Star Trek Continues

Star Trek: The Re-Reboot

Who needs big budget reboots when you've got fans? While J.J. Abrams' 2009 reboot of the original Star Trek breathed new life into this venerable 60s television property, fan remakes, created with arguably more authenticity and unquestionably more love, have have been circulating the internet for years now. For hardcore Trekkers and casual fans alike, these independent remakes, such as Starship Exeter and Star Trek: New Voyages (later renamed Star Trek: Phase II), have provided new windows into creator Gene Roddenberry's futuristic world, which franchise-owner, Paramount Studios, would never consider producing due to their potentially limited appeal. The more successful of these fan-made series nearly always hark back to the original 1960s incarnation of the show, closely mimicking its style by employing more subtle special effects and exploring social, political and philosophical themes.

The latest entry into this sci-fi sub-genre is titled Star Trek Continues, an off-Hollywood but fairly professional attempt to continue the original five-year mission of the starship Enterprise and her loyal crew. Featuring one of James Doohan's own sons, Christopher, reprising his father's role as Scotty, the ship's hard-drinking, fist-throwing engineer, Star Trek Continues does an admirable job of emulating the Crayola-color lighting, the oddball camera angles and the quirky TV dialogue of those late-1960s Desilu productions and even manages to make you forget you're watching a fan-flick, most of the time. Although I'd say the casting could use some tweaking, and some of the acting is, well, bad, the impressive attention to detail and the bonus inclusion of original series guest star, Michael Forest, who played Apollo in the episode Who Mourns for Adonais?, makes the whole affair a worthy homage to an American science fiction classic. Check the video below for a look at the very first episode, Pilgrim of Eternity -- and to you mega-geeks out there, make sure to watch (and listen) for some quick but notable cameos by some space-opera royalty including Marina Sirtis from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Go ahead, watch it. What else you doing on a cold-ass Saturday afternoon?

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Star Trek Continues E01 "Pilgrim of Eternity" from Star Trek Continues on Vimeo.

Star Trek: The Television Series

J.J. Abrams, the creator of such excrement films as Cloverfield and Super 8 as well as the brains behind the recent Star Trek movies, has, as many of you already know, been charged with the task of finishing off George Lucas' zillion-dollar space-baby, Star Wars, with episodes 7, 8 and 9 starting in 2015 or something like that. (Whew! That's a lot of links!) Well lately, Seth MacFarlane (Family Guy, American Dad) has been showing a lot of love for the classic 80s/90s TV show, Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TNG). He's made no secret of his fan status and has repeatedly stated that he would enjoy taking a shot at rebooting the classic sci-fi show for television. Most recently, Seth appeared in one of the documentaries included on the new TNG Blu-ray releases, and a few years back, he actually managed to reassemble the entire main cast for a special episode of Family Guy, in which Stewie builds a transporter and kidnaps Picard and company, which was a wet dream for any classic Trek fan. Check out this video featuring a montage of clips from the show and Seth himself talking about the possibility of his vision of Trek coming to the small screen.

First Peek at Star Trek 12

With the massive success of the first outside-produced Star Trek film in 2009, Paramount has finally got a Star Wars-type property on their hands and far be it from the bean counters to stop a charging juggernaut while it's dropping bags of gold out of it's butt. Hence, here comes Trek outing # 12 titled: STAR TREK: Into Darkness, because nothing's worth watching anymore unless it's sufficiently dark. Coming to theaters in May of 2013, here is the first peek at the next J.J Abrams-directed adventure featuring Kirk and company. Personally I thought the new movie should be titled "Star Trek 90210" but I think I'm just being bitter about Vulcan blowing up in that last flick. Enjoy.

Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded

One of the most popular computer game series of the 80s and 90s, the tongue-in-cheek (or hand-in-pocket) humor of Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards was a hit with juveniles of all ages. The game began its life as a basic text adventure for the Apple II called "Softporn Adventure" released by Sierra Online in 1981. Digital titillation being a rather new form of entertainment in the early 80s, the game was, of course, a huge success, prompting Sierra to task now-legendary programmer Al Lowe with the honor of rewriting the game to utilize a graphics engine (read: digital boobs). The result of Al's hard work was perhaps greater than the sum as the oddly endearing protagonist of the game, Larry Laffer, or as he is better known, Leisure Suit Larry, unexpectedly became a very marketable property. Five sequels (some say six) and millions of 5.25 inch floppies later the original series finally came to an end in 1996. After many years of dormancy, several questionable Larry adventures eventually appeared on Xbox and Playstation but they lacked involvement from the original creators and dropped most of the naughty-but-not-dirty humor of the classic series by replacing any potential instances of "clever" with "cleavage." Good eye-candy, to be sure, but weak gameplay. As one would expect, these titles sold poorly (they wouldn't even take my copy of Magna Cum Laude at Game Xchange, true story) which sadly brought the entire franchise to a screeching halt. Boo. But here's the part where the little indie developer swoops in to save the day. From Wikipedia:

• In June 2011, Replay Games announced on their blog that they had acquired a license for the Leisure Suit Larry series. Replay Games plans to re-release the titles it has licensed for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, XBLA, PSN, On-Live, and Steam. It is also announced that Al Lowe will be involved with the development of the new releases.

And then:

• In April 2012, Replay Games initiated the Kickstarter project Make Leisure Suit Larry come again! which finished funding on May 2, 2012 and secured a total of $674,598 ($655,182 via Kickstarter and $19,416 via Paypal) in funding compared to the $500,000 that was asked for. The "HD" Version of the game has a completion date of October 2012 listed, but it might be delayed to December 2012 or early 2013 since hitting the $650,000 mark. The $650,000 mark will add more story, dialogues and one more character.

Yup, they even got old Al Lowe to come back. Click on the links below. You know you want to.

CHECK OUT THE OFFICIAL SITE FOR ALL THE SLEAZY DETAILS

Bonus Video: Al Lowe talks about the rebirth of Leisure Suit Larry