Trekkies make their own show

From "Trekkies keep the Starship Enterprise airborne" (The Independent, 19 June, 2006):

Since there is no more Star Trek on television, and since the various generations of the film series appear to have run their course, the fans are taking matters into their own hands and shooting their own Star Trek episodes on digital video, for broadcast to fellow fanatics over the Internet.

Paramount Studios, which owns rights to the show and its various spin-offs, does not appear to mind so long as no commercial transactions are involved. And the fans are lapping it up.

One amateur production group called New Voyages claims to have received 30 million hits on its website. Its episodes, which are shot in upstate New York, are so popular, in fact, that some of the actors who appeared on the original show have agreed to make guest appearances. (Among them, George Takei, who played Sulu, and Walter Koenig, who played Chekov.) One of the original Star Trek writers, D C Fontana, has written an episode.

Trekkies always seem to know where their priorities lie, and they go for it.