JUNE 15, 2022 - Some consider Star Trek: The Animated Series canon; some consider it garbage. Whichever camp you belong to, there’s no denying that it had its effect on future Treks, and today we celebrate the man who brought the holodeck to the small screen. Sort of.

Chuck Menville was born on this day in 1940 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Spurred by a yearning to become an animator, he moved to Los Angeles, California at the age of 19 and landed a gig with Walt Disney Productions. He served as an assistant on the animated film The Jungle Book, but didn’t love working for the Mouse House, so shifted gears into writing with his friend Len Janson. Thus began their long-term partnership.

Menville and Janson co-produced a series of short live-action films in the 1960s, including the Academy Award-nominated Stop Look and Listen, an experimental film using an innovative technique known as “pixilation.” Pixilation is a stop-motion technique, using live actors as frame-by-frame subjects in an animated film. As with claymation and other forms of stop-motion, the actors pose for each frame of film and change position slightly for each new frame. This painstaking process uses the actors more as puppets than performers, and often gives the film a surreal feel. Disney and Hollywood studios had long since abandoned the technique, seeing little use for it, but Menville and Janson revived it for Stop Look and Listen, a 10-minute short comedy. It was filmed primarily in Santa Monica’s Griffith Park and took a look at the contrasting styles of two drivers. In addition to writing and producing the picture, Menville and Janson took the starring roles.

The partners went on to use the pixilaiton technique for a variety of short films and gasoline commercials, and by the early 1970s, they had come to the attention of a little animation production company called Filmation.

Filmation had been around since 1963, and by 1973 the studio had reached a deal with Paramount Television and Gene Roddenberry to produce a cartoon series based on Star Trek. Menville and Janson’s first assignment was to write the ninth episode of this new animated series. Entitled “Once Upon a Planet,” the episode saw the crew of the starship Enterprise revisit the “amusement park” planet first seen in the Original Series episode “Shore Leave.” Things go awry when McCoy is attacked by the Queen of Hearts and Uhura is captured by the planet’s computer. The episode is bananas (although one could argue it is no less so than the TOS episode that inspired it,) but years later it was referenced in another series. In “Once Upon a Planet,” Spock noted that Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a favorite of his mother Amanda’s and that she often read it to him. In Star Trek: Discovery’s “Context Is for Kings”, Spock’s foster sister, Michael Burnham, confirmed this fact.

Menville and Janson weren’t finished adding to Star Trek canon. In their second episode for TAS, “The Practical Joker,” the Enterprise itself seems to have gained sentience when the food dispensers start materializing drinks in dribble glasses and the captain finds a sign on his back stating “KIRK IS A JERK.”McCoy, Uhura, and Sulu decide the safest place for them is the recreation room, which turns out to be the precursor to the holodeck, with the ability to program various environments to experience.

By the 1980s, Menville was a regular contributor to Saturday morning cartoons like The Smurfs and The Real Ghostbusters. Late in his life, he was nominated for a Humanitas Prize for the episode “Opah” on Land of the Lost. He also wrote the story for “Birds of a Feather,” a 1992 episode of Batman: The Animated Series, but died before he could pen the script, leaving behind two children, Scott, a musician and voice artist, and Chad, a writer.

Please join us here at DSTN in honoring the innovative man who co-created the progenitor of the holodeck, Chuck Menville, on what would have been his 82nd birthday. For a full list of his filmography, please visit Wikipedia.