The Animated Series has always been considered canon

@GuyP2 Not always. In the 80s, Gene Roddenberry said it wasn't. It's only been considered canon recently.

Yes, LD and TAS are canon, since they were both officially produced shows or movies.

There is no such thing as an universal canon of Star Trek. Star Trek is a fictional universe, it's a franchise that is made up of all kinds of stories, TV shows, movies, novels, games, toys, posters, fan fiction - you name it. Nothing of this is real. And no part of it is "more real" or "right" than any other part. Whatever you choose to be your story, your "reality" of Star Trek, is canon.

Having said this, a subset of these stories can be defined as "canon" for practical reasons in a given context. But always bear in mind, every such definition is purely arbitrary. "Canons" are used in the following contexts:

• Your personal canon, your truth about Star Trek, as said above. Often called "head canon".

• When discussing Trek in a given group, you can define a canon for this conversation, so it's clear what you are talking about. This is what we have in Memory Alpha, and is defined here. In Memory Alpha, everything published by the copyright owner and shown in moving pictures (Movies, shows on TV and in streaming etc.) is canon, other material is not canon. Then again, the linked Memory Alpha Canon entry explicitely says that canon is not defined in an absolutle way, that "canons" may differ and that it defines the canon inside MA for that very reason.

• Authors may define a set of material as "canon" to use it as a reference for future episodes, so to keep the whole narrative consistant. With Star Trek, as a rule of thumb, the live action shows and movies are refernced most often. But then again, there are many examples when plot points from TAS, the novels, comics, even computer games are used in later shows and plot points from the live action material are ignored or contradicted.

• The copyright holder may define an official "canon", as Disney did when they made the extended universe into "legends". But then again, this has little consequences. It's still all fictional. If for you, the "legends" stories are the real history of the far away galaxy, and the sequels are not, there's nothing the law department of Disney can do to make you having it their way.

• As for Star Trek, Paramount has never defined such an official canon. All we have is personal opinions that staff members said in interviews. Gene Roddenberry did consider TAS apocryphal in the 80ies, as quoted above. The Canon entry of Memory Alpha that I linked above gives more quotes by Paula Block and Roberto Ocri, giving their own definitions of "canon". But these are just the personal thoughts those people had when being questioned. - And I think defining an "official" canon was a bad decision by Disney and not doing so is a good policy by Paramount.

So, to answer your question, as we are talking inside Memory Alpha here, the "right" canon to apply, if any, is the MA canon, according to which, as a TV show, TAS is clearly canon, as is LD. Simple as this, no room for debate. But this doesn't mean it has to be your canon as well.

As for what Mr. Roddenberry said in the 80ies, aside from being just his personal "canon" without further consequences, as said above, one should also remember that he changed his mind almost as often as his consorts.

When he himself made TAS in the 70ies, he clearly intended it to be just the continuing of TOS, depicting the last two years of the five year mission that they didn't have the chance to film in the 60ies (and therefore, of course, "canon").

It was only when they were planning Phase II and then doing the movies that TAS became inconvienient - it made it harder to avoid contradictions with his new ideas, so he wanted to get rid of it.

@MaryMoss It was considered Canon originally. It was then effectively de-canonised as part of renegotiating contracts for spin-off works (books, games, etc) after the first season of TNG.

Concepts from The Animated Series were no longer allowed to be used, but also you couldn't have recurring Original Characters between works. (i.e. if you wrote a series of books, then the only characters allowed to appear in more than one book were official characters from the shows/movies)

However… while it's often claimed that this was done by Roddenberry, several of the people working on Star Trek at the time instead suggest that it was actually the work of Richard H. Arnold, whom Roddenberry had named the Star Trek "Archivist".

When Roddenberry died, Arnold was almost immediately kicked to the curb, and episodes started including references to TAS events/characters/locations. (Also a bunch of popular writers who had stopped doing any Star Trek stuff returned to the fold. Many of them had had works rejected by Arnold, or even rewritten to the point where they disavowed the final result.)

@Chronocidal hence my question (it was canon, then wasn't, then was again etc.).

But I've yet to see anyone using the life support belt, after the events of "Beyond The Farthest Star"...

Many intersting concepts have been introduced once and then never used again over the history of Star Trek, from TOS to ENT. This has nothing to do with "canon". The live support belts were not used a second time in TAS itself, though Beyond the Farthest Star was the first of 22 episode.

And if the producers of the 80ies movies would have liked the life support belts for plot or just spectacle - and if they had an affordable way to depict them in live action - they would by all means have used them, regardles if novel authors were licensed to use M'Ress or not.

By the way, I always loved the life support belts. If I ever get the chance to make a fan film (a man can dream), these are one of the thing that would be in.

Personally, though, I understand why the life support belts got omitted from future Trek productions, as they're a bit cheap from a storytelling perspective--they gave any character equipped with them too easy a way out of certain situations meant to endanger them, and if the audience knows that, they aren't going to see the stakes are really as high as claimed and be disappointed. Plus, it makes it harder sometimes to write a story if your character is given too many ways to squeeze out of a predicament, and the life support belts make it a bit too easy to fall into such entrappings.

TNG had the same problem starting out, hence why later Trek has often added a number of minor caveats to a lot of the tech and ideas it introduced, so to try temper them and have a "best of both worlds" approach to it by striking a greater balance between too much and too little. But that's admittedly harder to do with the life support belt, as it either saves your life or it doesn't, so I can see how it was decided to just admit them altogether.

The protection the life support belt gives also always kinda struck me as a bit flimsy anyway--I feel like you'd always be putting a whole lot of faith in it reliably working every time. But that's me.

...weren't the big boxy belt-buckle things in TMP supposed to be their version of the life support belt, they just were never clearly demonstrated in action in the film? Or am I remembering that wrong? I seem to recall thinking there was a strong connection between the two, conceptually...

The PERSCAN device seen on the TMP uniforms is to link each crews’ vitals to sickbay. With these, if a crew member is injured or wounded, sickbay is already on the alert with all pertinent information.

And we never see them again.

I do not recall them providing life support functions, as the TAS belts do. When Spock leaves the Enterprise to examine V’Ger he is in an environmental suit.

@JMills095

Well, in fairness, the life support belts were meant for emergency situations. If you were going to deliberately put yourself into such a situation were you could prepare in advance for it, it was my understanding that putting on an environmental suit was still the more ideal option in the long run.

Of course, it occurs to me that probably yet another reason the life support belts were introduced in TAS at all was because it was a nice budgetary saver--it's easier and cheaper to animate the life support belt effect rather than have to redraw whole characters in environmental suits and whatever other protections needed (which could be another reason why they didn't persist in later Trek--that was no longer a factor, production-wise).

Anyway, sounds like I was indeed misremembering the PERSCAN things from TMP. Figured I might've been. But since we're on the subject...they may have not persisted past TMP, but it occurs to me that by the 24th century, it probably wouldn't have been hard to build combadges to include a similar function, at least enough to provide basic data. Kinda makes me wish someone had thought of that and already implemented such an idea, but oh well.