CBS/Paramount sues to stop Axanar 2 - Electric Boogaloo-Fanboys gone WILD-too many hyphens

After the whole Paul Jenkins feature-length four part saga going on, anything is possible.

 

The Google Reviews for Prelude are a fun read. Seem to reflect both ends of the Axanar spectrum: https://www.google.com/search?q=pre...0l5j0i22i30.3289j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Edit: Can't link directly to them but appear in the sidebar on right and can be opened in a modal from there.

 

The funny thing that is those reviews are supposed to be for Prelude, but are mostly about the lawsuit and the ne'er released follow-up.

 

I scanned through a few of those reviews; I think this one my favorite so far:


As if one needs to be a professional jockey to know that the guy sitting on the horse backwards is doing it wrong.

 

I'd at least respect that post marginally more, though still not much at all, if that poster had spelled "it's" and "too" correctly (and at least one other word, too). If you're going to get up on your high horse and all....

 

Ah, yes. To/Two/Too. Its/It's. There/Their/They're. There's/Theirs. Which/Witch.

And my personal favorite: Whether/Weather/Wether. Look that last one up, and you'll never use it in the wrong context ever again.

 

I wasn't aware that Peters was an industry professional.

 

"I bet none of you know how to run a production company, let alone a studio"​

Yep, none of us do and neither does Alec Peters

 

People writing “walla” for “voila” would make me tear my hair out...if I wasn’t bald on top already.

Is that ram wether or not?

 

Yeah, neither are Paul Jenkins, Rob Burnett, Christian Gossett, Tony Todd, etc. etc. etc. etc.

 

Reading some of those positive reviews just brings me back to the question I've been asking since I first saw Prelude: What is it about this tripe that its fans see in it that I'm missing?

Some said, "It's Star Trek! It's real Star Trek!" No it's not. Star Trek, in all iterations except the latest, has been a thought-provoking sci-fi adventure series. Prelude is just the trappings of Trek draped over a bunch of genre character actors in Trek cosplay waxing rhapsodic about events that - at least in a production sense - haven't happened yet, and doing it in the most droning, lifeless way possible. (and don't give me Gossett's explanation that it's a "war documentary." I've seen enough war documentaries to know that interview subjects relating even the most dire events manage to show emotion while relating them. Maybe if all those people had just made Axanar first the actors doing the documentary would have had some useful experience to use as context for their delivery.)

At least one said, "It's canon! It's totally canon." No, it's not. It's a handful of derivative fan films (including one that doesn't and may never actually exist) based on a TL;DR prose fan novella which is further based on a freakin' game. Anybody claiming that Axanar is or should be canon is like me boasting my Trek reboot fics are canon, and I know they're not. They are deliberately not!

Then of course, there's the old refrain of "It's better than CBS trek!" Yeah...that's like saying a pile of shit with a car freshener resting on it smells better than another pile of shit without the air freshener. (and you're perfectly welcome to decide for yourself whether Axanar or 25%-trek is the one with the car freshener.)

It has wracked my brain trying to figure out how twenty plus minutes of deadly dull talking heads interspersed with pretty FX shots captured the imagination of enough Trekkies that so many of them would be willing to pay for more of it, multiple damn times, based on Alec Peters' promises alone, and the above answers are the ones I keep getting. It's nuts! I feel like I need Diogenes and his lantern or something...

 

Because its not CBS. That's all there is to it. Those who feel that CBS has ignored them and made Trek in to something they don't like, so they run to someone who they think "get's it." And since Alec Peters is an individual and CBS is an corporation (and thus, by definition, evil) then it becomes a battle of good vs. evil, underdog vs. giant corporation, and protecting the "honor" of "real Trek.

Yes, there are a lot of quotes. Because I too am continually baffled by what people call "real Trek."

 

Was it simply because it was more polished, more professional-looking, than any fan film done before?

Honestly, that was the only thing that caught my eye.

 

Speaking for myself only...

I'll admit that the first 2014 "documentary style" production is what really hooked me. It was something that was never done before (and I love History Channel documentaries), and with all the professional actors AP got to play these roles, and being a sucker for FASA Trek lore (4 Years War), it definitely rekindled a kind of nostalgia that I hadn't experienced from Trek in a long time.

Then, after everything fell apart for the past 5-6 years, and after seeing what few seconds of actual meager "new" footage that came after hundreds of thousands of dollars had been donated, I was clearly done with it. Doesn't take much to see all the collective derailments, nor does it take an advanced degree in rocket science to see that it's eventually going to completely jump the tracks. My only real surprise at this point is that it hasn't completely happened yet.

A truly sad state of affairs, considering all the extreme talent that was brought to bear on the project. Even more sad that Richard Hatch will posthumously be attached to this dumpster fire production forever-more.

 

Agreed. It looked pretty, but it was slow and plodding. The action cut scenes all roll out in slow motion, so I didn't even have that to tickle my pew-pew bone. So there are lesser productions, sure, but I found several of them far more entertaining.

So do I, and that's actually why I never bought the "documentary style" thing.

Case in point: I watched a History Channel documentary back in the nineties about the Battle of Midway that included both archival and digital footage of the battle that was ten times as intense and engaging as the footage in Prelude. What I remember most, though, is one of the interviewees, who was one of the senior codebreakers at Pearl Harbor in 1942. He was relaying the famous story of how the codebreakers figured out that Midway was the Japanese target and when he got to the part where the Japenese sent the Purple message that tipped the game, his voice went up and he grinned as he said "and they sent a message that said, 'AF is short of water!" And he laughed. It's more than fifty years on from the time it happened and the guy was still giddy about it!

Veterans who survive the violence and intensity of major battles tend to carry the emotions they felt at the time with them, and those emotions come out when they relay those stories, which is likely why most veterans don't like to talk about "what they did in the war." The emotions run the gamut from fear to anger to sadness to elation, and you see all these emotions in their body language as they sit in front of the camera and tell their tales. They're all just right there.

And then there's Prelude, filled with trained veteran actors whose job it is to convey emotions and draw emotions out of their audience, and they're supposed to be telling the story of either participating in or witnessing the defining battle in Federation Starfleet history, and there's NOTHING! The performances have all the emotional weight of a tax adjuster reading returns out loud. Gary Graham can be excused because the character he plays is not supposed show emotion, but then the rest of the cast tries to out-Soval Soval, for twenty one minutes. There's a head-nod or a head-shake here and there, but even the Klingon - whom you'd think would speak the most passionately about a battle - just low-keyed it. The whole thing just leaves me cold any time I try to watch it.

That's the other thing. I'd never heard of FASA or The Four Years War until after I started watching this trainwreck unfold and researched the backstory. I don't play tie-in games and have only read a few tie-in books, and the amount of fan fiction I'll read is limited in scope. I remember wondering at one time if you had to have knowledge of FASA or FYW in order to get some enjoyment out of it. From what you're telling me I guess it's necessary.

I don't think of Richard Hatch in this nonsense. As far as I'm concerened, he's either Captain Apollo or Tom Zarek. It's like picking your head-canon.

As for all those other talented people, personally I'd like to see them all band together and do their own version of Axanar without Alec. Let him sue over it. He's likely to lose anyway.

 

This.