Behind the scenes of the making of: "Star Quest"

This post contains background information on the Star Quest video, which can be seen here on my YouTube channel, Tales from Weirdland:

It’s funny. As a kid, I wasn’t a big sci-fi fan. Or even a little sci-fi fan. There was Star Wars, sure–I loved Star Wars–but outside of that, nothing took my fancy. My brother, a real nerd, complete with jam jar glasses and an oversized digital watch that accurately showed all the moon phases, used to watch all the shows religiously: Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, V, and so forth; but me, I played with dolls and wanted a doll’s house for Christmas (which I got, thank you). My main memory of the 1979 Buck Rogers TV show basically is this hideous villain that appeared in one of the episodes: there was something wrong with him, his skin looked like mutant muesli. Boiled cancer. It made me lose all appetite for like, years.

He’s wearing his mask there–this is to protect you, reader. (I took that image from a blog, John Kenneth Muir’s Reflections on Cult Movies and Classic TV.) Google “Varek”, “Buck Rogers”, if you dare.

But anyway, the sci-fi genre wasn’t really for me.

And yet, I find that it’s exactly that, those old sci-fi shows and comics, that evoke some of the strongest childhood memories. Possibly because they promised an exciting future, somewhere in the background. Or maybe it’s like the songs you don’t really pay attention to: those get stuck in your head.

(A song gets stuck in your head when your brain is trying to finish it, to resolve it, but it can’t. To counter this, play the song in its entirety.)

That’s me, left, being my autumnal self in the early 1980s. My big brother is lost in a comic and unaware of reality.

Star Quest is an homage to this era of silver spacesuits, capes, medallions, bushy sideburns, tin foil antennas, robots made of gold-painted hard latex, and control panels that were really disguised mixing desks. I’ve always been intrigued by the technology from that period: those robust, bulky designs, built to withstand a bomb explosion apparently. 1970s telephones look like pre-school toys, with big buttons and thick, coated armor. The enemy ship in SQ is like that: it’s plated, heavy, a shark-shaped fortress:

Grand Vizier Rylox, captain of this evil ship, originally looked like the image above. His appearance resembled that of a Noh demon, but as much as I liked the design, it clashed with the 70s theme, so I abandoned it before I got to coloring the face. As I was redesigning the character, I wanted Rylox to look as if his face could be a rubber mask, or as if he was wearing prosthetics maybe. That’s why he has limited mouth movements in the video: it’s not bad lip syncing, it’s simply that the actor can’t move his facial muscles too well.

When Captain Logan is being addressed by Rylox via hologram, he just sternly stands there, listening. As Rylox himself wasn’t much to look at, with his small, black mouth, I had to vary the camera positions occasionally to prevent the video from losing its rhythm. That resulted in this tricky shot. I was very pleased with Captain Logan’s look actually: it’s a blend of Lorne Greene and a non-specific Filmation character (I was thinking of Journey to the Center of the Earth). To get the right 1970s feel for the video, I watched clips of all the relevant shows, but found that once you try to copy that style, you quickly venture towards caricature, parody, like that Starsky & Hutch film with Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson: it’s so SEVENTIES you actually forget it’s supposed to take place in the 1970s. A better approach is to just try to come up with a good design first, and then adjust it so that it fits within the fashion perimeters of that era. After all, in the 1970s, nobody looked or dressed like it was the 1970s.

That’s a fancy way of saying I more or less stole the outfits from the 1977 TV show, Space Academy.

The shark ship, before I forget, was originally supposed to be a city ship, a floating metropolis, housing thousands of people. (That’s inevitably in our future.) I thought it was a grand idea, until I discovered that a similar design features in Alien 2. So, exit city ship. The interior of the Starship Olympus was inspired, sort of, by E.T.’s ship.

Because I animate the old-fashioned way, by drawing everything on paper with pencil, I have to be economical when it comes to using paper. Hence these three heads crammed together on one sheet. The “Star Commander”, left, echoes 1970s Marvel comics: he doesn’t feature in the video itself but is simply there to suggest you’re watching a series. Also, he was the first character I started drawing when I set myself the task to go for a 1970s sci-fi theme.

The introductions were fun to do. Admiral Jericho is paired with Sola, in typical 1970s split-screen style. Again, these shots were intended to suggest you’re watching a running series instead of a brief one-off. I always think up small backstories for such glimpses, just for myself. Sola is being briefed by a Galruggian worker–”All cells have been replaced, lieutenant”–Jericho, in his lab, is testing out a new laser, making adjustments, taking notes.

Jim Booker and Captain Matt Logan. Matt, you say? Yes. My brother and I used to play with Lego Space when we were kids, and we had invented this show called Space Police. My main character in it was Jim Booker, my brother’s was Matt Logan, after, I suppose Matt Trakker (M.A.S.K.) and Wolverine. So my video is an homage to that too: that brief, golden flash that is your childhood.

Until next time!