Risa

TAS was great for what it was. Animation at the time was super cheap and outsourced, so you can't really put them blame on them for something that was pretty standard at the time.

One of the neat things about Star Trek: The Animated Series is that they were able to have crew members and aliens that were more than just humans with a couple of prosthetics. Aside from the Horta, and a couple glowing space things, basically every alien in The Original Series was a quickly painted extra.

You'd be hard pressed to find someone who says TAS was their favorite Trek, but it's probably in my top 4 Trek series.

I only have vague memories of most of it from watching it as a kid, but recently my spouse and I decided to give it a watch one night and made it through the first 7-ish episodes. About half of the stories were "meh" but the other half were actually pretty good by TOS standards.

Mind you that's just the stories. The animation itself is definitely a limiting factor, and a lot of what happens is either very sparsely animated or they literally have characters explaining what's happening rather than fully animating the events. A weird upside of that is that most episodes are practically radio plays, and you can just listen to the audio and understand what's going on.

No Star Trek fan would claim to love them all equally. We tend to have very strong opinions about this ever since the first Kirk vs. Picard debates back in the 80s

Star Trek peaked with the show that I specifically watched when I was twelve years old. Everything else is too cheesy, tastless, tacky, or boring, but not the show that hooked me when I, specifically, was twelve years old. That's a fact.

Which one? ;)

Lower Decks is too fast paced for my older brain. I tried to get into TAS but I wasn't identifying with the characters well.

But I ADORE Prodigy and am apalled that it got cut while we continue to run Discovery.

I have a soft spot for it because they did an episode that added Larry Niven's Kzinti to the Star Trek universe. I know TAS isn't usually considered canon, but that was fun.