The Quest of Ben

Author Commentaries

John

Although it is the longest entry in the Lame Trek series, to me this story has always seemed the weakest of our efforts. It's pretty obvious that we were taken aback by the abrupt and seemingly permanent ending to The Search for Ron, and were grasping at straws for ways to bring our beloved characters back to life. Even so, I don't think Quest is totally without its merits. I'm not certain when the idea to turn it into a Wizard of Oz spoof popped up, but it made for an interesting, if somewhat bizarre, new romp for our zany cast of characters.

Reading through the introduction, I have to laugh at my juvenile attempts to sound grandiose. Now the opening seems rather clunky and awkward, but at the time I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever written.

At the end of The Search for Ron, Captain Ben seemed quite happy to sit on his hunk of rock and play his tuba for all eternity. So I had to figure out a way to get him moving again so that we, the authors, could figure out a way to get our creative ball rolling towards the eventual restoration of the Lame Trek universe. Having him run out of valve oil (an event which may or may not have happened once or twice to the real Ben in band class) turned out to be the solution.

Thank goodness for loopholes! Ben left us one when he wrote, "They were zapped into another dimension, scattered into a million particles," referring to Wayne and Garth's decimation at the hands of a deranged Kobill in TSFR. Even as subatomic particles floating around in alternate dimensions, Wayne and Garth are two pretty cool dudes, and they became the first of our faithful crew members to be resurrected.

Avery and the Aviators refers to the real Ben Avery's real fake (as in, made-up) "heavy metal" band. As in "the band instruments are all made of heavy metal." Here's a link that probably explains it a little better than that awkward mess of a sentence I just wrote.

A word about Ensign Noghwhan: My co-author, Gordon Scott, has always specialized in coming up with unusual names for the "red shirts" (i.e. expendable crew members or extras) that are oddly spelled but actually pronounced like common, everyday words. For example, Ensigns Hym and Hergh, who first (dis)appeared in Stranded, have names that are pronounced like the pronouns "him" and "her," and this is what makes the verbal gag during their debut appearance work. "Noghwhan" is supposed to be pronounced like "no one." The dunderhead that I am, I didn't catch on to this until some time after Gordon introduced the character... for the longest time I was mentally pronouncing it "nog wan." (In fact, I still do sometimes.) I'm still not certain whether or not Gordon intended Noghwhan to be an actual, living character, or if he was supposed to be a hallucination of Doctor McDonalds brought on by his glue-sniffing.

When Lieutenant Commander Input made his reappearance, it seemed to jumpstart a rapid-fire series of old characters popping up all across the Land of Schnoz, their stories of how they arrived getting more and more bizarre and unbelievable. This all culminated in Captain Finley's return... we couldn't even think of a valid reason for him to be there, so... we didn't bother trying. The resulting scene is quite lame, but that is the name of the story, is it not?

What is it about that poor Jean-Luc Kanost that always seems to land him in an enemy prison? If it's not the Clingon penal colony of DaQrah Pagh, it's a Lamulan detention center, and when neither of them will do, well the, the dank, dark dungeons of the Wicked Witch of the Kleenex will just have to suffice!

In this story we introduced a new character, Commander T's'p'k'lk'd'r'p's'n'm'f'z'tk'a, whose name I have never been able to pronounce correctly. Gordon has tried on numerous occasions to explain and demonstrate the proper pronunciation to me, but I have not been, and I suspect never will be, able to say it right. Your guess is as good as mine.

At the point in the story where Ben first plays the ruby tuba with disastrous results, I now look back and wonder why on earth we didn't call Ron "Supersize Ron" instead of "Super Giant Ron." I mean, we were going for the whole McDonalds motif, weren't we? Hindsight is 20/20.

Yup. Whopperama's magic scepter is a plunger. Makes sense, his throne is a toilet.

I absolutely loved the idea of displaying a game of Starfleet Battles (or the Schnozian equivalent) in progress; I give Gordon top marks for that idea. After all, it is the game on which the Lame Trek universe and its mechanics are based. It provided an excellent and humorous means for Commodore Scot to escape from the Prison of Sneeze.

If you've noticed a significant improvement in the quality and detail of the illustrations in this story, it's not an accident. As I've mentioned in the commentaries for the earlier stories, I had begun a new-and-improved "deluxe edition" of all the Lame Trek stories, with better illustrations. Although that project fizzled out during the writing of this story (I got as far as the scene where the Sludgekins tell Ben about the Yellow Brick Nose), the more careful attention I'd been giving to the new illustrations carried over into the first edition of Quest. (*NOTE: By the time we began Lame Trek IV, I was a first-year commercial art major in college, and I think you'll notice an even more significant jump in the qualtiy of the illustrations there.)

Gordon

The biggest thing I remember about writing The Quest of Ben was how unbelievably hard it was to come up with a plausible scenario with which to continue the Lame Trek saga. Ben is a very accomplished writer, and his ending to The Search for Ron was fairly watertight. The sole loophole he left us in the narrative was that Wayne and Garth had been zapped into an alternate dimension. Even the bit about Ron was actually more close-ended than it appears. The original text for Ron's death at the end of Search stated that he had been vaporized. Unfortunately, I missed that line and had mentally pictured Ron falling over, dead, which is how I had him "recovering" in Quest. Apparently, John didn't pick up on the vaporizing line either, and by the time we caught the mistake, we were too far in the narrative of Quest to correct it. The easier solution was to "back-edit" the line in Search to fit what we had been mentally picturing all along, and Ron won a reprieve. Slightly bending the rules, I know, but we didn't want to continue Lame Trek without our prize character! Kudos to Ben though, for presenting such a maddening mental exercise for the two remaining authors! (And yes, it would have been easier to insert a "dream sequence", but since the days of the Gordran stories they have been rather frowned upon by us authors as a deus-ex-machina.)

The inspiration for the sequence with Kobill and all of the characters from Search's final battle getting merged with McMatter is a weird fusion of the microbe/Spock scenes from Star Trek III and the 1982 movie Swamp Thing by Wes Craven. Strangely, once Kobill the Plant Man "splits the scene" early in this installment, he is never seen or referenced again until the very end when Ben is musing on whether he will see Kobill again now that the universe is restored.

To answer John's "Noghwhan" question, I believe that yes, that character was intended to be a hallucination of Ron's brought about by that McElmer's Super Fast Drying Crazy Glue. However, it was obvious once the installment was returned to me that I didn't adequately convey that to John, and Ensign Noghwhan became yet another of our increasingly more improbable Lame Trek crew survivors. What is even more interesting about Noghwhan is that he is a one-off character, not based off of any "real life" character (SNL or otherwise), is not intended to be a lead (i.e. a captain, admiral, or some such), and yet he manages to become a main character in Quest as well as manages to survive until the very end! He doesn't even get shot off in some turbolift somewhere, or get transported through time or inter-dimensionally! As of this writing, he has yet to appear in any non-Quest Lame Trek literature, but nothing in the Lame Trek texts to date rule this out yet, either.

A possible continuity error has surfaced with Lame Trek: Adventures in Space, precipitated by this episode. Saladrama, Whopperama's sidekick and sole remaining Burger Klingon colleague, is portrayed in the earlier story wearing a fuzzy green hat... apparel that he presumably would not acquire until the duo's exile in the Land of Schnoz in The Quest of Ben. To be fair to John, the original editions of Adventures did not contain any sketches of Saladrama, and the subsequent drawings of the character in Quest ALWAYS had him wearing the green hat, a parody of the Emerald City Wizard's Guard from The Wizard of Oz. I figure when John put together his "deluxe" edition of Lame Trek, he simply transferred Saladrama's appearance from Quest to Adventures, including the green hat. Of course, the case could be made that Saladrama owned the hat prior to his and Whopperama's exile, and the similarity of the hat to the Wizard of Oz is mere coincidence.

A milestone of sorts occurs in this story, as Commodore Scot finally takes command of the U.S.S. Powerhouse, the dreadnought first mentioned way back in Adventures. And yes, he is obsessed with power. There. I said it. You would be too if you got stuck with little scout cruisers and science vessels while everyone else in the story gets battleships and dreadnoughts. No, I'm not bitter. Not in the least!

The appearance of Starfleet Battles has already been commented on by John, but what he neglects to tell you is how frighteningly close to reality that dialogue is to some of the game sessions our group of five friends had played in the past. It is no stretch of the imagination that Commodore Scot was able to sneak away while the Schnozonians are arguing about the finer points of the SFB rulebook. As a matter of fact, Scot probably could have gotten some coffee, taken a shower, packed his bags, made up his bed, and left a mint on his pillow with time to spare before the guards would have been done arguing.

In response to John and as a help to all of you avid Lame Trek readers out there, I present T's'p'k'lk'd'r'p's'n'm'f'z'tk'a Name Pronunciation 101! The correct pronunciation of the character can start off with this, phonetically: TIS-PICK-ULK-DERPS-NUM-FIZZ-TICK-AH. De-emphasize the vowel sounds except for the ending "a" and you got it! Easy as Sorryan Brandy!

As far as why I would come up with such a convoluted name for a character, it actually is (as is most of our inspirations) a parody on another work. The Star Trek novel Spock's World by Diane Duane has a character in it by the name of K's't'lk, an alien being that is described as looking like a crystalline spider. I liked the name, and figured that I would incorporate it into our work, but (as usual) taken to the extreme.

Check out: Lame Trek III: The Quest of Ben

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