Ian Ramsey – Fan Film Factor

LOGICAL music video parody from STAR REKT took 2 years and massive dance choreography to complete! (interview with IAN RAMSEY)

I always get a feeling of giddy anticipation when I see a new video from fan filmmaker IAN RAMSEY show up in my YouTube feed. I subscribe to his STAR REKT YouTube channel, and every few months, Ian posts a new, brilliantly hilarious Star Trek-themed musical video parodystarring himself in a different era uniform(s) and/or costume(s) with wonderful green screen editing composited in with backgrounds and spliced with short clips from all the myriad Star Trek series.

Over the past four years, Ian has released no less than SIXTEEN parodies of songs ranging from Frankie Valli to Katy Perry, Barry Manilow to Queen, Nickelback to the Backstreet Boys, and Green Day to Michael Bublé (to name but a few!). I interviewed Ian back in early 2023 when he’d released “only” nine musical parodies—all excellent—but with his editing abilities only just beginning to develop. And I was thinking it might be time to interview Ian again…although I wondered what kind of spin to put on the blog. After all, making music videos in front of a green screen in your house is kind of a one-note interview, right?

Then, late last year, I saw this…

Wow! This was a step beyond (pun somewhat intended) anything I’d seen out of Ian before this. And who knew the boy could dance??? Actually, according to the tag at the end of the video, this effort required a professional choreographer and more than two years to complete.

Well, if that’s not fodder for an interesting blog, I don’t know what is!

Actually, I should mention that the paradigm shift happened one video sooner, as Ian went from videos that were mainly framed from mid-level up to full-body coverage shots. This music video parody of “Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears debuted in July of 2024…

And Ian’s latest masterpiece (from January of this year) takes the song “Starships” by Nicki Minaj, cleans up the lyrics to a PG rating, and sets its phasers (literally) on “Redshirts“…

I’m pretty sure Ian included every TOS red shirt death in that video…plus a few blue and gold shirt departures. (Let me know if he missed any.) But for now, I want to find out more about LOGICAL, Ian’s awesome dance moves, and his choreographer, CAROLYN DESKIN. So let’s fly…or hit it…or whatever. Here’s Ian…

Funny videos: “Servin’ with Captain Lorca” and “Cardassian Space Station”

What if “Weird Al” Yankovic were a Trekkie? (Actually, he probably is!) But that’s okay, because we’ve already got a brilliant song parody writer in the form of IAN RAMSEY of the STAR REKT YouTube channel. I covered Ian’s parody music videos in a blog back in February, but the guy’s as prolific as a tribble! He’s covered everyone from Queen to Katy Perry to The Backstreet Boys to Barry Manilow and more—each parody more hilarious than the last!! And now we can add Ricky Martin and Green Day to that list with parodies of Livin’ La Vida Loca and American Idiot. Set phasers for laughter…!

STAR REKT takes MUSIC PARODY videos to the final frontier! (video interview with IAN RAMSEY)

I first discovered STAR REKT back in 2021 when someone posted to Facebook a link to a Star Trek-themed music video parodying the 1975 song by The Four Seasons, “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night).” But instead of “Night,” the lyric was changed to “Fight” and melodically recounted Kirk’s battle with the Gorn following the attack on Cestus III in the 1967 TOS episode “Arena.”

Now, I’d seen a whole bunch of Star Trek music videos over the years…many of them simply montages of edited clips from episodes and movies played over pop songs. (I even made one myself back in 2002 from Trek home recordings off of VHS tapes!) I’ve also watched a wide variety of Trek music PARODY videos, usually when someone writes new lyrics to an existing song. This playlist from YouTube shows a good selection of what’s out there. What you’ll notice is that these parody videos are usually either edited clips from Trek episodes/movies OR fans doing cosplay singing (or lip synching) to their own song in a series of cuts.

But what struck me about Star Rekt is that this fellow recorded himself in costume in front of a green screen and intercut those shots with clips from TOS (and eventually other TV series and movies) to create a “hybrid” of sorts. This fresh approach really stood out for me—along with his great parody lyrics, good singing, and the quality of the video editing. Take a look first at “Oh, What a Fight…”

By the time I’d found out about this guy and his videos during the summer, he’d already posted two others. The first was “I Kissed a Borg” (based on “I Kissed a Girl” by Katy Perry)…

The other was “Trill All the Klingons Want” (parodying””Girl All the Bad Guys Want” by Bowling For Soup)…

Three awesome parody music videos in four months? This funny guy was SERIOUS! And he had already covered TOS, TNG, and DS9. What else would he come up with? I immediately subscribed to his channel and eagerly waited for his next offering. It came three months later, and we were back to TNG with a dash of DS9 and Voyager thrown in. How did he cover all three? Well, they all have a Holocek (or Holosuite), and thus we were treated to a parody of the song “Photograph” by Nickelback…

At the time I’m writing this blog, Star Rekt has now released NINE parody music videos in total. If you want to see the rest, check out this playlist for parodies that spotlight some of the Star Trek features as well as the Enterprise TV series. This guy also did an off-the-wall video of himself mixing Star Trek-themed drinks and doing trivia for an hour while getting progressively plastered. It’s worth checking out.

Anyway, I tracked down “Star Rekt” and discovered his real name is IAN RAMSEY, and he does everything from here…

Let’s find out more…