as much as I enjoy the show, I doubt it has staying power – and then see about that Faith spinoff.
God. No.
Faith’s an interesting supporting character, but there’s no way in hell she could support her own show.
The animated series is a good idea - in theory, at least. The one problem I have with it as it’s been presented to now: one of the preview sites I ran across said that ‘due to the nature of cartoons’ they can’t have any real overarching continuity, so the episodes could be shown in any order. While a lot of cartoons do get aired that way, and are designed to accomodate it, it’s far from a defining point of (or restricted to) cartoons - and most networks, when they buy an animated series that’s designed to be shown in order, are good at doing so - even Fox.
Now, it’s possible to do it well that way, but they’re talking about it like they’re pretty much ignoring the events of the TV series to accomplish this, and that’s not a good sign.
Nah, it’s not a bad idea. It just means they’ll all be MoTW episodes. It was slightly annoying when they tried that with Angel, but that’s because Angel was an actual drama with a lot of story still left to tell. We already saw the story BtVS for the high school years. I think it could be fun to leave the heavy stuff behind and just focus on fun demons and non-angst and the snark.
Enough of the SMG bashing already. Yeesh, yeah she was pretty peeved about how bad Season 6 and 7 were, but so were we. Take out Once More With Feeling and both seasons are dreadful trainwrecks compared to the first five. At least SMG had the decency to care.
Joss simply walked away from BtVS to chase Firefly, Ripper, the first try at the cartoon and start up Angel. Most of these efforts flopped, Firefly was great but was cancelled quickly (Sigh) and Angel had its best season with little input from the Firefly obsessed Joss.
Major characters were ruined. The plots, direction and acting became one dimensional. The verve, snark, spirit and heart of the show disappeared. SMG lost 2 years working for a show that was a pale shadow of itself. The show’s creator was AWOL most of the time, yet nobody points the finger at him. So maybe she deserves to be a little bitter. Hell, all she had to do was look at how much better the Angel scripts, plotting and direction were. The fact that the primary movers behind the epic disasters of Seasons 6-7 are now pointing fingers at SMG is a joke.
Didn’t anyone else notice how characters magically improved once the Angel writers and directors got to work with them? Cordelia, Wesley, even Buffy.
It was a bummer that Buffy couldn’t make the last of the Angel episodes, but given the direction they chose, what the heck would she be there for? She did everyone a favor by saying no. In retrospect, she (like many fans) probably wish that if Joss was going to abandon the series to a bunch of hacks, that they just ended it at The Gift. I know I do.
That’s to assume the season would have ended the way it did even if she’d agreed to appear, which I don’t believe.
I personally believe they had to scramble around to accommodate her unwillingness to put in a couple days work – a pittance she refused, thanks to feeling butt-hurt over bad writing. Too bad she couldn’t see past her unhappiness to pay back her fans by helping to put a nice bow on the series, or at least pay back JW for helping her become a millionaire.
Which sucks.
If you’re going to rant about the “hacks” on BtVS while simultaneously praising the staff on AtS, you better get your facts straight. Unless each person on the staff of BtVS had a double running around, stealing their names.
With very few exceptions, Angel and Buffy had the same staff for the entirety of both series. So blaming the writers/directors for SMG’s poor performance won’t fly. Even Marti Noxon was a consulting producer on AtS for the first four seasons. “That bunch of hacks” is the Angel staff, and whoever didn’t stay went on to do Wonderfalls, Smallville, Gilmore Girls and Jake 2.0
They could have wrote the most brilliant episodes ever, and if SMG wasn’t willing to act the way they directed, then that’s it. The fact is, she was just phoning in her performances and doing a piss poor job of that too. In Entropy, she was supposed to be horrified/hurt when she saw Spike with Anya, to the point that her reaction gave away their relationship. She didn’t have a reaction at all! Watch the ep again keeping that in mind.
Moreso, Fury (specifically) commented on the fact that she was just impossible to direct, and she routinely left the set early/when she felt like it to get her nails done, for example. BTW, Fury was the exectutive producer in S5 and a writer for AtS in the first four seasons.
Just because Joss walked away didn’t give SMG the right to completely shut down and do a half-assed job. There were a lot of problems in the last two seasons, but she contributed to them.
Furthermore, I wasn’t bashing SMG. paperbackwriter wanted to know why she avoided BtVS related-projects. I didn’t make any of this shit up. It’s all out there in interviews, behind-the-scenes reports, set reports, etc.
As I said previously, their not being in the Encyclopedia (which would imply that Roddenberry approved their being left out) is what makes them non-canon and I am only assuming that the quality and hokiness of the episodes is what makes them apocryphal.
Anyway, we’re hijacking this thread with Trek discussion. If you want to talk about this further, you can start an OP about it. I’d be interested to debate it further (and with other people) if you would as well.
God damn it. That was me, not Gr8Kat – I forgot to log her out. Sorry.