Adventures in Space
The No-Motion Picture

Author Commentaries

John

The first of our "feature-length" Lame Trek stories, Adventures also marked the first of our stories to have not two, but three authors collaborating together. Ben Avery joined our writing team for the first time, injecting his unique sense of humor and storytelling talents to really liven things up.

To be honest, Ben really deserves a lot of credit for getting the entire Lame Trek saga started in the first place. Revolt on the Benterprise, the first story in the series, was inspired by a series of comic book-like doodles that Ben and I traded back and forth when we were lab partners in high school Chemistry.

Throughout this series, events in the story have frequently been inspired by our drawings (and vice versa, of course). A good example of this is the repeated shrinkings and re-inflatings of Captain Ben's head that occur throughout this story. In my original opening illustration, which I faithfully re-copied for the second edition, I accidentally drew Captain Avery's head a bit too small for his body! Ben picked up on this and wrote it into the story, naturally incorporating his own high-school band instrument, the tuba, as the cure for Captain Avery's affliction.

It ought to be noted that when reading Adventures in Space out loud, the Lamulan character Commander T'Singer's lines should always be sung. Just thought you should know that.

The scene where Captain Avery is explaining Mr. Input's tephlon-detection idea to the other officers was lifted from the ST:TNG two-part episode Redemption, where Data comes up with a similar idea for detecting cloaked Romulans via tachyons. Gordon used to love to make fun of my original illustration for this scene, because when drawing it, I screwed up the perspective on Ben's hand gesturing at the screen. I tried to "fix" it, but ended up making his hand look like a scrambled inky mess. I've included the new and improved "deluxe edition" illustration for the on-line version.

And that brings me to another point: it's very easy to tell which illustrations are from the the first edition and which are from the deluxe, since for Adventures only I used blue ink for the basic line drawings instead of black. I'm not sure why, but by the time I drew the deluxe edition illustrations, I'd switched back to the black ink standard.

I believe Commander Guy Forget was Ben's idea. Ben had either read or heard about a French tennis player named Guy Forget, pronounced "gee for-zhay" in French, but in English it sounds like you're saying "I forget." Ben thought this was hilarious and so we had to have a scene in the story where Guy tells someone his name and they think he can't remember it.

The bit about Captain Avery's memory getting swiss-cheesed after he and his crew are sent back in time by the Disorganizians is, I'm fairly certain, an off-hand and obscure reference to the early nineties science fiction TV series Quantum Leap. That show was in it's first few seaons when we were writing Lame Trek and we were all fans.

Kobill's repeated shootings of his first officer are explained in the commentary for Cremated Clingons. However, it should be noted that this practice first appeared here, and by the time Clingons was written, had become "old hat."

Pennyunwise McClown, the McPerson villain who makes his debut in this story, was based on Pennywise, the sinister, murderous clown from Stephen King's It. The TV miniseries based on that novel came out right around the time we wrote Adventures in Space.

Ah, the good old Acme Patented Flashback Ripple Effect^TM! This is one of Gordon's contributions, and one that I feel only he can adequately explain. Suffice it to say, it seems to be one of Gordon's favorite storytelling devices, and he uses it quite frequently.

Gordon

Reading through the Lame Trek series chronologically, one could get the impression that for a while I had some preoccupation with having Jean-Luc captured by the enemy. My rationale on the ongoing "theme" of Admiral Kanost's incarceration is that the initial idea was thought up during the first drafts of Cremated Clingons before the text was lost. Deeming that plotline gone forever, I tried to incorporate elements from it into Adventures in Space, since I had gotten rather fond of where Clingons was heading. Apparently, between John and Ben, they would have nothing of it. Spoilsports. Fortunately for all of us, John and I later revisited the plotline in its own right and I was able to explore the concept in a resurrected Clingons story.

In Adventures, the Avery/Scot banter continues with the Ho-Ho poisoning plot, pioneering a new major plot device in the story with the appearance of Hanz Shwartzeneggar as the first (of many) Saturday Night Live characters to be inserted into the narrative. It may also be noted that I did not realize at the time that real life Ah-nold's last name is actually spelled "Schwarzenegger", but since it seems we were consistent about spelling Hanz's last name, the error could be chalked up to an intentional parody of the now-Governator's surname.

Why on earth John did not take the IDEAL opportunity to turn his "author's interruption" near the start of the story into an "Ah, But" is beyond me. To this day, I still mentally add the infamous phrase at the start of his paragraph. Perhaps he had thought it was too cliche by this point, or something.

Despite the persistent rumor that Authors are infallible, we do commit errors from time to time. Some of the more obvious ones include Captain Scot astride a Benterprise-class vessel (instead of a destroyer) at the end of Revolt on the Benterprise, the timeline errors of Stranded and Cremated Clingons, Ben's incredible shrinking head, or the attempt to rename Dolong to Wazzitooyu in Adventures. Most of these are minor and simply ignored, or corrected by actions later on in the narrative. Unfortunately, I was the perpetrator of one of the bigger errors in the series, prompting a rejection of my submission and a forced rewrite (I believe that was the only time this has happened in all of our co-authored story history). The error was simply too big to overcome through the narrative, and John thought it was best if I scrapped my segment and tried again. What happened was this: Ben had written a small blurb about "Pennyunwise McClown" in his segment, providing no other details about the character, and then passed it on to me to continue. Unbeknownst to Ben, I had never heard of Stephen King's thriller "It", and wouldn't see the movie version until many years later. As such, I had interpreted Pennyunwise as a malicious, cantankerous old spinster woman of a McPerson that Ron had prior relations with many years ago. I had written a flashback on the relations between the two and provided a semi-elaborate backstory before turning the story over to John for continuation. To which John promptly replied, "Gordon, Pennyunwise McClown is a MAN!" and proceeded to tell me the derivations of the name.

Disappointed, I shelved the previous storyline and wrote a backstory of why Pennyunwise (the man) was evil instead. The only remaining stub of my version of Pennyunwise was the picture Ron has. Why I didn't remove that, I'm not certain, but I interpret that scene as Ron possessing a signed celebrity "glossy" of Pennyunwise in his quarters. As you may suspect, when an opportunity to dust off my original plans for the character presented itself, I pounced. The female Pennyunwise McClown was renamed "Ima McSteamy", assigned as the Lamefleet operator seen in the previous panel, and the backstory moved from Ron to his father, Raymond, as seen in The Search for Ron.

Toward the end of the story, I had an off-the-cuff idea to have Ron revert Ben's plastic surgery not back to a human as expected, but to a McPerson. I thought this would be totally in line with what a McPerson would do, and to my surprise, both John and Ben went with it. What totally threw me off guard was the length of time that this plot device would be used. I thought that Ben would remain a clown for a page or two, the laugh would wear off, and then Ben would revert his character back to a human just in time for the end credits. Amazingly, Ben would stay a McPerson for much longer than that...

And lastly, about the ACME Patented Flashback Ripple Effect^TM... This plot device actually started off rather humbly in the English Composition class that we all were taking in high school. At the time, it was merely called the ripple effect or the flashback effect. I believe I had even used it in the utterly lame comp stories that were part of our class assignments, with references that the ripples from the flashback effect obscured the character's eyes. This was based on various conventions used on television when flashbacks occur and what looks like water ripples travel across the screen as the picture dissolves and morphs into the past. Once John and I started continuing stories on our own, I would every so often insert the effect into our narratives as necessary, with each instance becoming more elaborate than the previous: the ripple effect. The Flashback ripple effect. The Patented Flashback effect^TM. The Patented Flashback Ripple Effect^TM. The ACME Patented Flashback Ripple Effect^TM. And voila! An author's trademark is born!

Check out: Lame Trek: Adventures in Space

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