The "cheesiest" chapter of Star Trek isn't Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Star Trek can be cheesy sometimes. It absolutely can be. It's not a bad thing though. If you look at the Batman franchise, people love Michael Keaton as much as they do Adam West. Very different tones, and very different characters. Yet, beloved. That's not too dissimilar from Star Trek, as Trek can be cheesy and fun too.

Space.com just called Star Trek V: The Final Frontier the cheesiest chapter in Star Trek history. It's a fair title, as this is the film that had a celestial being pretending to be "God" and still needing a starship to fulfill his plans. While that's pretty darn cheesy, it's not the most cheese-filled Star Trek property going.

A case can be made for the Original Series, as it's basically Velveeta, but while it had its moments, it also was very sincere a good deal of the team. The week-in and week-out performances would change depending on the script but the cheese factor only reached Tostitos levels on rare occasions.

No, the perpetually cheesy show, no matter how hard they tried to make it anything but, was the sequel series to Star Trek's 1966 offering, Star Trek: The Animated Series.

The show is among the least liked aspects of the franchise, admittedly, so it may seem like low-hanging fruit, but there's a good reason that when we talk about shows that are the Pepper Jack of the franchise, it's the animated series. It comes down simply to the animation.

It was the style of the era. It was janky, and stiff, and often scenes were recycled so that costs stayed down. Anyone who's ever watched Scooby Doo Where Are You? knows what I'm talking about. Anytime they did a hallway chase, you'd just see the same animation looped to cut costs. Star Trek was no different in that regard, but it didn't have the same charm as other Saturday morning cartoons.

While Scooby Doo and other series like it at the time were just sugary goodness, designed to sell things to kids, Star Trek was a morality play. It lost a lot of its essence moving from a 40+ minute series to that of a 20+ cartoon affair. The heft of a typical Star Trek episode was there and instead was a poorly produced action series that had no charm of the original.

Just janky animation that doesn't hold up anymore. Yet, even Star Trek: The Animated Series may not be the cheesiest of all. Have you ever seen The Marvel Super Heroes cartoon?

"When Captain America throws his mighty shield..."

Yeah, it's bad. But in the best way. It just goes to show that even when things are cheese and not great, they still have some value. If you can appreciate its absurdist nature.