The Star Trek A-Team

By: Dennis Rayburn
12/01/2009

Fan films were once projects shot with VHS camcorder when they were two piece units, a VCR which broke apart into two pieces, the tuner for recording TV shows, and a portable VHS recorded which hooked to a hand held camera as large as one piece camcorders would be one day. The props were hand made, or toys from the store and the quality was pretty predictable. Nowadays, with the advent of digital recording, home computers with CGI capabilities, the fan film has developed into a true art form.

A recent innovations in fan films is called the mashup. In those films, two different shows are taken and combined to make a very unique product. Readers of this column have read of a gentleman named Rick Kelvington and seen his work on a mashup of Star Trek and Doctor Who (of which the third part is due out Christmas 2009).

Today I found out about a new mashup by a different individual that is an absolute riot. But, before I talk about it, I want to talk about an earlier attempt at the same effect with a different era of one of the two shows involved. A YouTube user named Huckbone decided to attempt a mashup with the original series of Star Trek and the show, The A-Team. The results were pretty good as you can see here.



That was uploaded to YouTube in January of 2008 and frankly, it was a pretty good mashup. It wasn't an actual attempt at a mini-episode as some folks work on, but it was very entertaining and something that fans of both shows (and I am definitely a fan of the A-Team) could enjoy.

Let us flash forward (sorry, I couldn't resist) to November of this year. The new Star Trek movie has come out and is a smash hit. With all of the action scenes, it was simply begging to become one of the parties in a mashup. Enter a YouTube user named PhamtomKnight who apparently has decided that the Star Trek/A-Team mashup was in need of an update. Here is his result.



With the fast and explosive action of the new Star Trek, PhamtomKnight has created one heck of a mashup here. He, like Huckbone before him, as timed the scenes down to second where the A-Team intro and them mesh perfectly with the new footage. I especially liked his choices of scenes to use as they were all hard hitting action, combines with the humorous scenes that the A-Team opening had.  He even nailed the sound of a Cylon that appears in the A-Team opening to the second with a great scene. For those who don't remember, in the A-Team opening, a Cylon warrior walks past Faceman, who was played by Dirk Benedict, who was also Starbuck in the original Battlestar Galactica (a wonderful Easter Egg in that opening).

While PhamtomKnight's mashup is amazing, let's not sell Huckbone's short. When he undertook his project, there was no new movie to work with and he had to work with what he had. I feel he also did a great job in picking the scenes and meshing them together.

Now these mashups open up a very interesting subject that, while other websites' readers are debating it, I would like our readers to comment on. In your opinion, which of the characters of Star Trek (limit yourself to the original and new versions) would fit the roles of Faceman, Howling Mad Murdock, and B. A. Baracus? Post your thoughts below and let's have some fun with this.

See you next time!

Videos:  YouTube.com

Author: Dennis Rayburn

Dennis Rayburn is a columnist for Roddenberry.com. His column, "Two Strips of Latinum" appears every Sunday through Thursday.
Contact: drayburn@roddenberry.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/drayburn
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