Star Trek fan films

Roc Con was fun,getting off to a great start with Vic Mignogna walking by my table and signing my copy of Broly the legendary Super Saiyan, and I purchased a katana for a decent price, and that was before it actually got going. Then I was playing Pokemon Yellow and finally beat it using Ash's Team. But I digress I need to get on to a more pressing issue, Star Trek Fan Films.

Vic presented "Embrace the Wind" episode 7 of Star Trek Continues, his fan tribute to the classic series. The episode, which he describes as "topical", is about appointing a new captain to an unmanned ship and it's between Spock and a female named Garret. The question driving the episode is whether the federation is ready for a female captain and it's pretty easy to tell that Garret represents Hilary Clinton. Kirk is rather diplomatic in his support for the female captain, but he is driven by the selfish motivation of keeping Spock on his ship instead of going elsewhere, while Spock actually experiences the same motivation and everybody seems to support Garret until Kirk discovers that she may have a skeleton in her closet that makes her unsuitable and has nothing to do with her gender. It's a tense courtroom drama and I don't want to give away the ending so I highly recommend looking it up and watching it yourself.

Afterward Vic had a Q&A session with a moment where he had some trouble regarding how CBS is handling this property. They have rather strict guidelines mainly that nobody can make money off of Star Trek but them. Vic has been content to work within these guidelines, but some other fans haven't been as cooperative and things have gotten harder. I found out from another artist who had done promo work for another fan project that this other project was the root of the problem. We had a conversation about it and I realized CBS really needs to handle Star Trek fan films the same way Amazon has handled Kindle Worlds. I've talked about Kindle Worlds before so I'll skip to how it fits in here; CBS should start a website or alternate channel (YouTube, Netflix, something like Crackle) that airs these fan films. Just let CBS review everything for suitable content and distribute it on their channel and fans can pick which ones they like. The whole thing could be covered with ads for canon Star Trek works and other similar CBS properties, and if anything proves to be popular enough to be profitable, CBS can split the money with the fans who actually made the fan film. A model like this seems to be working for Amazon, and if CBS were smart they would try this. I don't know if anybody else is doing anything like this, but I think it would be a smart move for CBS. It seems like everybody has a website, but not everybody has worthwhile content and TV network websites can be among the worst. Having truly original content like this would be a great way for CBS to stand out and fans would love to know their work could be approved as at least semi-canon.

Live long and prosper!