Time has proved Gene Roddenberry’s original 1966 “Star Trek” television series a tough act to follow. By mixing swashbuckling derring-do and ticking-clock plot brinksmanship with emotional stakes of mythological size and operatic intensity, “Star Trek,” like bubblegum music, Marvel Comics, Rod Serling’s original “Twilight Zone,” and the best of the rest of 1960s pop culture, sold young-at-heart audiences on a fantasy of adult emotional existence in which nothing lasted forever except hope and regret.

For every planet Captain Kirk and his crew saved, for every tangled time stream they put back in order, there was at least one heart that broke. True believers like me watched the show with our hearts in our mouths, both wishing for and ruing the day that our lives might bear the same magnificent potential for emotional martyrdom, responsibility, and risk that the Enterprise crew endured weekly.

In the decades since the cancellation of the original series (as well as its subsequent rerun immortality), the “Star Trek” feature films and TV spin-offs, though they’ve held fan interest, have presented a decidedly less pulpy and dramatic galaxy that, at worst, resembles a consensus-seeking PTA meeting in space when compared with the original series. The show’s most recent incarnation, “Star Trek: Enterprise,” mistook vulgarity and stupidity for heroism and died an overdue death after four wince-inducing seasons, leaving the big and small screen Trek-free for the first time in 20 years.

But as the show’s fan base has proclaimed for three decades, “‘Star Trek’ lives.” No less an acolyte than “Lost” and “Alias” writer/director J.J. Abrams, the talented heir apparent to the pulpy, ingeniously imaginative, and emotionally truthful story legacy of Roddenberry, Serling, and Marvel Comics’ Stan Lee, has vowed to rejuvenate Kirk, Spock, and McCoy for the big screen next year.

But if the future of “Star Trek” is its past, then the future is now, not Christmas2008, when Mr. Abrams is scheduled to unveil his retooled “Star Trek.” Audiences hungry for more adventures with the original Enterprise crew need look no further than their computers. Since 2003, a crew as altruistically minded, culturally diverse, and indefatigable as the Enterprise’s complement has periodically toiled in a former car dealership warehouse in upstate New York, boldly picking up where the original series left off in “Star Trek: New Voyages,” a series of one hour “webisodes” that resume the “Trek” timeline before the series was cancelled after three seasons in 1969.

“Star Trek: New Voyages” is the brainchild of fans James Cawley and Jack Marshall. Coordinating and networking via the Internet, Mr. Cawley (who also portrays Captain Kirk in each webisode without William Shatner’s Shakespearean presentational extremes) has assembled a cast and crew composed predominantly of enthusiastic amateurs and produced four original episodes of the series (a fifth is in post production) available for viewing exclusively via the Internet. The goal is to eventually create a full seasons’s worth (about 22 a year) of “webisodes” that maintain Roddeberry’s vision for the original series.

Each “New Voyages” episode has moved past the last in complexity and production values. The latest, “World Enough and Time,” which made its premiere last week on the New Voyages Web site and onscreen at the start of a weekend-long Star Trek film festival in Los Angeles, romances the original show’s mythos by using the original show’s actual talent.

“World and Enough Time” features actor George Takei in a reprisal his role as Hikaru Sulu, the Enterprise’s helmsman. Mr. Takei’s participation was midwifed by the episode’s co-writer and director, Mark Scott Zicree. Mr. Zicree is a veteran television writer and producer, with “Next Generation” and “Deep Space Nine” scripts among his more than 100 credits. A chance meeting with an original “Star Trek” cast member, Walter Koenig, on the eve of Mr. Koenig’s reprisal of his role of Ensign Pavel Chekov for a previous “New Voyages” shoot, brought the Web series to Mr. Zicree’s attention.

“I went online and watched ‘New Voyages,'” Mr. Zicree said. “It was great, it was so much fun. There was enthusiasm, it was cleverly written, it had energy, and the effects were terrific. They were getting millions of viewers and they were totally fan produced.”

As a working writer in Hollywood and a student of the convoluted history of “Star Trek,” Mr. Zicree recalled a script pitch from the series’ lost decade.

“Paramount was going to do a show called ‘Star Trek Phase II’ in 1976 and 1977,” he said. “A friend of mine named Michael Reaves came up with this great Sulu story where Sulu gets marooned on an alien planet and has a family,” he said. “Sulu’s such a great character and George Takei is such a great actor and I always loved that story.”

As it turned out, he loved it enough to make Mr. Takei love it as well.

“Mark is a very excitable guy,” Mr. Takei said. “He vigorously and excitedly pitched me, and I said, ‘It sounds interesting. When the script’s ready, I’d love to read it.’ He opened up his briefcase and said, ‘Here it is.'”

Ironically, in the 30 years since the story was conceived, Mr. Takei has only grown better suited for the part of the older of the two Ensign Sulus separated by decades in “World Enough and Time.”

“If I had done it back in the ’70s, I would’ve played the young Sulu and they would’ve made me up to play the aged Sulu,” Mr. Takei laughed. “But in this case I provided my own aging.”

“George was phenomenal,” Mr. Zicree said, and the finished film, an ingeniously plotted and craftily executed distillation of story tropes and themes from the original series, garnished with an extra dollop of pop humanism redolent of the ’90s spin-offs, bears out his claim. And Mr. Takei’s experience?

“It just underscored the extraordinary phenomenon of ‘Star Trek’,” said Mr. Takei who, like everyone involved, worked for free and paid his own way. “It was an amazing, international group of people. The very kind of team that Gene Roddenberry envisioned.” Ensign Sulu’s younger self is played by a Washington, D.C., attorney, John Lim. John M. Kelley is actually a practicing doctor when not portraying Dr. McCoy on “New Voyages.”

“Infinite diversity in infinite combinations,” Mr. Takei said, invoking one of boilerplate credos of “Star Trek.” “But diversity isn’t just in ethnicity or political philosophy, it’s in capabilities.”

With a hugely successful premiere screening in the recent past, a trip to Japan to show “World Enough and Time” at Worldcon in Yokohama this week, and continuing guest roles on NBC’s top-rated “Heroes” on the next horizon, the 5 a.m. wraps, misfiled call sheets, blanket-and-clothesline dressing rooms, and no cell phone service have long since faded into Mr. Takei’s distant past.

“It was fun, it was trying, it was exhilarating, it was tough,” he said, true to trouper form. “I think it’s unrealistic to go into a thing like this expecting the kind of working relationship we’d have on a Hollywood soundstage.”

“Gene Roddenberry created the show and it was his vision,” Mr. Takei said. “But this unbelievable longevity is because of the fans. I truly believe the ‘Star Trek’ phenomenon was really created by the fans. Doing this project was a way of showing my appreciation — all the while knowing that it was going to require a little bit more than just appreciation on my part.”