Fannish Ramblings

This being an election year, we’re going to spend the next nine months being bombarded with campaign ads. This morning it occurred to me that in convention dealers rooms, we’re probably going to see an abundance of T-shirts and stickers promoting various fictional Presidential tickets (e.g. “Picard/Riker 2008: The Team for the Future” or “Spock/Data 2008: The Logical Choice.”)

Those gags go back 10 or 20 years. Wouldn’t it be great to have a candidate from a more recent show? Then it hit me. We already do. One of the main threads in the first season of Heroes had to do with Nathan Petrelli’s Congressional campaign.

I didn’t have a lot of time this morning, but I’ve put together a few quick items on CaféPress. Check out the Fanboy’s Convention List online store. Based on feedback, I’ll decide how much more to do with that.

Updated 2-17-08: Apparently CaféPress considers “Petrelli for Congress” merchandise to infringe on NBC’s intellectual property. I had hoped this would be a permitted use, but so be it. It’s not the end of the world.

In the meantime, I’ve discovered what I’m guessing is an NBC-owned “Nathan Petrelli for Congress” site at http://votepetrelli.com/. The current status of the site seems to reflect the show’s story line. And who knows? Perhaps NBC is selling some “Petrelli for Congress” merchandise.

Starship Farragut

When Starship Farragut released their first episode last February, their goal was to release new episodes at a rate of two per year. The first episode, “The Captaincy” premiered at the Farpoint convention, so with the 2008 edition of Farpoint approaching, it occurred to me to check whether there were any updates.

Sure enough, when I visited Farragut’s web site (http://www.starshipfarragut.com/), I was greeted with an announcement that a new episode was available for download.

“For Want of a Nail” premiered on October 13 and was released on the web (with a variety of download mirrors) on December 3. I haven’t had a chance to view the episode yet (I may have an opportunity this weekend), but the trailers make it sound quite enticing.

Starship Exeter

After downloading the new Starship Farragut episode, I decided to check the status of another fan series, Starship Exeter (http://www.starshipexeter.com/). Rather than the “all at once” approach Farragut and New Voyages use for releasing their new episodes, Exeter has been releasing individual acts of the episode as they finish the post processing.

The advantage to this strategy is that you get to see new footage a little more often. The down side of course is that when a segment ends on a dramatic note, it can be quite frustrating waiting for the next segment to be released. In the case of Exeter’s current episode, “The Tressaurian Intersection,” it was a year between the release of Act II and Act III. (As frustrating as that might be, it’s still faster than IMPS: The Relentless which is coming up on three years since the last installment was released.)

As with the Exeter episode, I haven’t had a chance to watch Act III of “The Tressaurian Intersection” yet, but I do remember Act II as a classic cliffhanger. I’m definitely looking forward to watching it, though I can’t help wondering whether I should wait for the ending piece to be released.

Every so often I’ll check out Luke Ski’s site to see if he has any interesting projects going on. Visiting the site today and progressing onto YouTube, I discovered a batch of music videos based on his songs. Some appear to have been created with Luke Ski’s direct input, some by his fans.

Check them out if you dare:

Holding out for Hiro

You Don’t Know Jack

Wannabe a Slayer (Only visible on YouTube)

Stealing Like a Hobbit

And then, it appears that somebody took a part of one of Luke Ski’s derivative works and created their own derivative work, “Jedi School Dropout” (featuring an excerpt from Luke Ski’s “Grease Wars”).

Fans haven’t had much good to say about the Fox network since Firefly was canceled (likewise for the cancellation of Futurama), but I do have to give the network credit for being able to laugh at themselves (for example, the various Fox-targeted jibes on The Simpsons).

For the past several years, Fox’s Superbowl coverage has included a “robotic football player” jumping around during the breaks where they name the sponsors. The spots promoting The Sarah Connor Chronicles, featuring the football player being attacked by Terminators, definitely got my attention.

I haven’t regularly watched anything on broadcast television for a few years, but this has me intrigued. (Seeing the two commercials they ran may also have something to do with it.)