Stranded

Author Commentaries

John

Stranded occurs simultaneously with Cremated Clingons, but was written years before it, right after the conclusion of Revolt on the Benterprise. This story suffers from some sort of time compression phenomenon; although it doesn't seem possible, its events occur over the course of not only the time that Captain Scot was doing desk work at Starbase 17, but also during the events of Cremated Clingons.

A discrepancy seems to have arisen around the amount of time Scot spent on Starbase 17. RotB says two years, but in both Stranded and Clingons, the time of his sentence is given as three years. Also, in RotB, three years pass after the release of Avery and the start of his new mission and Scot's court-martial. However, in this story Avery knows what Scot's sentence was. My guess is that Scot's court-martial and sentencing took place after one year of confinement, that he served one year of his three year sentence before Avery left, and that he then got time off for good behavior, shortening his sentence to just two years. But's that's just a guess.

Several new characters are introduced in Stranded. Mr. Stock of Vulgar was named after one of our high school teachers, but is also a play off a Star Trek original series character (Spock), as are Purina (Uhura), Sununu (Sulu), Chicken (Chekov), and McDonalds (McCoy). Others, such as Ensign Blagh and Cheif Engineer Vrum Turbo (pronounced "vroom"), were simply created out of thin air to fill necessary positions. Lieutenant Commander K. Kinkaid Finley, based on our good friend Korbet Finley, makes his first Lame Trek appearance in Stranded.

I must say something about Dr. McDonalds. I introduced him into the Lame Trek universe in an attempt to come up with an amusing play on words based on the name "McCoy" from Star Trek. I had no idea what would eventually evolve from this one character... an entire planet and culture based on the McDonalds restaurant franchise! Go on to read Lame Trek I, II, III and IV, and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Gordon and I had a number of other literary endeavors in progress simultaneously with the Lame Trek stories. One of these, which has now sadly been lost, involved a little blue alien named Kaa'Noost and his intergalactic quest for Ho-Hos. Gordon had the brilliant idea of doing a Lame Trek / Kaa'Noost crossover, and now it seems that Captain Avery's encounter with Kaa'Noost in Stranded is all that remains of the Kenwoodian's story. Unfortunate, since Kaa'Noost's motives for attacking the Benterprise and then later leaving them stranded once again before completing the Ho-Ho deal were better explained in Kaa'Noost's story.

Gordon's crossover gave me the impetus to insert my own. The "hostile alien" who grabs the Benterprise saucer was Bert, a character that I drew a short-lived series of comics about around the same time we were writing Stranded. Bert was based on the World War II era Kilroy drawings, in that he was always peeking over a wall of some kind and you never saw his entire face. He lived in the Checker Dimension, but was always peeling back the walls of his own dimension to visit others. An entire Bert comic, drawn at the time of the Stranded crossover, shows Bert's visit to the Lame Trek universe, his discovery of the Benterprise and carting it home, and being forced by his mother to return it. (In almost every Bert comic, he brought something home from another dimension which his mother made him put back.) Unfortunately, the Benterprise saucer got shrunk somehow in the process, leading to its destruction by a Clingon frigate.

At least the crew eventually returned to their original size.

One more thing... as I mentioned in the RotB commentary, I had been making a second copy of every story in which I re-drew all the illustrations. The illustrations you see in RotB and Clingons were scanned from this copy. However, in the mid-nineties, I had the idea of making a "deluxe edition" of Lame Trek. I bought a black spiral-bound notebook and began copying everything a second time, taking great pains to improve the drawings. I think I succeeded in some cases, although some of the new drawings just don't have the same character as the originals. The "personnel file" drawings were conceived for this project, and I began to use them in the ongoing originals as well. The illustrations you see in Stranded and the stories that follow it are a mix of drawings from my original copy and this "deluxe" second edition. The only exceptions are Clingons and Lame Trek IV: The Return of R'Dorko, both of which were written after I'd abandoned the deluxe edition project after making it partway through Lame Trek III.

Gordon

The first of our Revolt on the Benterprise sequels (The series title "Lame Trek" did not come into general use until Lame Trek I: Adventures in Space), Stranded dealt with Captain Avery’s adventures in the great beyond. The inspiration of this story basically came down to: Ooh! We shot Ben over to the other side of the universe! Now how do we get him back so we can continue our stories? The story is unique in the fact that no where in the narrative is Captain Jean-Luc Kanost mentioned, making Stranded the only story in the entire series that omits an "author" character in its entirety. Fortunately for John, the somewhat mysterious encounter with the alien Kaa’Noost allows a crossover author character to make an appearance, so all is not lost.

One thing that needs to be mentioned is this story’s preoccupation with Ho-Hos, a fixation that would continue to pop up every once in a while during the rest of the series. This is probably the real legacy provided by the Kaa’Noost crossover event. The search for Ho-Hos was, as John had said previously, the main impetus for the Kaa’Noost character, and somehow Captain Avery inherited that craving from our little blue alien. The whole Ho-Ho craving storyline was inspired by my eating habits during school lunch. However, the real shocker is that the Ho-Ho joke itself is inaccurate! I figure that at some point John had noticed that I always got a pack of Hostess Ho-Hos for dessert at lunch, and wrote it into our Kaa’Noost storyline. BUT, my traditional lunchtime dessert was not a Ho-Ho as written, it was actually a pack of King Dons! (For those who have never heard of King Dons, Hostess has since renamed them to Ding-Dongs -- check them out here.) I figure that it is highly plausible that on the day John wrote the snack into the Kaa’Noost story, the vending machine was out of King Dons and I had to make due with Ho-Hos, which then got declared the Universal Snacktime Food. This is a classic case of the Ho-Ho being in the right place at the right time! And thus, history was made.

Another Lame Trek element that makes its debut in Stranded is the Ancient Vulgar Means of Persuasion. I don’t think we ever quite nailed down exactly what the AVMP was, as it was variously interpreted as "face slap meets lip stretch meets neck pinch". Go figure. Whatever it is, the Vulgars in Lame Trek get pretty adept at using the thing.

As for the Ron McDonalds character, his introduction to the Lame Trek universe is what Stranded has come to be remembered for the most, by those of us who remember it. Way to go, John!

Check out: Stranded

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