Listen to the background music from Star Trek: The Animated Series

The music from cartoons, especially the stuff made in the 60s and 70s is criminally underrated. Many big time talents made beautiful tunes that set the mood for low quality animation, often carrying the story forward when budgets were tight.

A few weeks ago, I talked about the talented Ray Ellis, and 11db11’s amazing work trying to reclaim his music from the Spider-Man Animated Series. Ellis also worked on other great shows.

One of my favorites is Star Trek: The Animated Series. It has deep stories, new characters, and music that we just didn’t get in the original Star Trek. Sadly, they never did a full release of the soundtrack to the show.

That is where the internet comes into play. Intrepid YouTuber Grimbot2 took a stab at editing together the available music and put together a great 15 minutes of audio that is full of great songs and musical cues. Here is a rough breakdown of what you will hear courtesy of another YouTuber, MetaRed Coding and Gaming.

0:00 Theme Song
1:00 Intro to episode #1
1:15 Intro to episode #2
1:27 Mystery #1 Music / Part of Intro to episode #2
2:20 Mystery #1 Sound
2:28 Mystery #2 / Romance Music
6:10 Action #1 Sound
6:15 Action #1 Music
6:43 Action #2 / Surprised Sound #1
6:58 Surprised Sound #2
7:14 Action #2 Music
8:41 Mystery #3 Music
9:20 Mystery #4 Music
10:14 Action #3 Sound
10:19 Action #3 Music
11:10 Action #4 Sound
11:13 Action #4 Music
11:57 Intro to episode #3 / Action Music #5
12:30 Mystery #5 / Part of Action #5
13:02 Mystery #6 Music
13:43 Mystery #7 Music
14:41 Action #6
14:54 Closing theme

While not as long as the Spider-Man music, this is great stuff and if you are a fan of Star Trek, it will really trigger some great memories.

Thanks to Geekfilter, the Co-host of Saturday Morning Trek, for sharing this with me.

About Ray Ellis

Ray Ellis, who passed away in 2008 was producer, arranger and conductor who while working under the pseudonym, Yvette Blais, with Norm Prescott created all the music used at the Filmation animation studio. He also composed to the music to one of my favorite game shows, Sale of the Century, and probably more impressively provided the orchestration for Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin (1958).