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Star Trek: New Voyages, The Fan-Based Star Trek Series (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The New York Times has published an article on Star Trek: New Voyages, a fan production that's based on TOS. “People come from all over the world to take part in this — Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia and every state in the union,” said James Cawley, the show’s executive producer. “That’s the magic of Star Trek. It’s spawned this whole generation of fans who went on to professional careers — doctors, lawyers, engineers — who are now participating in that shared love here.” With TOS fans generally being less than enamored with the movie reboots, are fan produced web series the wave of the future?
I just watched the 5 eps on the website over the last week, very enjoyable, even if fan made. They even had them in HD.
I really wish we had a star trek series on tv, over the last year I re-watched DS9, last year I re-watched Voyager. I finished the Stargate Series last month.
The state of sci-fi on tv really sucks right now.
What I am still surprised at is the copyright owners don't hunt and pursue their fans and try to destroy them like so many other companies normally would.
I just hope it doesn't happen any time soon considering the new film series that have been happening now.
Of course, I am really hoping that these people are smart enough to use these fan projects to gauge interest in a possible new series.
This is pretty much free research in to target markets for new products done by others.
And since these things tend to be fairly high quality, it wouldn't even damage reputation of the series by proxy.
This is one common issue that a lot of these companies face when they end up issuing C&Ds, they absolutely shit themselves and think a fan project will ruin the reputation of their products and dilute them so much that they becoming meaningless.
But that very rarely happens. Stupid things like that usually end up on Fan-fiction, not actual full-on productions like these.
Better yet are those companies that even embrace their fans works and give them an official greenlight and support for work.
Sometimes even the actors or staff that have worked on the series have even been involved in stuff like this. And that includes some Star Trek fan series.
These companies actually have the brains to realize their fans aren't a bunch of blabbering morons and will treat their fan-work with respect that it deserves since they are actually putting their own money on the line, or crowd-funded money in some occasions, in which case it is their own reputation on the line, which is an even bigger thing than a company trying to protect its IP.
The whole issues of fan-work productions are self-correcting, they can't really damage a persons IP. Very very few people are stupid enough not to know the difference between a fan-work and official product, especially in the geek sector of media.
Crytek and Bethesda are others who have allowed fan works with Timesplitters and Fallout respectively, in the gaming sector.
Bethesda is one that is another seemingly paradoxical situation considering how their parent company tried to sue MOJANG of all people for a game called Scrolls totally being a rip-off of The Elder Scrolls.
Crytek have said with the current Timesplitters Rewind fan-game that if it actually managed to get enough people back in to the series that they will seriously consider a full official game on PC. The quality of work on the fan-game so far is top-tier, done in spare time by a group of fans around the world.
Fallout, likewise, the fan series Nuka Break, hilarious series, very Fallout-like in comedy, great special effects and make-up team.
If only more companies would officially support fan-works. It really does improve relations with the fans and can even re-ignite interest in older series.
"Open sourcing" your IPs would be an even bigger leap to improving those relations.
Hell, even just allowing people to "hop on-board" and influence a products future can be a step in the right direction. So many companies just straight up ignore their fan-base (Nintendo!) and it just comes back to bite them in however many years time. These companies just never learn.
Star Trek New Voyages doesn't have a Doohan relative on their cast. They have had George Takei and Walter Koenig reprise their TOS roles, though.
Try watching Andromeda. I always wrote it off without watching but ended up really enjoying it. Tyr was everything the Klingons should have been. True enlightened warriors instead of playing politics.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard