You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief.

I'm Eric Melinsky.

John Lim is a lawyer. In the early 2000s, he was bit by the theater bug, as they say, and he fell in love with acting.

And around the same time, he became fascinated by fan films.

These are short films made by fans that are set in the worlds of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or whatever.

And this was the early 2000s. So most of the fan films that John was watching were pretty amateurish.

And then he came across a series of Star Trek fan films called New Voyages.

And I was blown away because they'd actually taken the time to recreate the sets and the costumes and the look and the feel of the original show right down to a tee.

They were hour long episodes, the same length as the original series. And the writing was spot on to the point where fans were saying,

this felt like the extra season of Star Trek that the original series never got.

But at that point, they hadn't put up many episodes and John noticed that they hadn't cast Suluyet.

John is an Asian American actor, so he got in touch with the filmmakers. And before he knew it,

John was on the bridge of the Enterprise, their Enterprise, playing Suluyet.

It was about as close as I can imagine to stepping onto those sets if I had been alive in the 1960s and had been at Desiilus Studios.

Mr. Suluyet.

Aye, sir.

We're going to need some fancy piloting and we're going to get out of this mess with a few extra dimensional coordinates thrown in.

Are you on for it? When do I start?

One of the reasons why New Voyages looked so good was because some of the filmmakers had worked on the series Star Trek Enterprise.

And even back then, they could use home computers to create special effects that were better than the original series.

In fact,

there was definitely creative differences between the producers as to whether or not to go back and really stick to the tried and true and make it look as close to the 60s as possible or updated to make it look like it was more of a current production.

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