About

MANDATORY FUN is a complete collection of 100 animated shorts, 16.9 minutes in total, made as an unofficial fan work. It is finished. There will be no second season.

Artist statement

Published 6 August 2026

Star Trek’s central promise is that work in the future will be meaningful. Its crews are competent, its missions matter, and nobody spends a shift arguing about a calendar invite. That promise is the most optimistic thing about the franchise, and it is the thing this project is aimed at.

Each short takes an officer from that imagined future and hands them a piece of ordinary corporate administration: a mandatory wellness session, a camera-on policy, a password rotation, an open-plan seating chart. The joke is not that these characters are silly. The joke is that the machinery of modern office life is strong enough to flatten even them — that we have built rituals no amount of competence or idealism can survive.

Opposite them stands a character built for exactly this. Daria Morgendorffer was, in her own series, a running critique of institutions that mistake procedure for purpose — school assemblies, self-esteem workshops, motivational assignments. Using her to examine the adult version of those institutions is not a departure from what that show was doing. It is the same argument, twenty-five years later, in a worse building.

The form is deliberate. Each piece runs about ten seconds, which is roughly the attention a real meeting deserves. There are a hundred of them because the point is repetition: any single absurd ritual is a joke, and a hundred of them in a row is a description.

Who owns what

Daria, Star Trek, and every character depicted here belong to their respective rights holders. This project is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected to Paramount, CBS, MTV, or anyone who has ever worked on those properties. No claim of ownership is made over the underlying characters, settings, or trademarks.

No copyright is asserted in these clips. They were produced by a generative model, and this project makes no ownership claim over the resulting frames.

Non-commercial, permanently

This work is free and will stay free. There is no advertising, no sponsorship, no merchandise, no membership, no crowdfunding, and no tip jar. Nothing here is for sale and nothing here ever will be. That is not a temporary state pending an audience; it is the condition on which the work was made.

On generated media

Every clip on this site was generated with AI, including all of the audio. The voices are synthetic. No performer recorded anything for this project, no actor participated in it, and no actor is named anywhere in it — including in the generation prompts, which are preserved in full with the project archive. Nothing here should be taken as a real performance by, or an endorsement from, any person.

The captions are exact in wording. Their timings are estimated from dialogue length rather than aligned to the rendered speech, and are labelled that way throughout.

How it was made

Each short was produced by an image-to-video model from one of five hand-selected anchor frames — one per co-star — which held the character designs, wardrobe, and setting steady across the whole run. A single structured prompt per episode specified the motion, the camera, the two lines of dialogue, the vocal character of each speaker, and the ambient sound. Every render records its seed and settings, so all of it is reproducible.

One post-generation repair: the generator’s audio decoder opened every clip on a sharp transient, so a single batch pass applied a 100 ms audio fade-in across the archive. The video streams were copied untouched; only the audio was re-encoded.

The site itself uses no third-party fonts, no analytics, no trackers, and no cookies. Its interface is a deliberate homage to the flat, block-and-elbow panel style of 1990s television starship computers — drawn from scratch, in a palette sampled from the clips rather than the colour system used on screen, with no insignia, no logo from either property, and no reproduction of any specific screen. An affectionate imitation, not trying to pass for the real thing.

Fair use

This is offered as transformative commentary: non-commercial, critical of the source material’s own premises as much as it borrows from them, and no substitute for anything the rights holders sell. Each short is roughly ten seconds at low resolution and uses no footage, audio, music, script, or artwork from any existing production.

That is a good-faith position, not a legal conclusion, and reasonable people can disagree with it.

If you own this material

If you represent a rights holder and want any part of this taken down, it will be removed promptly and without argument. There is no interest in a dispute here. Open an issue on the project repository, or use the contact address published alongside it, and it will be handled.

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