Kate Mulgrew dropped a major hint that Star Trek: Prodigy may go live-action.
Star Trek: Prodigy is a hit and has won over a lot of its critics with its heart, humor, and stylish animation. The series has really done a good job highlighting the Trek values with a young-entertaining crew of new characters. Most of them are originals but the show does a good job of connecting it to a larger Trek audience by using cameos and legacy characters.
One of those characters that came back to Star Trek was Kathryn Janeway, who is seen twice in the show. One as an Emergency Command Hologram and another as an older Admiral Janeway. Janeway of course is from Star Trek: Voyager and the woman who brought her to life with such ease, Kate Mulgrew, returned to the role with Prodigy.
Prodigy, unlike Voyager, is completely animated. There’s no live-action acting here. Yet, the talk of crossovers has come up recently, so when SFX Magazine (via TrekMovie.com) sat down with Mulgrew to talk Trek, one of the questions asked is if they thought characters from Prodigy would appear in live-action at some point in the future.
"Kate Mulgrew: [She leans across the chair and grins] I think there’s a likelihood, actually…"
Should Star Trek: Prodigy stray into live-action?
Now, Prodigy is an animated series and with that comes the fact that a lot of the designs aren’t created with the consideration of live-action adaptation in mind. There’s a character Rok-Tahk who’s close to eight feet tall and well over four hundred pounds. That’s not going to be easy to pull off in live-action.
She’s also voiced by an 11-year-old girl, so putting her in prosthetics isn’t even possible. So it doesn’t seem like she’d be brought in any practical sense; though completely CGI is possible (an expensive).
That doesn’t mean it’s entirely impossible. Both Dal and Gwyn, the stars of the show, are both very possible to bring over to live-actoin. Plus the series does feature Mulgrew’s Janeway and Robert Beltran’s Chakotay, so there are already established live-action characters on the show.
So should Prodigy get the live-action treatment? If it’s in a cross-over, you can use characters like Dal and Gwyn if you’re looking for someone new, and of course, Chakotay and Janeway if you’re just looking at anyone from the show.
So should they? Sure, even if it’s expensive, and hard to do, it would be something that would be a lot of fun to see get pulled off. Just from a technical stance. Especially if the whole crew of the USS Protostar shows up in live-action.
So yeah, let’s do it.