GEEK OF THE WEEK: Curt Danhauser

Welcome to another new feature here at Monsters and Rockets. In Geek of the Week, we'll honor the people who give nerds a good name. First up, Curt Danhuaser, the very busy webmaster of Danhausertrek.com.

In the '70s, the Filmation company produced an Emmy-winning Star Trek cartoon that aired on Saturday mornings. (Click the image at left to purchase the entire series on DVD from Amazon.) The show featured the voices of the original cast (with an overworked James Doohan providing the voices for most of the aliens) and scripts by respected sci-fi scribes of the day like Larry Niven, David Gerrold and D.C. Fontana. While the animation suffered from the arthritic stiffness common to the era's TV cartoons, the show had a stylish look and the cartoon format allowed the Enterprise crew to explore strange new worlds and seek out new life and new civilizations that would have been far too weird and expensive for live-action TV.

There's a lot to like about the animated Star Trek, but over the years it's sort of become the black sheep of the Trek family and it's rarely mentioned when people are discussing Trek's long history. Fortunately Curt Danhauser is doing all he can to make sure that the animated Trek should never be forgotten. How much does Danhauser love the Star Trek cartoon? Enough that he has spent 14 years creating an absolutely amazing, exhaustive (and exhausting) website dedicated to it. There's a complete history of the show's production, pages on indidividual episodes, write-ups on all the ships and aliens, even a "personnel" page featuring short profiles of every single Starfleet member seen in the series.

But Danhauser doesn't stop there, bless his dorky heart. He's actually making broadcast-quality new episodes of the animated series, and posting them for free. He recently completed his most recent episode, And Let the Heavens Fall. Danhauser's website is a work of nerd genius, and he has more than earned the crown of Monsters and Rockets' Geek of the Week.

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