I'm a big Star Trek fan, and I like to watch a lot of the available fan productions, such as New Voyages, Phase II, and so on. One of the fan productions I took interest in about a year or so ago was called Axanar. After I saw the 20 minute "Prelude to Axanar" I was highly impressed and I wanted to see more. When I found out that there was going to be a full-length version I was thrilled, and eagerly awaited its release.

Then, a few months ago, I discovered that CBS and Paramount, the owners of the Star Trek franchise, had filed a lawsuit against Axanar Productions, the people who were making the Axanar film. As the owners of the franchise, they have every right to do this, but it is my personal opinion that this lawsuit is a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation), which is essentially an attempt to intimidate people who pose a threat to whomever is bringing the suit out in the first place. The Axanar clips I've seen on Youtube are extremely well done, and since CBS and Paramount came out with their guidelines for fan productions, I think it's obvious why the SLAPP suit was brought about: Axanar looked TOO good, too professional, too perfect, and that on the eve of the release of Star Trek Beyond as well as the franchise's 50th Anniversary, would be professional enough in quality to possibly bring real criticism against the big studios whose productions were much more expensive and yet only slightly higher quality.

I've heard some people say that Axanar was making too much money and was a for-profit venture. This is a steaming pile of bullshit, because simply put, for a company to be "for profit," it has to make more money selling a product than it invested into making the product. Paying actors, paying set-builders, paying for materials, paying rent, and so on, are part of the investment, and are NOT considered "profit." In order for Axanar to be a "for profit" venture, it would have to charge for views, and it would have to make more money in such charging for views than it put into the production of the film in the first place. Since it was to be released for free, as in without people having to pay to see it, making a profit would be essentially impossible. And since the film was in production and therefore not finished when the production company was SLAPPed in the first place, it is obvious that this has nothing to do with profit.

This kind of thing happens in the business world a lot. Companies get complacent, technology and pricing becomes standardized, then along comes some idealistic person or company who proves that the product can be vastly improved upon and still make money, and all of a sudden the whole industry is in an uproar doing whatever it can to silence the voice of innovation. Such was the case with Preston Tucker and his 1948 Tucker Torpedo, a car so advanced that it was advertised as "the car of the future... today," and yet could still make a profit. He also got SLAPPed into submission, because he would not back down and would not make a car that was more "normal" for upstarts to make. Along with the lawsuit, there was tons of bad press, most of it being exaggeration and outright willful ignorance of the truth, and the lawsuit drove the final nail in the Tucker car's coffin, because it was the ultimate in bad press for the company.

Lots of self-proclaimed "skeptics" love to say that acknowledgement of this reality is "conspiracy theory," but they themselves aren't even skeptics, they're just people going off half-cocked about things they know very little about and denying any evidence that contradicts them. Skeptics value evidence, and thus people who don't value evidence aren't skeptics, they're just opinionated.

Anyway, it's obvious why Axanar got axed (no pun intended). The production quality was simply too good and too inexpensive for the big studios to tolerate its existence. The film is dead, and sadly, so are fan films of any real quality, thanks to CBS and Paramount's paranoia. I'm still a fan of the franchise, but not so much of the people who own it.