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I have known Admiral Niagara since he was a twinkle in his father's, er, creators' eyes. We were writing up Admiral Quirk's umpteenth court martial at the hands of an as-yet-unnamed Starfleet high admiral for the unpardonable sin of saving the galaxy, when...
Maybe I should begin at the beginning...
Maybe not that far back.
Ok, August 1980. By this time, the bing bang had cooled to the point where humans could survive. Gene Roddenberry had created Star Trek, all the principals of our story had been born, and George and I were both freshmen at UNO. (UNO isn't formal enough to have froshchmen).
Colleen Wallace was organizing an SF club at the time, and
each of us was recruited. I recall George telling us that he gave his nickname as
'Bill
' to one of his professors and it stuck for a few years. The Survivors of
the Big Bang constitution was the first collaborative effort we both worked on, although it was a work
of not-quite fiction.
Over the next two or three years, SOB² got to know each other, went to a few conventions, threw a few parties, played endless games of Cosmic Encounter, and developed a communal interest in Audio Science Fiction. This last was especially unusual, because I don't recall that any individual had such an interest. Several of us tried to write our own radio plays, but each of us lacked some of the skills and/or persistence to put together anything we were willing to show around, much less produce.
Somehow, somebody got the idea to collaborate on a radio play. We were still naive enough to think that we could combine our individual abilities into a gestalt. Fortunately, we fought over what to write about. Some of us wanted to do hard SF, some fantasy, some swords and sorcery, and someone had to do a mystery. The only thing we could agree on was that the situation and characters had to be settled before we could begin actual writing, and that we wanted to do something more serious than yet another Star Trek spoof.
But, to misquote A. C. Doyle, "After you have eliminated
the impossible, all that remains, however juvenile, is to do a Star Trek spoof
". At least ten of
us met once or twice a week for the better part of a semester. The first meeting, we just threw around
character names and basic plot ideas. Most of the ideas were direct spoofs or sequels of particular
Trek episodes. (This was 1982, there was only Trek Classic.) Yet, against all odds, we created our
own plotline for The Wrath of a Con. To summarize the summary:
The A.S.S. BOOBYPRIZE
is dragged into the 20th century by Dr. Who
(Tom Baker style, the US hadn't seen anything else yet),
attracted by our scrambled Orcan egg. Dr. Who disguises himself as a
fan in a Dr. Who costume at DarathaCon '86. We deploy the usual
landing party, win fourth in the costume contest,
PHASER a fan,
go to a room party, find the Star Fleet Battle Manual, roll a six,
fail a high energy turn (killing off a third of the crew), and return to our own time. After that,
'Bones
' Maloy and Montgomery Ward Scotch succeed in killing off Mr. G. Spot by
locking him in the men's room and backing up the toilets, and his body is flushed (literally)
into space.
Somewhere along here, George dropped out of active SOB² membership, and the Amalgamation faltered. We recorded The Wrath of a Con at Fed Haugh's house on April 1, 1983, and converted it to a stage play and performed it at VulCon*. That Saturday night at VulCon 1983 was the same night as the last pan-galactic gargle blaster party for a decade or so. Both are best remembered in the forgetting. However, it was at about this point that George came back to SOB².
Somehow, despite the flop at VulCon, we were asked to perform TWOAC at CoastCon the next year. We decided to un-stage it, and do a live radio play (we did wear costumes, but the show was in the audio.) It was in large part due to George's insistence at having numerous rehearsals at which we actually improved timing and emphasis that we were a hit on March 10, 1984. (this date later became stardate 0:0000).
The only problem with success at CoastCon was that they wanted us to do another play the next year!!
Our working title was Revenge of the Dead-Eye. It would be a parody of the
Star Wars trilogy, of which the last was released in May, 1983.
At this point, we fully believed Lucas would continue doing these movies every three years into the
twenty-first century. After numerous brain-storming sessions at various bars and the physics club
room, we set a date for the writing sessions. It only took about four sessions to write this one,
partially because we had the plotline fleshed out a little better in advance, but mostly because
only George, Liz Eckerle, and I showed up for them. Most of the play was written by George and Liz
dialogue-ing out the parts, with me throwing in wisecracks and scribbling furiously. Our primary
difficulty with this play was Lucas' use of establishing visuals. We didn't want to stray
from audio format, so the announcer's role was increased. The net effect was that the announcer
wound up delivering half of the plot and our timing strongly resembled the The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. Also, none of the characters we had written had the guts to
blow actually blow up the Derth Star, so we brought in the BOOBYPRIZE
crew to do it. The motive? They saw the insipid orange "under construction
" signs dispersed
through space like elecrons in a cloud, and thought it was toilet paper left by the apparently
not-so-late Mr. Spot. We rolled another six with a PHARTON torpedo, and blew up "half the
damn galaxy and ourselves along with it
". Mr. Spot's replacement, Ensign T (as in "I
pity the fool what touch my shiny new console
") was also lost when he leapt into space after
his gold chains, which had been tossed out by Bones.
Our main problem with performing the play was that it was too long. CoastCon only wanted about twenty five minutes, and we had about forty. We decided to jettison the opening stuff about sneaking everyone into Slobba the Mutt's doghouse and Delaya Orgasma dissolving the dehydrated Khan Solo in warm water to reconstitute him, and give all that to the announcer, too. (The opening was later restored as the Un-Lobotomized version.). But, wouldn't you know it, the convention then asked us if we could do another fifteen minutes.
The working title of the third play was given in TROTB as "In Search of...Spot, or I'll take you
home again, Kathleen
". We had no idea that these titles were in any way linked, until I
thought, "What if Spot's first name was Kathleen?
" Unfortunately, he was already
G. Spot, so it had to become "I'll take you home again, Gkathleen
". This was a fully
Amalgamation play, with cameos by the P-team (Col. Panadol Smith, Facemaker,
and the return of Ensign T.) and the Starship construction/repair team of Howard, Fine, and Howard.
To summarize: We find Mr. Spot's Kaka (his soul) and reunite it to his body (we found it
somewhere) in an ancient voodoo ritual involving a King Edward Cigar. We also blow up a
Klingfree and a Remoulade fleet along the way.
Anyway, we had done three plays at this point, and we had called the second play "the middle
story of the middle trilogy of trilogies
". And we had numbered our three plays 1, 2, and 3.
(Lucas post-dated Star Wars to #4). So, our next story, the first story of the first trilogy
of trilogies, became Star Yecch Negative Two: Forward into the Past. It opens with the above
mentioned court-martial. Niagara dismisses the charges before they are even read, but sentences
the BOOBYPRIZE crew to man the new EXPECTORATION battle cruiser, with it's ill-omened Trash
WArP Drive.
We took on Rocky Horror in Star Yecch Negative One, which had essentially no pot, but, then,
it was a musical. "It's just a sock to the left, panty hose to the right, but that jock
on your hips, and you pull it up tight! It's the cosmic socks that really drive you
through space! Let's use the Trash WArP
again!
" This was the last dramatic appearance of the BOOBYPRIZE
crew, but the emphasis had already shifted to the written word and the Admiralty.
During carnival 1988, Anthony's car, christened the ANDREA DORIA
(DYV-1060), was hit and run uptown, only a day or so after other collision damage had been
repaired. It was time to go to war against the Ubangmees. We wrote our first newspaper ever
(the headline was "War!
" and the subtitle "HUUNNGH!
") and put it on the freebie desks
at CoastCon. We also pre-printed some letterhead and produced three more newsletters at
CoastCon. It was fin, but we missed almost the whole con. (Of course, we were printing on
George's Atari, at a blistering 5 cps or
so.) After that experience, we pre-printed all of the newspapers before the convention.
Since his initial Court-Martial, Admiral Niagara has waged a dozen or so wars upon the Ubangmees, Bjornn (Huge tennis ball ships that bounce around space), the F'Gawis, the Klingfrees, the Remoulades, and others. He as also handled internal uprisings by the Obsidians, the Rhondstadt (aka Senate), and the Rubble Alliance. He has capriciously re-assigned (nearly) everyone in Operation Coronary, been killed by at least seventy-two PHASER blasts (self-inflicted in a room of mirrors), been improperly succeeded by his sibling-clone Hiawatha M Niagara and bastard son Will E. Dicker, and now, a year later, found alive upon emergency exhumation of his remains.
Hiawatha L. Niagara not only lives in interesting times, he leads an interesting life. Not bad for a clone.
Gus Michel, aka Guhd E.
'Goody
' Gumdrop
Keeping the peace as best we can."
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