WI: No Star Trek Fan Film Boom

[Emperor Norton I]

The specify, what if there had been no Star Trek fan film movement post-ENT? Following the cancellation of Enterprise and the mixed quality of Nemesis, there was no official Star Trek series and Paramount really had put Star Trek out to pasture on the whole. In the wake of that, Star Trek fan films, which had always existed to some degree, really took off and there was a special focus on the Original Series era. These fan film series have included Starship Exeter, Star Trek New Voyages and quite a few others, and it has been argued, fairly I think, that Star Trek New Voyages showed that people would accept other people playing the main characters of the Original Series, and pushed Paramount to do a reboot of that setting. You could argue that fan films lead to the return of Star Trek when it happened on the whole.

So what if that did not happen?

 

[JVM]

I'm n ot so sure about butterflies, but I can give you a pretty simple PoD - some fan film project in 2006 or so is so poorly-managed and poorly-done, perhaps via a bad Kickstarter-esque system, hyping up a purported film and asking for money, only for it to fall apart and be released half-assedly with poor, unfinished effects work and a poor or unfinished script. It gains some outside attention and bad publicity, and fanfilms in general become the butt of Star Trek nerd jokes for a little while. This creates an aversion to the trend for more serious amateur filmmakers who worry about being 'lumped in'.

 

[DrakonFin]

One thing to point out here: I think it is pretty hard to avoid the ST fan film boom, given that around the turn of the century, there was now a lot of people around the world with an interest in the franchise, suffering from withdrawal effect when new shows were not on the horizon (or perhaps that was just the post-TNG blues), and perhaps most importantly, having the technical capabilities and hardware easily available for making such films. Really I think that for avoiding a number of fan films being made circa 2000-2010 we would have to butterfly Star Trek fan culture and mid-to-late 90s advances in computers and digital cameras.

The Finnish Star Wreck series of ST fan films is a case in point - a guy started making simple Star Trek animations of his PC in 1992, and several increasingly tolerable installations later, in 2006 he, with a group of friends, released Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning, a full-length ST/Babylon 5-crossover fan film, with mostly poor acting and a somewhat meh script, but really top notch space battle scenes outdoing ST:TNG and B5 original graphics, painstakingly rendered on a few home computers.

What I am saying here is that these kind of fan films were made because people were short on ST-related things to watch, and now for the first time the fans could make them on the cheap and with (relatively) cool graphics. Motive, opportunity and the means conspired to make the "boom" - in different countries, not just the US.

So to avoid it - 1) remove the motive: have one or several passable-to-good Star Trek series follow DS9 and Voyager, along with Enterprise, extended for several seasons, and better yet have some of them premier in, say 95-97 to coincide with the other series for effectively taking up all the fans' time, or 2) remove the opportunity: somehow conspire to make ST fans more rare and isolated, without potential collaborators for putting together fan productions, perhaps weakening the whole fan movement around the franchise already before, or 3) remove the means: somehow make it so that the required computer hardware and software as well as relatively cheap/easy-to-use digital cameras are slower in appearing and don't lend themselves to such fan projects.

Otherwise, I am at a loss. It seems to me that it was almost inevitable that at least some fairly elaborate fan films/series would pop up roughly during the time of the "boom". The intensity of the "boom" can be tweaked with minor PODs, of course. In the Pirkinning, for example, could be torpedoed with fairly small changes. But beyond that, I don't know.

 

[JamesHunter]

Well part of why Phase II became so sucessful was because Paramount accepted it and surviving TOS cast and crew embraced it. A cease and desist from Paramount/cbs could have killed it really quickly. Also if DC Fontana and Walter Konig hadn't come on board for "To serve all my days" then things might not have been kicked up to the near professional level they became. Come what may and in harms way are fun, but they aren't gonna get a hugo nomination as happened later, and the Special effects are not very good.

If new Voyages/phase II and Starship Exeter were to be butterflyed away, you'd be left with hidden frontier as the top fan series, which isn't very good and has low production values. Also no Star Wreak would likely butterfly Iron Sky, not sure if thats a good thing or not?

Still as someone said the fan film boom was pretty inevitable. Fans had the advantage that the tech matured just as CbS was prepared to be tolerant of fan productions. The same thing happened with Star Wars (Lucas gave out an award for a while, don't know if he still does).

 

[DrakonFin]

Also no Star Wreak would likely butterfly Iron Sky, not sure if thats a good thing or not?

It would be a bad thing, whether you like the actual finished film or not. As a phenomenon Iron Sky showed that you can create a real film with a budget of 10 million Euros starting from a purely amateur/fan film base, building on crowdsourcing and -funding in the crucial stages of the project. And that you can do that in a small country like Finland, no less.

As a success story, Iron Sky was only a limited one if you consider the quality, reception and sales of the film, but the project in its general particulars has most likely served as an inspiration for many people who took part in it in some small way or even heard about it and are working with their own little film schemes at the moment. Quite possibly some of them will make it big or at least relatively successful in the future.

As butterflies go, avoiding the (so far) last Star Wreck installment and thus Iron Sky is an intriguing one, because the effects of that would be so diffuse and hard to predict - we might still see a major director or actor(s) in the future credit the beginning of their career(s) to these projects, and as well we could see some SF or fantasy films being realized through similarly inspired schemes that otherwise would not have come to exist, say - but we would have a hell of a time pinpointing the Star Wreck-Iron Sky continuum as the POD or starting point to that.

This all can also be extended to the different Star Trek fan films - some of the people making them or getting inspired by them will have gone and will go into the movie and TV business. It is hard to say how big an effect they have had (or will have in the future), even by going through all the people who were involved in them and looking up what later became of them.