The first thing that struck me is, as in the ST Classic series, the lack of women among command-level officers in Starfleet. Classic/Animated (essentially one series begun with human actors and concluded with animations) was the last ST context with that limitation, and I am always astonished for a few minutes watching any episode from that series. That deficiency, both in the officers and in the canonical declaration (as parodied in the post subject above), was remedied starting with Next Gen and all subsequent ST series.
The next surprise to me was the animation. The animated series was done by Filmation, reputedly one of the best in the business 40 years ago; nonetheless, any typical kid's cartoon aired today has markedly superior animation to ST:TAS. It does my heart good to see something that has actually improved over my lifetime.
The crew voices, at least of the stars, were performed by the original cast of Classic (William Shatner and his late lamented sidekicks Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley). All in all, it was a convincing job. They even enlisted Dorothy Fontana to write or edit some of the new episodes, which means they were a significant improvement over some of Classic's disappointing third season episodes.
