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Star Trek Continues is a fantastic fan series. I've been watching Star Trek fan films since the first episode of Star Trek New Voyages, Come What May, was released. It has been amazing to witness the subculture grow with the technology that enables its existence.

And consider what this says about Star Trek as a cultural force. It was an optimistic message during pessimistic times. In the 60s people needed hope for the future. Star Trek filled that need so well that now, in very different (but still uncertain) times, we end up with Star Trek spontaneously manifesting itself into existence all over the place. It's like a program embedded into the cultural psyche: Need hope? Go to Star Trek. No Star Trek? Make Star Trek. Humans are crazy.

I'm not sure if new episodes of my favorite 60s television show will really offer hype to today's post-modern outlook. I would love to see a Star Trek allegory on contemporary identity politics and the formalization and modeling of all of reality into the data-mined, consultant-approved Matrix we all inhabit today. It would probably have to be DS9esque in outlook, though. On that note, I thought Caprica was going to be the crown-jewel of socially-relevant contemporary science-fiction television but it got shit-canned after two seasons. Imagine if that happened to Babylon 5, what we would have missed out on? Now we have Doctor Who, whose offered fantasy is "leave the whole fucking planet behind". Huh.

Star Trek New Voyages just released their 9th official episode and a new one is out soon this month. Starship Exeter finally released the last act of their second episode last year, after a nearly 10 year wait. Check them out!

Hell, New Voyages even managed to find an actor with all the style & ego of Shatner to play Kirk.

The one fan show I'd love to see continue, Starship Exeter, is rumored to be closing down after its second episode is on the servers.

I also have extreme fondness for Hidden Frontier, shut down after its seventh season and which generated not one, but TWO spinoff series. Although most of HF's camera work could be considered cheesy as hell, you gotta remember that they had a budget of about 500 bucks an episode. I woulda loved to see this if they'd gotten any real money to play with; no more acting in front of a green screen...

And I've seen Episode 1 of Odessey (one of HF's spinoffs), it was great.

The current prequel idea has Hollywood screwup written all over it. Why don't they buy the rights to "Starship Exeter" and do a big screen/big budget version of that? Now you've got a whole new story line set in a familiar ST era following all the known ST rules.

What I think this particular story means is that the Star Trek universe wants to stop moving forward. In time, I mean. The creators of Star Trek have - starting with Enterprise and continuing until now - lost the guts to do anything but cash in on past glories and old history. There's no drive to create NEW history. Old Star Trek is popular still - yeah, because it's old. New Old Star Trek will get nowhere. "Rebooting" the Star Trek universe from Kirk and Spock will get nowhere. They need to go forward. REALLY forward. Five hundred years beyond TNG. Build an absolutely perfect Federation and then hurl seriously gigantic threats at it. Go to the limits of current science fiction and use the cream. Transhumanism and stuff!

At least with fan films I can still get Star Trek:

New Voyages
Star Trek Hidden Frontier
Starship Exeter
Tales of the Seventh Fleet
Star Trek: Intrepid
USS Hathaway

Audio:

Star Trek: Pioneers
Star Trek: The Section 31 Files

New Voyages
Star Trek Hidden Frontier
Starship Exeter
Tales of the Seventh Fleet
Star Trek: Intrepid
USS Hathaway

Audio:

Star Trek: Pioneers
Star Trek: The Section 31 Files

Some of these are quite enjoyable

It reminds me of another fan project I ran across a while back. Lots of work done on the set, effects, everything technical looks great...but the acting and script are...well, kinda painful, to be blunt. Someone else mentioned lighting and makeup as being a bit weak; I imagine some sound work would go a fair ways too.

Yeah, I know Exeter and Revelations are done by amateur volunteers, and from that perspective they're both impressive. But I'm still somewhat struck by the apparant imbalance of effort in both cases. Really, they're both cool projects and hope they continue their work, I just hope they focus on the weak bits and keep improving.

-U
Only anon 'cause I never made an account.

Forget them ole Next Gen'rs, that Starship Exeter movie had better acting and a superior plot.
Seriously, I enjoyed watching that fan-based production as much as I enjoyed Nemesis. They both sucked equally and one cost a lot less to make.

Yeah, the more people supplying it the better. Not that there's much demand... I've had it out on Gnutella, Kazaa, and WinMX since around 3pm, and there's only been 9 files downloaded (one guy DLed all 5, and a couple people grabbed one or two random files each). This guy's mirror might be why. That's where I downloaded my copies @ 350K, and I just checked and I can still download @ 160K from him. Not bad, considering what large movie files and Slashdot links do to most servers...

After watching it, I can definitely say they got the poor acting and cheesy special effects right. :) Still, it's impressive for something done on their spare time with no external motivation ($$$, film school project, etc), and far better than I could do.