While kdramas having been established in global popularity, cdramas are having a bit of a moment with international audiences.
Pursuit of Jade was recently the first to crack mainland China production to crack the Netflix non-English language top ten, and stayed on it for several weeks.
Outside China, cdrama fans seem to intersect with Star Trek fans more than one might expect. Perhaps it’s the willingness to watch massive numbers of episodes to enjoy a series? cdramas typically come in with 40 episode series, and in earlier years some had 60 or 70 episodes.
So, it seems inevitable that Star Trek cdrama fans would want to fancast reboots of classic Star Trek legacy characters with top Chinese Idol drama actors.
u/universalaxototal created these and posted them on cdramafans subreddit today. Shared with permission.
More are in the works for some of the women characters.
From the original post:
• Tan Jianci righteously commanding as Xiang-Luc Picard mic drop 🎤
• Liu Yuning looking so natural in Starfleet uniform. He definitely plays the saxophone […and towers over everyone at 1.91 metres.]
• Hou Minghao as Captain Kirk, absolutely seducing an alien woman on a distant planet while the away team pretends not to notice
Deng Wei as Spock/Data 🖖
• Deng Wei also somehow managing the wearing of a hair accessory on his face (it is the future, luxury brands have collapsed, so the House of Chanel has had to pivot into quantum optics and interface technology)
As I said, the images were posted on Reddit by someone who loves both Cdramas and Star Trek.
I’ve checked privately with the creator and they asked to watermark the images. They shared the watermarked versions with me by private messaging and agreed to let me post here.
This person is a professional vfx specialist working in television who did this for their own amusement. They have asked me to avoid sharing more detail on who they are which I believe is fair.