So I'll cop to being Melyanna's friend who was active during the Voyager era and I knew several of the people courted by Paramount during the 1980s movie era. Before the age of the next generation televisions series (small n and g there), the editors of major zines (some of which I subscribed to right before the internet ate such things, and some of which I wrote before the internet ate my urge to spend so much time writing hard copy) were the only way to influence the mass of ultraloyal fans. One has to remember the history of Star Trek and that it was fans and ficing in particular that supported the series from it's cancelation through the early movie era.
My understanding was that most of that ended with the death of The Great Bird, though his widow continued to be active in limited parts of the fandom. I was active in Trek fandom mostly in fics and PBM (note, not PBeM) from around 1991-1997, dropping off right at the end of the shift from paper to internet fandom. At that time Star Trek was still taking spec scripts from fans, but even among active fans the consensus was that most of these were poorly written--a fact backed up by Ron Moore in interviews--and done more as a good will gesture to fans than any real search for scripts.
Now this may have just been the areas of Trek fandom I was in, and it was and still is a massive fandom on many levels but I was directly into fic in that fandom... that as the franchise itself was slowly dying off during the Voyager era, so were most of the big fic focused fandoms. Looking back I think what happened was that you had a combination of reasons. The franchise was growing stale and for the first time at least in the era of television scifi facing real competition from other shows that were much more savy about the internet (beginning with Babylon 5), and the Star Trek fic model that had worked basically continuously for 25 years with many of the same people didn't translate as easily as one might think to the early age of the internet.
Which is basically my long winded way to back Mel up. Star Trek powers that be have always been the exception and not the rule when it comes to how IP holders view fanfic.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2007-05-27 02:43 am (UTC)My understanding was that most of that ended with the death of The Great Bird, though his widow continued to be active in limited parts of the fandom. I was active in Trek fandom mostly in fics and PBM (note, not PBeM) from around 1991-1997, dropping off right at the end of the shift from paper to internet fandom. At that time Star Trek was still taking spec scripts from fans, but even among active fans the consensus was that most of these were poorly written--a fact backed up by Ron Moore in interviews--and done more as a good will gesture to fans than any real search for scripts.
Now this may have just been the areas of Trek fandom I was in, and it was and still is a massive fandom on many levels but I was directly into fic in that fandom... that as the franchise itself was slowly dying off during the Voyager era, so were most of the big fic focused fandoms. Looking back I think what happened was that you had a combination of reasons. The franchise was growing stale and for the first time at least in the era of television scifi facing real competition from other shows that were much more savy about the internet (beginning with Babylon 5), and the Star Trek fic model that had worked basically continuously for 25 years with many of the same people didn't translate as easily as one might think to the early age of the internet.
Which is basically my long winded way to back Mel up. Star Trek powers that be have always been the exception and not the rule when it comes to how IP holders view fanfic.