'Excelsior' Rally Report
By ChristianApril 24, 2000 - 9:22 PM
Though both the official Excelsior site and the campaign's discussion board are strangely lacking any news at all about the results of Saturday's nationwide fan demonstrations, the first actual report of the rallies has appeared at Simon & Schuster's Star Trek Books Board.
In a post to that board, Bob Greenberger relayed an email he'd received from Russ Haslage, the organiser of the campaign:
Although we didn't get nearly the turnout we had hoped for LA, the people there were terrific and resulted in many new fans coming to the campaign. Though the numbers in LA were much smaller than we had hoped (about 30), the regional rallies were fantastic and much more successful than we had hoped. We had right around 500 fans show up at
the 12 rallies across the nation. No, LA didn't produce the mega leap we had hoped, but the weekend was a positive one overall...truly we made progress during "rally weekend".
Compared to the 'huge masses' of fans mainstream media were expecting to turn up, the 2000 letters that were supposedly sent to Paramount, and the 5000 members registered for the campaign, this is certainly a very disappointing result, and does not exactly inspire much confidence in the strength of the campaign. On the other hand, according to the Excelsior Campaign Schedule, they're still planning to place ads in Variety and other trade magazines, as well as a second letter writing campaign, so maybe that will improve the campaign's chances.
Meanwhile, according to a post by Pocket Books Senior Editor John Ordover, so far 402 letters have been received for the Captain Sulu Novel Challenge. A thousand letters in support of a Sulu novel need to be sent before the 1st of May in order for Pocket Books to publish one, so it seems unlikely that this goal will be met.
Again, if any of you actually attended one of the demonstrations, I'd still love to receive a report. Also, according to another post on the Star Trek Books Board, the LA rally actually made a short appearance on the news - did anyone happen to see this?
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