Treklanta: Experiencing ‘Prelude To Axanar’

Editor’s Note:  This piece comes from a new member of Team Axanar who attended the Treklanta convention and wanted to share their experience with the rest of us.  

By Leslie E Owen

Remember when you were a little kid, and you went to the movies? Remember the excitement of sitting by yourself in the front row, of having your favourite candy and a soda too?   Remember the chatter and the giggles giving way to that expectant hush as the music cued and the credits rolled and then you were transfixed and transported to somewhere else, to laughter and tears and hope and glory?

On Saturday afternoon at the Marriott Hotel in Atlanta, attending the Treklanta Independent Fan Film Awards, I re-experienced that childhood joy for the first time in a very long while. I was seated in Ballroom D, primed and ready for the panel that Axanar executive producer and writer Alec Peters was going to give, laptop ready to report on what Alec had to say regarding the making of “Prelude to Axanar”. My son Thomas and I had already manned the Axanar table for a couple of hours, answering people’s questions, handing out free Axanar buttons and selling T-shirts, stickers, and patches. I’d recorded the awed remarks that people made as they watched Prelude on Alec’s laptop, which played on a continuous loop at the table. This was where I would get the nuts and bolts of the information I needed to write a decent blog about the film awards, the convention, the personalities, and the films.

And then Alec asked if there were people in the audience who hadn’t yet seen “Prelude to Axanar”. Well, of course, I’d seen it. Probably twenty or thirty times, on YouTube, on my laptop, even though I have the equipment to hook my laptop up to my HD TV and I could have seen it on my big screen. And my son had seen it – so we looked around the room and maybe three people raised their hands. I didn’t mind seeing it again. That was cool. The lights went down.

And the music cued. And the Federation logo appeared – and once again I was a little kid, transfixed and transported into the world I grew up with – the world of Star Trek. It was – seeing it on the big screen, with an audience – as if I were seeing Star Trek for the first time. It took my breath away and brought tears to my eyes in the same way that thirty-six years ago the opening sequence to Star Trek: The Motion Picture did – or even further back, to almost fifty years ago when I was a little girl sitting in my pajamas on the living room floor watching something on television no one had ever seen before.

And that is what “Prelude to Axanar” does: it transports you all the way back to the very first time you saw Star Trek and you heard those words for the very first time: “These are the voyages….” But “Prelude to Axanar” goes one step further, because it takes the idealism of Gene Roddenberry’s universe and distills it into two very important lines of dialogue that form the basis for the film that “Axanar” will be:

Admiral Ramirez: “For myself, I have but one fear: destroying the dream of the Federation. Compared to such a loss, I do not fear the Klingon Empire!”

And then, Garth of Izar: “We didn’t sign up to be warriors. That’s not what Starfleet’s about.”

This is Star Trek – Gene’s Star Trek. And our Star Trek.

Editor’s Note:  Thank you so much Leslie!  Looking forward to more of your writing.