It has been another of those quiet, chilled out sundays. Apart from some work on my thesis this morning, I haven’t really done much. Lyn has been busy at work in her studio. Mind you, I did come across the beginnings of something interesting earlier: I had known about Star Trek: Of Gods and Men for a while now, but,, arrogantly perhaps couldn’t be bothered to engage with it. I finally gave it a viewing this afternoon. It’s strange: it is a version of star trek which is not the official version, as made by paramount, but which has many of the original actors in it, so you can’t call it fanfiction either. It sort of merges the two genres in a way, which interests me greatly. Like fanfic it takes an original text and adds to it in a way the original creators might not have intended, yet it has many actors from the original. I suppose it can be seen as a type of ‘official fanfic’, yet I still feel a sense of subversiveness to it, as if it’s makers were trying to tell paramount something. To my mind it almost yearns for the reinvigoration of a moribund franchise.

Either way, it seems to me that this might be the beginning of something. Textual play is opening up: we saw a good example at the olympics with bond and the queen. Like fanfiction, and like Of Gods and Men, that sequence can be seen to both add to, play with and pay tribute to an original text, for instance referencing/reusing the Union Jack parachute jump from The Spy Who Loved Me; but like the latter and unlike the former, it was semi-official, using original actors in their original roles, so it stands apart from usual, fan-made textual play. Indeed, given that it would be inappropriate for her majesty to appear in an actual EON-produced Bond film, Happy and Glorious is as near as it possibly could be to be to being a ‘real’ bond film; it therefore cannot be lumped together with the usual type of fanfic or textual play*. Could both be instances of a new kind of postmodern artistic movement, one which plays with established texts in new ways? Both constitute the breaking of accepted barriers. Could textual play itself be becoming mainstream? Now that certainly is an interesting prospect. after all, if bond can meet the queen, then why not anything else? Why can’t a borg cube fight an imperial deathstar, or Gollum poke harry potter in the eye?

*Mind you, as soon as one says that, one enters into debates over whether this was or was not bond. We know that ‘real’ 007 films are made by EON. This wasn’t, so therefore it can’t be a real bond film or part of he character’s history. If it is, then one must consider other bits of fanfic to be just as canonic (even if the rules of cannon in the fan studies sense do not apply to this franchise as they usually would). For instance, it would follow that ‘Never say Never Again’ should be accepted into the fold. At the end of the day, however, given that he official, current Bond actor was used, together with the bond theme and a firmly established bond meme in the flag-emblazoned parachute, to try to argue that this was not Bond or a huge tribute to the Bond phenomenon because it was not made by EON would be absurd. After all, although not official bond films, things like Never Say Never Again attest to Bond’s cultural position simply due to the fact they exist.