Seven Days: Vermont's Independent Voice

This Thursday brings a new double taping of WCAX’s local variety show “Late Night Saturday.” At the first show, host Tim Kavanagh will welcome local Irish-born poet Greg Delanty, who just received a Guggenheim grant. For the second, his guest will be James Cawley of Ticonderoga, New York, billed as “Executive Producer and Captain Kirk on ‘Star Trek: New Voyages.’"

Say what? Is yet another “Star Trek” series in the works? Well, sort of. Cawley isn’t as famous as William Shatner, but he did star in a 2005 Wired article called “To Boldly Go Where No Fan Has Gone Before.” Cawley and fellow “Trek” fan Jack Marshall are creating a “fourth season” of the original “Star Trek” at the rate of an episode a year. The set is a full-scale recreation of the U.S.S. Enterprise that Cawley worked on for 20 years near his home in the Adirondacks.

The show, which is distributed free on the Internet, isn’t the amateurish production one might expect. It features contributions from professionals who worked on Hollywood incarnations of “Star Trek” — not to mention Walter Koenig and George Takei, who played the original Chekov and Sulu, respectively. “New Voyages” doesn’t pay salaries or reap profits — that’s the condition on which Cawley and Marshall are allowed to use Paramount’s trademarked material — but it seems to have succeeded as a labor of love. Live long and prosper, indeed.

“LNS” taping on April 5 at Alumni Auditorium, Champlain College, doors open 6:45 p.m. For info and free tickets, 865-6401.



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