Hey, our Excelsior predates yours. Our ship launched in 1998--and I think my superiors at Bravo Fleet made a pretty reasonable claim to post-DS9 canon themselves at around that time. :P Not that they thought to do a fan film on it.
Technically HF's claim to the Excelsior goes back (ON VIDEO) to 1993 with this film:
http://www.hiddenfrontier.com/episodes/ste.php
Touche. I bow to your clearly prior claim, not least because "Shields! Shields!" shouted repeatedly is extremely cute and because I received as a gift that exact toy starship in 1993.
However, the server that video is on appears to have gone down.
So I guess that's why I get surprised sometimes hearing an RPG claim it's a fan-film, and therefore fan-film people should have paid attention to what the RPG community was doing 10 years ago because an RPG suddenly has more clout that something that was actually shot with actors, CG models, and props, and a hella lot of time.
I didn't say that. I don't even think that. I only brought up our claim to first release on the Internet because you appeared to be saying that any fan project that doesn't fold itself from the first to fit into your personal version of the post-Nemesis universe was somehow being discourteous when it came up with its backstory. Our backstory predates the very existence of HF, much less its emergence as a highly successful webseries, and clearly HF had never heard of the
Excelsior or the extensive Bravo Fleet post-DS9 canon when it started, either. Therefore,
neither of us should be blaming the other for not paying attention to disparate projects that started a decade ago and only recently moved into the same arena. That would be like criticizing
HF for failing to predict that the Briar Patch would end up canonically placed in the Beta Quadrant.
But even if our backstory
had been invented out of thin air twelve months ago, the idea that one non-profit producer of
Star Trek content for sheer love of the franchise should have more "clout" than another non-profit producer of
Star Trek content for sheer love of the franchise, or the idea that fan films
, the most marginal backwater of any fandom's canon, are being discourteous if they don't bend over backwards to remain in continuity with not just the vast
Trek canon, but with all prior fan films... well, they strike me as completely absurd, even contrary to the very idea of creative freedom that makes fan films so attractive. I'm sorry that you hold a differing opinion, but I guess I'm just not as much of a continuity-geek as you are.
As I said before, Gene Roddenberry gave us a big universe, chock-full of contradictions all its own. There's enough room in that same universe for both of us, if you're willing to see past our very few differences.
True,
Excelsior is never going to be as lovingly conformed to
HF canon as
Intrepid and others have been, but I just don't see why that has to be an obstacle.
That said, I wish all productions the most success and if borrowing creative stuff from other fan-films helps, that's great.
Last thing: Maybe you were referring to someone else, but it didn't sound like it. So I want to make it very clear:
Star Trek: Excelsior never has and never will "borrow" one jot of content from another fan production. Ever. We have stories and material enough to last us for many years to come, all generated one hundred percent by our own writers. We do like to
homage other productions; even when it doesn't help our story in any way (and it never does), we consider it to be fitting to so honor our fellow wayfarers in the Great Bird's universe.
I feel rather strongly that I not be misunderstood on this point. We rely on no one but ourselves for our creative content, and would never dream of doing otherwise. Hat-tips are one thing, but riding on another's hard-built canon bandwagon is something I would never allow.
Again, apologies to Nick for being in his thread. Mods, feel free to move to another thread.
Hope my views on the topic of continuity are useful or at least entertaining. I know I'm having fun taking a trip down memory lane with all this stuff. The Angeles series seems to LONG ago!
Rob
Rob, I can't think of I time you haven't been entertaining, from "Enemy Unknown" on. And I'm sure
ANG was fun, too. (I hope that, somehow, someday,
Angeles is able to be released.) I genuinely wish you and your shows well.
A topic split might well be advisable, since we appear to be eschewing PM's here and
USS Intrepid shouldn't have to deal with this conversation cluttering his announcement thread. Unless we're done, in which case, no point.
<- that's as close as I can get to showing impatience
