I assume from various pieces of evidence I’ve encountered that there are a bunch of Star Trek fans out there making their own fan films based on the franchise.
I further assume that most of these are pretty lousy.
But I don’t know, because I haven’t seen them.
One fan-produced Star Trek effort has stood out, though, and I have actually seen some of it (though not enough to do a full review at this point).
The series is called Star Trek New Voyages, and it has managed to achieve unprecedented success.
The idea is that the series will use modern amateur film techniques (which are getting quite good) to produce the episodes that would have been needed to fill out the remaining two years of the original Enterprise’s "five year mission" (y’know: the two years they didn’t get to film because they got cancelled after season 3) and these episodes will be released direct-to-web.
The show thus features the original series cast of characters, though with different actors playing them (usually).
What makes the series unusual is the degree of quality that the folks behind it are trying to put into it. Their sets, for example, are virtually identical to those used on the original series–so identical, in fact, that when Star Trek Enterprise needed a copy of Mr. Sulu’s extendible console viewer thingie (as seen here) for their Mirror Universe episodes and the prop department didn’t have it any more, the producers of the TV show called the New Voyages folks to borrow the fans’ version of the prop rather than make their own.
The level of quality that they’re trying to put into the show has been so great (relative to other fan productions operating on a shoestring) that they’ve been able to get numerous professionals connected with the TV series to participate in New Voyages as well. This includes not only Gene Roddenberry’s son and actors who had minor roles in the original series but also writers from the original series, Next Gen, and Deep Space 9, including such noteables as D. C. Fontana and David Gerrold.
And now some of the main cast from the original series is getting into the act.
This September they’ll be releasing an episode in which Walter Koenig reprises his role as Checkov (an older version of himself who meets the younger version normally on New Voyages), and I’m anticipating that this episode will be used as Koenig’s swan song for the character (i.e., I’m expecting the older Checkov to die in it and thus tie up his character arc).
George Takei is also going to be reprising his role as Sulu in an upcoming episode.
Unfortunately, they’re only making one of these a year at present, so they may have to re-cast all the parts once again before they get to the end of the fifth year (if they get that far), but it’s interesting to note the success they’ve had thus far.
Now, there’s a specific reason I mention all this.
More on that later.
