Moore Advises Choosing Fan Products Over Franchise

Former Star Trek writer and producer Ron Moore, currently the executive producer of Sci-Fi's Battlestar Galactica revival, said that he has personally heard Viacom executives "refer to the 'next fifty years of Star Trek' as a corporate priority and stated his belief that "Star Trek isn't dead and it isn't dying" in his blog.

Writing at SciFi.com's Battlestar Galactica Blog, Moore labeled the current state of the Trek franchise "an interregnum, a pause in the treadmill of overlapping productions that have become the norm for the series that was once considered 'too cerebral for television.'" He mentioned the names of several staff members who have been with Star Trek since the early days of The Next Generation, also the era in which he joined the franchise, but said that he believes it to be a cause for celebration that Star Trek has been returned to the care of its fans.

"I say returned because there was a time when the fans were the exclusive owners and operators of what would later become the Franchise," he noted, citing the grassroots movement that produced early fan fiction, zines and conventions -- all of which now have commercial equivalents. "I was one of those fans; I was a kid growing up in the 1970's who found Star Trek in strip syndication and bought every book and magazine I could lay my hands on and every piece of fan merchandise I could con my parents into buying." Moore named several fans turned Bantam novelists and said that "we, the fans, embroidered the Trek tapestry while the powers that be at Paramount dawdled."

Moore seemed to suggest that Enterprise viewers would do better to abandon the trappings of the Franchise and return to the imaginative roots of Star Trek, stating that fans "can consume the seemingly endless licensed products available to them from the Franchise, everything from barware to shower curtains, and read only the mainstream, officially licensed and sanctioned books, or they can go their own way. Some of the most daring and creatively challenging Star Trek material has been created not by Paramount, but by amateurs, who simply had an idea for an interesting twist on the Trek universe." He even gave a plug to slash fan fiction, in which Kirk and Spock are reimagined as secret lovers.

To read Moore's blog, visit SciFi.com.

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