The Fun Police really misinterpreted this. This is not saying anything about how good or bad LD is. I was just expecting something more like what TAS was to TOS. Other than the fact that TAS episodes were half the length and that the animated nature allowed them to afford to depict more exotic things like underwater scenes and six-limbed bridge crew members, TOS/TAS were mostly the same. They had roughly the same degree of adventure, philosophy, humor, etc. On the other hand, LD targeted a different audience by focusing on qualities that had not been prioritized in any earlier series. I was just disappointed by how different LD is from TAS.
I guess the secondary directive of the Federation is to gatekeep having fun?
Animation isn’t for children by default. Only boring, unimaginative people talk that way about animated stories.
Star Trek has always had violence.
Star Trek has often had profanity. In another alien language sure, but we all knew which Klingon words were curses.
Does sophomoric humor graduate to senior humor when it’s subtle enough that you didn’t catch it as a child? Humor is SUPER subjective and VERY sensitive to the current zeitgeist, so comparing humor across a franchise that has been around this long seems a little absurd. Data pushed Crusher into the ocean for a laugh, that seems pretty sophomoric to me. Bones regularly joked about Spock’s racial differences, that also seems pretty crude by today’s standards.
In fact, early animation was not even thought of to appeal to a particular age group. It was just a fun thing to do with movies that you couldn’t do with live action. And people who did comic strips in newspapers, never intended to be just for kids, were hired to make them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertie_the_Dinosaur