The Gathering Storm is back on YouTube and either it’s been allowed to or it is another attempt at getting CBS and Paramount mad at Axanar.

It is possible that CBS and Paramount have decided it is not worth any annoyance and just let it stay on despite it breaking a couple of rules, rules like running time and have professionals who worked on Star Trek as we’ve pointed out before.

The concern is that if The Gathering Storm has been banned from YouTube and Team Axanar keep sticking it on there, it could have a bad effect on fan films.

Legally, people don’t have the right to make fan films, Star Trek is not our intellectual property, we may have an emotional ownership of Star Trek, but we don’t own the rights to it, we never have and so the rights owners allow us to make fan films but with conditions and fair enough.

Fan made Star Trek used to be filmed in parks, garages and houses, usually by young people and Hollywood was nowhere near them and then one day people decided they needed full on sets, they needed professionals, they needed fans money and it got out of control, it went from homage to business and that’s when things changed.

Axanar goes around saying they were sued for being ‘too good’, too good does not mean that it was superior to what was on the books (Discovery), it meant that it was ‘too good’ for the definition of a fan film, Axanar didn’t want to be painted with the fan film brush, they wanted to be Independent and bang there was trouble.

A Studio, Merchandise, Professionals, the original plan for Axanar was an unauthorised Star Trek spin off, and people still can’t see the problem with that, it is simple, they were making a business based on somebody else’s business.

Now after almost a decade of pushing buttons, they have ‘Axanar on Demand’ which is basically their own Star Trek service with their ‘canonical’ fan films and their universe fan films, sorry to say folks but calling it a universe doesn’t change a thing, it is still based off Star Trek.

So, CBS and Paramount could go for the nuclear option and stop fan films in their tracks, it wouldn’t be popular, but it wouldn’t be earth shattering, fan films are not revered fandom wide and if anybody storms off, you can bet they’ll be watching Star Trek in some way, shape or form.

Team Axanar will never be welcomed through the gates of Paramount Pictures as workers, they’ll never run a Star Trek show or movie, they are not the heroes of the franchise, they are just people who stumbled and fumbled through a decade to make a fan film that many people managed to achieve multiple times over in the same time span.


If you want to see a fan film called ‘The Gathering Storm’, try this one, it was called obscure by a certain guy but fifteen years ago, this version of ‘The Gathering Storm’ was during an exciting time in fan films as creativity was starting to grow.

Or if you like ‘A Gathering Storm’, try this fan film by Potemkin Pictures, it has Klingons in it too and you can be assured that you are watching a fan film that makes you think as they love having the story driving their fan films forward.

Yes, we know all about Winston Churchill and The Gathering Storm, but unlike a certain person, Winston Churchill was and is a hero to millions of people even decades after his death, a status that is unlikely to diminish through time.