Star Trek posts video highlights how Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks crossover happend

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds crossed over with Star Trek: Lowe Decks.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks crossed over and it was an episode. While we’ll dive deeper into how we felt about the crossover, the simple fact that it exists is impressive. While crossovers within the franchise are as old as The Next Generation, never before has Star Trek had two different mediums get fused together.

Lower Decks is exclusively animated, while Prodigy is exclusively live-action. That makes it harder for crossovers to happen, as the likeness of live-action characters is far easier to duplicate in animation, but it’s not as easy the other way.

Animated characters aren’t cast by how their actors look. Sure, in some shows like Archer, that does happen but it’s done specifically, like with Christian Slater playing Slater. That was done intentionally. With Lower Decks, that wasn’t the case. They cast a group of talent who could do the job required; it didn’t matter if they looked anything like their animated counterparts.

In fact, when pitched, everyone thought it’d be a Strange New Worlds episode that was animated.

So they got lucky that Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome looked enough like their animated alter-egos to pull this off, but it goes deeper from there.

The crossover is helped extensively by Jack Quaid

When watching the behind-the-scenes video, a certain respect settles in when you hear Jack Quaid, who plays Brad Boilmer, talk about how he brought the physical mannerisms from the animation to live action. That’s something you don’t think about much, ‘how would an actor bring a cartoon to life’, because it isn’t something we see all that often.

And when we do, its not something that gets a lot of focus. It’s usually more about how the live-action actor or actress is doing with bringing a character to life. Not how an animated voice actor will then bring his character to life in live action.

It’s a very unique situation to find yourself in.