Just a few days ago we celebrated Star Trek Day, it is always a fun time of the year, a good excuse to talk about fan films on days that are not Saturday.

After a couple of weeks of stalling, we got around to watching some of the recent episodes of Strange New Worlds, we got through ‘Human Best Friend’ and ‘A Case of Chiaroscuro’, the latter was over the top in trying to mimic 1940s films and both episodes weren’t that thrilling to sit through but next week for us is ‘Level-Five Transporter Accident’ and apparently despite its Muppet looks it is good to watch.

Now to look at some fan films.

Matthew Lee Blackburn has released ‘Manhunt’, it is always good to see a new fan film from Matthew, ‘Monstrosity’ was a very thought-provoking fan film, and Manhunt serves up another solid effort which is always good to see.

New from What Fourth Wall Productions is ‘Family I’ from Star Trek Deimos, as noted in previous times Deimos is a popular name and a successful name too.

This fan film stars Sue Rhodes as Captain Rion Harte and Jed T. E. Rhodes as Captain Jackson Carver, the running time is a nice seven minutes, perfect for those who need to fill in a little bit of time between doing things.

From Star Trek: The Next Frontier is ‘The Unknown’ and this fan film has action from space to away missions all in thirty-four minutes, it is always good to such efforts being done, it is good to not use a commonly used Starship name too.

The Axanar Saga aka ‘Whack-A-Mole’ continues with The Gathering Storm popping up on YouTube and then disappearing again, this was not because of CBS but because Axanar did not want it to be taken down by CBS and potentially wiping the Axanar channel from existence as can happen on YouTube if a creator crosses the line too many times especially with certain material.

Axanar does have the fan films squirrelled away on a website, far from the bright spotlights (and money?) that YouTube provides, no doubt TPTB know all about it as the location is on every short video and post by Axanar in recent weeks.

Reading through the Kickstarter about ‘The Battle for Axanar’, there is talk about Axanar First Blood and John Ottman directing it, this may be a big problem because if it is the John Ottman on IMDb who worked with Bryan Singer then his hiring goes against guideline point number five.

The fan production must be a real “fan” production, i.e., creators, actors and all other participants must be amateurs, cannot be compensated for their services, and cannot be currently or previously employed on any Star Trek series, films, production of DVDs or with any of CBS or Paramount Pictures’ licensees.

John Ottman worked on Discovery as a ‘Consulting Producer’ for a total of 13 episodes and a Director for one episode.

So, we could be getting another fan film headache in a couple of months’ time, we wonder if any of the professionals in The Gathering Storm or Crucible and First Blood know about the fan film guidelines, probably not, for all we know they may see this nice and easy job, get a little cash and they don’t do any research to make sure that they are going to be A-OK.

That’s it for this edition of MTM Wrap, it is always a pleasure to have you here with us.

Until next time, be good to each other.