Legacy animations won't play

Okay, so I’ve been having no luck trying to get my animations to play at all in game. I exported .FBX files from 3ds Max using a biped rig, and everything seemed to be fine in unity aside from having to set the rig type to Legacy for whatever reason. No big deal, I don’t need foot IK or anything, I just need my animations to play. Everything works fine in the preview in the inspector, the animations plug into the Animation component just fine, and console throws no errors. However, the animations won’t play in game either by checking Play Automatically or calling GetComponent().Play(“Example”). I can find no answers in the sparse documentation regarding legacy animation or any of the pages and pages of questions I sifted through to find someone experiencing the same issue. I’ve played with every import setting I could, made sure Batched Static wasn’t checked, or was checked, or any variation there of. I’ve tried attaching the animations to my actual player, as well as just dragging the imported model into the scene. I’ve tried copying the animations to outside of the imported model and calling them from there, and I’ve tried checking to see if an animation is already playing before calling an animation to avoid sticking on the first frame. I’ve also called a function outside of update to eliminate that possibility. I cant use an Animator Controller because of the Legacy animations. Any help would be seriously appreciated, I am at a stand-still here and can’t very well make a game without animations.

If you really really want to use Legacy, Duplicate your animations by selecting them and pressing Ctrl-D. Select the duplicate. At the top right hand corner above the inspector click the little triangle next to the lock symbol. Select DEBUG underneath NORMAL.

The inspector un-greys and you can select the Legacy checkbox.

Found my issue. When you drag the imported model into a scene, it creates a biped and a mesh as children, and while investigating the imported mesh, I noticed that it is a Skinned Mesh Renderer as opposed to a mesh filter / mesh renderer. Hopefully this helps someone else.