健康长寿·繁荣昌盛*

Meanwhile, we're living with the 
looming threat of authoritarianism 
and no Star Trek- themed park...

Like I've mentioned before, I'm not an amusement park person. The mix of inedible food, nausea, and screaming children has never appeared to me. That said, I'm a little jealous of China. Well, ok not the authoritarianism and human rights violations, but they're getting a Star Trek theme park, so there's that. Ok, it's not a Star Trek park per se, but rather an eight billion dollar resort themed around Paramount studios in Kunming, China and part of it will be Star Trek themed. The rest of it, I suppose, will be based on Paramount's other streaming series? 

Which, I mean, what else do they have? Survivor and like five different versions of NCIS? One is a TV show about trying to survive in a harsh, unwelcoming environment and the other is a police procedural for olds. Neither sounds like a particularly appealing vacation, so why not make the whole thing Star Trek?

Wait, what's even going on here? Is this what Survivor is now?
Because this looks like a ropes course for team-building getaways.

"Lebel lange un gedeihe, Nerds."

-an old German saying

Anyway, if a Star Trek attraction sounds familiar, it's because Star Trek the Experience in Las Vegas did exactly the same thing but closed like ten years ago. So now, according to Trekmovie.com, the only Star Trek themed park attraction in the world right is in Germany--which is again, inconvenient for me--at a place called Movie Park. Although this makes more sense than China, as Germany is pretty keen on Star Trek. In fact there's a subset of the extended universe novels written in German. But does anyone in China know or care about it? But an exhaustive search of the internet--by which I mean I googled it--came up with a kind of confusing answer to whether or not Star Trek is popular in China. Mostly it appears not to be a thing, but there's nearly one and a half billion people there, so statistically someone's got to be into it.

Although the crew of the Enterprise did
once team up with Mark Twain, so, I mean,
the Chinese government isn't wrong here.

Searching for "Chinese Star Trek fans" yields some results including some lunatic CEO who modeled his company's headquarters after the Starship Enterprise. My sense it that the fandom in China is something akin to the following say Blake's Seven or Space Battleship Yamoto has in the US. So, you know, nerds. Not helping matters is the fact that the Chinese Government bans movies and television about time travel--a well Star Trek dips into kind of a lot--saying that they "treat history frivolously." Which is a weird thing to get upset about, but I don't want to tell them how to police state. 

Anyway, all this is to say that while I would never begrudge overseas fans the experience of paying way too much for watered down cocktails in a recreation of Quark's Bar or getting married on a replica of the Enterprise-D's bridge. Never, more power to them. But what I want to know, is why isn't there one of these in the U.S? 

I mean, we invented obsessive fandom.

*I guess it's Chinese for "live long and prosper" but this is Google translate we're talking about so, who can say?