If you think Star Trek is big here in America, you ain’t seen nuthin’ until you check out Germany! The German fans LOVE their Star Trek, and their annual convention FEDCON in the city of Bonn blows away most of the Trek-themed events you’ll find in the United States.
So it’s no surprise that Germany is one of the non-U.S. countries producing its own Star Trek fan series. In fact, the Germans have multiple productions at present. But as Fan Film Factor hasn’t featured any German fan filmmakers yet, I decided to begin with Germany’s oldest ongoing Trek fan series, EUDERION – INFINITY.
Based out of Germany’s capital, Berlin, Euderion began filming their first project back in 2008, releasing STAR TREK: EUDERION‘s initial episode “After the War Is Before the War” in 2009. Since then, the group has released a total of fourteen Star Trek fan films (you can view them all from this YouTube playlist). The episodes are entirely in German, but the closed-caption subtitling is excellent—not the auto-translate that YouTube offers—and they are absolutely worth checking out. Set during the 24th century in the late Deep Space Nine era, their episodes have featured a wide variety of themes and emotional tones, from light and amusing to dark and tragic, and from serious and thoughtful to adventurous and suspenseful. And they have pulled off each kind of story very successfully.
Their runtimes have covered everything from short vignettes of only a few minutes to full-length productions of a half hour or longer. Indeed, their latest effort, “The Legacy of the Archein,” was more than 45 minutes in length with an additional 6 and a half minutes of bloopers tacked onto the end. You can watch the episode below…
I was recently able to interview three of the warm and jovial individuals behind this excellent fan series: TOM ERDMANN, SEBASTIAN BITTINS, and MIRI LUX…all of whom speak wonderful English (infinitely better than my minuscule amount of German!). Also appearing in the interview is C.A.R.L. the exobot—not to be confused with Peanut Hamper!—who has joined the cast of the series taken the fan film world by storm with his friendly personality and meticulous craftsmanship.
Let’s give a warm Fan Film Factor willkommen to these fine folks and learn about the long-running Star Trek fan series Euderion – Infinity…