The Search for Ron

Author Commentaries

John

I find it interesting that just like Adventures in Space, the second illustration drawn for this story is of Ben playing his tuba. Only now he looks like a clown, and I still don't think I've got him holding it right.

In previous stories, Wayne and Garth from the Wayne's World movies and SNL sketches were included on the crew rosters, but didn't have much in the way of speaking parts. We used them a lot more in TSFR. I never knew that Garth's last name was "Algar" until I finally watched the Wayne's World movie in 2005, so he was always simply referred to in the story as "Garth," while Wayne got to use his full name.

I think "Massive Head Wound Harry" was one of the last one-off sketch characters that Dana Carvey played on SNL before leaving the show in the early nineties. He was basically a guy who came to a party that no one wanted to dance with because, well... he had a massive head wound that he apparently didn't know about. I believe he was thrown into the story by Gordon, and then never used again, at all, ever. I didn't do any drawings of him, and perhaps thats... for the best.

As I've read and reread through these stories again preparing them for the web, I noticed the fact that Gordon, (or at least Captain Scot), seemed to have an obsession with power. He's always trying to get it, and every new ship he serves on he looks at it from the viewpoint of how powerful it is. I have no point, really, I just thought that was interesting.

Potsdam, Ohio ended up being the location of both Lamefleet HQ and the entire population of the earth in the Lamefleet universe because that's where Ben Avery lived when we were writing this story.

Adventures in Space wasn't really patterned after any of the Star Trek films in particular, with the exception of the events at the end. The Search for Ron, however, is obviously meant to parody the events of the third Star Trek feature.

Raymond and Ronalda McDonalds are an enigma. How two McHicks from the McSticks could have two such well-adjusted (for McPeople) sons as Bozo and Ron is beyond me. And why do they keep calling Captain Finley a "revinoor?" I thought a revenuer was a government tax collector, or a federal agent who went looking for moonshine stills during Prohibition. Perhaps the word means something else in McLanguage.

In the middle of the OCOAGE roll call, there is a character who identifies himself as "Merlin Minor Flask." Ben inserted this villain into the Lame Trek universe here, but he'd actually been created earlier in our high school chemistry class. "Merlin Minor Flask" sounds a lot like "Earlenmyer Flask," doesn't it? And it's no coincidence that our chemistry teacher's name was Tom Minor. According to our legend, Merlin Minor Flask was invulberable, yet like Achilles he had one weak spot... in Merlin's case a small, square patch of unshaved sideburn on his right cheek. This was because one day, our chemistry teacher showed up for class with a small, square patch of unshaved sideburn on his right cheek, and we're still laughing about it to this day.

"Fat Guy the Twentieth" is derived from the primary antagonist in a James Bond parody that Ben wrote in high school that pitted the original Fat Guy against the world renowned, super-sophisticated superspy James Ben. According to the real Ben Avery, James Ben was Captain Avery's ancestor, and apparently the Fat Guy family has carried the grudge against Avery's family into the twenty-third century.

Ima McSteamy first appeared in Adventures in Space but now finally gets a name and a real piece of the action in her bid for revenge on Raymond McDonalds. Fortunately for Ray, Ima is easily spooked!

One of the great questions that could be on everybody's minds (but probably isn't): is the Lord Mung who shows up in TSFR the same Lord Mung who terrorizes the hapless denizens of the Kingdom of Gon in Lord of the String? I don't know! This could be a crossover event, or... it could just be that two separate and distinct story universes just happened to have an evil supervillain by the same name. Lord of the String is still a work in progress, so anything is possible!

Commander Kurtz, the "linguistics officer" on board the I.K.V. Aargh, was based on our high school English teacher, Greg Kurtz. Most of the other bridge officers serving aboard Kobill's ship were derivitives of that name.

Starting at about the point where Kobill vaporized everybody on his ship and set it on a collision course with the Benterprise, Ben took over the story and "railroaded" it to the end. I think he was just tired of it, didn't want to write any more, and wanted it to end. He wrote about three times as much material as we would normally add, and of course ended the story with a bang.

I think Gordon and I were both a bit disapointed to see the story end so abruptly. Gordon especially didn't like the way his character got pegged for the entire OCOAGE/Mung conspiracy, and worked very hard to remedy Captain Scot's tarnished reputation in the following story, The Quest of Ben. However, I think more disappointing to both of us was the fact that Ben didn't want to write any more material for the Lame Trek universe. Of the three of us, Ben is definitely the most talented writer, and we missed his contribution on our later efforts. Gordon and I both agree that Ben's ending to TSFR is classic Lame Trek humor.

What?

(It should be noted that the very last "Or is it" at the end of this story was tacked on by yours truly once Gordon and I had decided that we were going to continue Lame Trek on our own once again.)

Gordon

Despite the "railroaded" ending and the attempt to peg all the world's evils on Commodore Scot, this installment of Lame Trek has long been my favorite. I think that having a real story to parody helped us authors immensely with Search's structure. This resulted in a story that (for Lame Trek) is easier to follow and is logically progressing toward a conclusion as opposed to randomly ending when the authors tire of the narrative. This time, Ben purposely ended the story when he tired of the narrative.

That, unfortunately, is a pity and perhaps a bit premature. I especially liked Ben's inclusion of the treasure trove of baddies that make up the O.C.O.A.G.E. organization, which met an all-too-soon demise at the hands of Mung and the Warlock Lord 'O Joy. The enduring hope is that with the restoration of the universe in the following episodes, somehow the Ominous Consortium may have survived or have been re-founded.

In The Seach for Ron, Captain Finley finally gets a leading role in Lame Trek, after only a handful of lines in Adventures and even less in Stranded. Unfortunately, he spends the vast majority of the episode clinically insane. Sorry Korb! Let it be known that we attribute Captain Finley's lack of mental faculties to dealing with Ron's ketchup, not due to any inherent lack of intelligence of the character himself.

An interesting glitch that I didn't notice until years later involved the very last panel of the story. The universe is destroyed, Ben is alone on a hill playing his tuba, and... there are stars glittering in the background in a universe that only contains one star, Gamma Bootie. Oops. Though I have imagined the same panel without the stars, and it seems it wouldn't quite be as visually interesting with inky blackness behind Ben. The way I reconcile the discrepancy is that the objects behind Ben aren't stars at all-- rather they are flaming chunks of exploded matter fizzling out of existence in the Universes' death throes. It's a big universe, after all, and it would take at least a few minutes for the light of the explosions of all the stars to reach the Leviticus planet, yes?

As John had indicated, I decided at the end of this episode that the Avery / Scot feud had gone on long enough. The "poison pen" animosity of those two characters had reached a peak at the end of Search, and I didn't want the series to end with the two un-reconciled and bitter enemies at that. What bothered me even more is that Ben in real life is a good friend of mine, yet on the page it looked like we couldn't stand each other. I think that more than anything else is the reason why Lame Trek had to continue, in my view.

Little did we anticipate exactly how monumental that task would be...

Check out: Lame Trek II: The Search for Ron

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