I wanted to take a moment and tell you about an interesting experiment I’ve embarked on with my girlfriend Essi. It’s called Trekathon, and the its basic idea is to find out what happens to two film nerds who decide to consume the full franchise of Star Trek in just one year time.

Yesterday was the 100th day of Trekathon, and I wanted to share our results with you, the Iron Sky and Star Wreck people. As some of you might know, I’ve directed a small film called Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning some years ago. As the name would suggest, it’s a Star Trek film.

Now the funny thing was that when working on the film, I hadn’t seen practically any episodes of Star Trek. Ever.

Finally this year, I decided to fix this. I even lured my filmnerd-of-a-girlfriend Essi to join me – make her give up her obsession on films and focus completely on Star Trek for the next 365 days.
So that’s what we’ve been doing for the last 100 days. Watching Star Trek.

And to make things even more interesting, I decided to combine my long-time dream to run a marathon. So, in addition to watching all of the Star Trek movies and episodes in the next year, I’ve promised to buy a Star Trek fan shirt and wear it proudly when crossing the finishing line of Helsinki City Marathon in 2010.

Here’s where we’re standing now with Trekathon:

So far, we’ve seen 194 episodes of Star Trek, starting from the unaired pilot (“The Cage”), then moving on to The Original Series, The Animated Series and we’re just about to finish the fourth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In addition to that, we’ve seen five Star Trek movies.

To finish our great undertaking, we have 530 episodes and 6 movies left – and 265 days to go. This means we need to watch approximately 2 episodes every day for the next 265 days.

So, what do we like Star Trek so far?

It’s awesome.

It’s better than we had ever expected.

It’s even better than that.

It’s … Grand. (Yes, I did say that in Patrick Stewart’s voice.)

We’ve set up a blog that follows our progress daily – check it out here. In addition to that, you can follow us on Twitter, and even wear a Twibbon to show your support.

Alright, friends – Live Long and Prosper!

Timo.

We got some great news a few days ago: Star Wreck has won this year’s Suecica Astrum Erratus Praemium – Swedish Star Trek Databas Award. The movie was nominated for the award also on 2009, but this time we took the first prize!

This is what the jury had to say about the Star Wreck project:

“Their commitment and sedulous work have been an inspiration for the whole of northern Europe in the sphere of fan production, and they also put Finland and Scandinavia on the science fiction map, once and for all. With great humour, they have set a good example for many of us.”

On behalf of the Star Wreck team – thank you very much, we are honoured to receive this award!

…also, the saga of Star Wreck is not at an end, by any means. Although we are currently hard at work on Iron Sky, the first drafts of the story for the next Star Wreck movie have been done and the script is currently being written. And yeah, it’s even more crazy and irreverent than In The Pirkinning.

Here is the award announcement on Star Trek Databas site, and here is the conversation (in Swedish).

Samuli doing what Captain Pirk does best.

Linda Whitmore of LA Times’ Hero Complex did a very thorough interview about Samuli couple of weeks back. Now the results of that interview have been published witht he title “Star Wreck, from Finland, with love“.

I rarely blog about things that are written about us, but this is an exeption, mostly because a) It’s a very good interview, as Kris from our forum put it “Anyone at all who likes Wreck should read that interview” and b) because the Finnish press thought it was newsworthy, with one of our two biggest tabloids, Ilta-Sanomat, writing an article about the interview… Sometimes journalists work in mysterious ways.

What would happen if the Starship Enterprise and “Airplane” crashed into the Babylon 5 space station somewhere in the skies above Finland?

The loopy result would be “Star Wreck (The Imperial Edition),” the Starfleet parody from a Finnish writer-actor-producer named Samuli Torssonen and his crew of amateur moviemakers. Seven years in the making, the farce opens on the bridge of the USS Kickstart with the not-so-cosmic sound of a toilet flushing – the men’s room, it seems, is conveniently located right next to the vessel’s command center.

There’s also an interesting notion from Samuli:

The team of five people formed by accident. The director, Timo Vuorensola, was not a “Star Trek” fan at all — which ultimately was a very good thing. Usually, fan-film directors know too much about the subject, and the film doesn’t make any sense to non-fans.

That pretty much sums up five years of critique towards fan films. People making them just know too much. And it seems the problem is kind of creeping to mainstream cinema (and TV), with some re-boots spending far too much time making knowing references to the original to become interesting films in themselves.

Head over to Hero Complex to read Samuli’s interview.

Oh, one other thing. If you’ve seen Star Wreck we would really appreciate it if you took the time to write an review on Amazon and let others know what you thought.