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Just rewatched an early Star Trek New Voyages episode.
God I have so many thoughts!
I loved it so much more this time than the first time I saw it, and I think I really need to write about new voyages/phase 2 and separately about continues and the stuff Tim Russ did.
Star Trek New Voyages (and Star Trek Continues, to a lesser extent) were beautiful, and I'm so glad that they existed and I'm deeply upset with Paramount for fucking them up.
(There are 3! Episodes of Star Trek New Voyages that will never get finished because between them being shot and being released, they became explicitly illegal.)
Of course, this is because they were always illegal. They were copyright infringing, it just didn't matter until Paramount decided that fan films had gotten too good, and posed a real threat to their bottom line.
I don't think I can fully explain how much Paramount's capricious fan film guidelines radicalized me w/r/t my views on copyright.
@ajroach42 I tend to agree
two minor thoughts, from the last time i looked into this (a long while ago)
Vic Mignogna burned a lot of good will because of his bullshit on ST: Continues. Real issue.
Then Axanar happened to coincide with Paramount deciding they might actually pay attention to the battle because of STW and revisiting that past. One could argue they only decided to do so because of New Voyages / Continues' success but there you have it.
Also saw your follow-up just now: I thought it was James Cawley and Brian Gross in the ST: New Voyages stuff?
Of course, both New Voyages on occasion and Continues in most (every?) episode featured Vic Mignogna as Captain Kirk.
I have heard from credible sources that, in addition to being a first class creep ( see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Mignogna#Legal_battles_and_sexual_harassment_allegations ) he was also probably a thief!
I feel like I shouldn't continue this discussion without acknowledging that.
Anyway, problematic people aside, the concept of these Star Trek fan films was beautifully naive: "let's do Fan Fiction but for Television"
Fan fiction is also illegal, and usually tolerated at best. (It shouldn't be illegal, but that's another story!) and that's while most Fan Fiction could not possibly supplant the work who's copyright it is infringing. Who would read Fan Fic without reading/watching the thing its based on?
At the time that Star Trek New Voyages started coming out there hadn't been any Star Trek on TV or in cinemas for years, and the early episodes of NV... Well, they are a little unpolished, rough around the edges.
But, by the time the later episodes were released, and by the time Continues hit the scene, two things had changed:
1) these fan films became absolutely as good as or better than many episodes of Star Trek that had aired on television (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4TC5wl0IzE&list=PL5h4ur_aSq8NxKIK0TWk6puXu4E1RjT8y&index=5 or any of the later episodes for example.)
2) J.J. Abrams' Star Trek film was released, and quickly became a blockbuster trilogy of ... well, shall we say "Flashy" films?
In short, there was money on the line.
@ajroach42 marzgurl has an eleven hour video on YouTube about that guy and I've seen it all and it is wild that eleven hours is ludicrously long and also I don't think she could've done a shorter one and still got everything.
absolutely wild how ick that guy is lol. but it's not the first Kirk played by a guy you wish would just stop
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