‘Star Trek: Renegades’, Featuring Actors From TV Series, Seeks Funding

The 2008 Star Trek fan film, subtitled Of Gods And Men, was a “40th anniversary gift” to Trek fans. From the sound of one of its top rated YouTube comments, the film sacrificed the expensive, flashy action of the 2009 J.J. Abrams reboot in favor of a staunch devotion to the original Star Trek universe. Now, the same team that made that film is hoping to create another film, titled Star Trek: Renegades, for which they have set up a Kickstarter campaign hoping to raise a whopping $200,000

Renegades‘ director is Tim Russ, who also made Of Gods And Men. Russ, however, isn’t just a Trek fan; he played Lieutenant Tuvok on Star Trek: Voyager, the TV series that ran for seven seasons on UPN. Due to Russ’ connections to the franchise, he was able to get several actors from the various Star Trek incarnations to appear in Of Gods And Men. Most notably, Walter Koenig and Nichelle Nichols – who played Chekov and Uhura in the original series, respectively – starred in the feature-length film. Though Nichols will not return for Renegades, Koenig is on board. Both he and Russ appear in the project’s trailer:

Of Gods and Men was initially released as a three-part web series, but Russ and his team hope to sell Renegades as a full length TV pilot. “It has been seven long years since Enterprise left the air,” states the Renegades team on its Kickstarter page, “and though we’ve had the recent big screen adaptation of Gene Roddenberry’s futuristic vision (and the sequel coming next year), we feel the true home of Star Trek is as a continuing episodic series.  The goal of this project is to make that happen.” So far, the project has raised over $23,000 dollars, but they hope to increase this amount almost nine times over in order to cover the cost of creating a high quality TV pilot that they can sell to CBS as a web series.

So what will Renegades look like? It’s advertised as “not your grandfather’s Star Trek,” instead choosing the route of “bold, edgy, and a little bit dark.” Of Gods And Men featured fairly amateur special effects, but its creators note with what seems like plenty of pride that their film had “less than .1% of the recent Star Trek film.” Given that they are aiming for a larger budget this time (and, presumably, a shorter feature), don’t be surprised if the final product is much sharper than its director’s previous work.