News Archive 17

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February 28.2019

February is a Short Month! Larry Rosenthal Art, Fanfic Categories

February is a Short Month! February is not only cold in the north, but it's cold and short. This month was a little crazy in real life and it included an impromptu flight to Detroit with my daughter and a 1000+ mile drive back to home. The trip was great and all for good, we made some memories with her and made it home safely in time to enjoy a cold beverage and birthday cake. The rest of the month was taken up with staying warm, moving snow, class work and work work. On top of that, we tapped the maple trees in anticipation of syrup season starting. Real life has been taking up its usual time as it does!

Creator Updates Larry Rosenthal Art Through a Twitter exchange in mid February, series artist Larry Rosenthal gave some background on Marock's ship in the episode Invasion: FYI. In the original notes the alien kids ship I designed was supposed to dwarf the station like Baloks ship did to the USS Enterprise in a nod to TOS. They never showed an external shot to establish it's scale. Would have been a nice shot and shown power of his species. In the episode, we saw this representation: Larry then shared a collage of his artwork, including a "3D rendered" version of the Spydroid, that he had up on his Cube3 website for 20 years. Larry was kind enough to allow us to share that here on the site and we've combined with a still of the Spydroid as in the episode Stargate. Thank you Larry!

Fanfic Categories The Fanfic categories are starting to fill out! Our own MaryNiko from the forums has been working through the stories and providing the information needed to create the connections between characters and the fanfic that they appear in. For example, if you wanted to see how many stories Jessica Foxx was in, you could go to her page and look at Fanfic Appearances to see: A Christmas Gathering A Galaxy Ranger Holiday A Matter of Trust Christmess Chrysalis - Book One - Chapter 01 Crystal Structures Goose Again Introductions Obsession Ranger Danger Return of the Demon Supertrooper Playdate Supertrooper Wedding Bells The Wreck of the Hyperion There You'll Be Til The Season Comes 'Round Again Untitled GG When Sleeping Beauty Woke Up Pretty cool! The lists will continue expand while things are cataloged. Somewhere in the future I plan on redoing the page formatting so the reading is easier, for now I'll apologize for some of the layouts right up front. Random Fanfic Finally, I didn't know this existed until last night, a random link to items within a Category. Check this out: Click for a random story in the Fanfic category!

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January 26.2019

Characters and Characters and Characters, Toys, Mark Chiarello, GV in Blender, Parting Shot

Characters and Characters and Characters Happy New Year! The last month of work was pretty much centered around doing a re-watch of the series in order to grab all of the characters I could. It was a bit daunting and the initial output is below (I'll share the spreadsheet out for viewing). On the last update I had just passed 200 characters and right now there are roughly 555 characters listed (a couple of duplicates and a load of tertiary background characters). The Spreadsheet Category:Unnamed Characters (pictures of unnamed characters) Spreadsheet generated list of unique characters Next up: editing the spreadsheet and getting the attributes filled out so the character pages can be made.

Toys Pictures Galore You'll never guess this bio-defense.... Uploaded a good number of Toys to the gallery, including Zachary, Goose, Doc, a few of the horses, shooters and a watch. After seeing some really unfortunate results of neglect being posted, we started a "Toys-OMG-WHAT-HAPPENED" sub-category to the Toys group. You can check those out, good and bad, here. We have some pictures of the protoypes as well and will post those at a later time. DIY Lightbox If you have figures, I'll post some pictures of my DIY lightbox so you can build one to take stunning pictures of your collection.

Creator Updates Mark Chiarello Send some good thoughts over to former series artist Mark Chiarello if you have a moment and wish him luck getting back on his feet. Nuff said!

GV in Blender Over winter break I gave a shot at creating GV in Blender. Visually it works, but I have a lot to learn about making a model that is printable. Until then, I've got screenshots and an .stl file to play with.

Parting Shot Saw a picture on Twitter... and then this happened: "I started to paint a happy Captain Foxx, but then I asked myself 'Self, was he ever really happy?' and then I let the brush find his heart...a little cobalt blue and a touch of titanium white..." said Bob Ross never. Credit to my son for the cobalt blue\titanium white touch.

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December 24.2018

Robert Mandell 2004 Interview, Dan Fiorella - Series 6 Podcast, Characters Characters Characters, Happy Holidays

Robert Mandell 2004 Interview Tara O'Shea has been a fan of the Galaxy Rangers for years and in 2004 she had the pleasure of interviewing the series creator, Mr. Robert Mandell. Tara and Robert discuss the the show and the interview shows us Robert's favorite things from the series, a bit of production insight, and of course how toys influenced the success or demise of a cartoon in the 1980's. Read the interview here! Thank you Tara.

Dan Fiorella - Series 6 Podcast In Episode 16.2, Galaxy Rangers series writer Dan Fiorella sits in with the Series 6 Podcast as they review The Ax. Dan talks about some of the creative aspects of writing an episode, including how he and occasional co-writer John Rawlins approach writing stories in a way that doesn't use the Series 5 implants as the over powered plot movers that they sometimes can be. The talk also discusses a bit of the background on the endings of Boomtown, written by Dan, and Shaky, leaving us to wonder what happens if we splice the two together. Check the episode out here.

Characters Characters Characters

This month we took a step back from things and decided that cataloging characters was the priority item. This was an insane move. By episode 23 we've cataloged 211 characters, some with names and many without, and the issues are "do they eventually get a name?" and "have I seen that character already?". Did I mention this was an insane move? You can read find out the Iron Maiden crossover and whether or not Tom Waits is a Supertrooper over in the Forums. Additional helpful reference items: Category:Unnamed Characters (pictures of unnamed characters) Spreadsheet generated list (current list of characters in the spreadsheet, updated every 10 episodes)

Happy Holidays It's that time of year again and we wish you a "Happy Holidays" from Betamountain.Org! Fan Fiction Fun While you're sipping eggnog, check out a couple of fan-fiction pieces that were included on GRCD1! A Christmas for Goose by Jill Webber Christmess by AKK 12 Days of GR Christmas On the Twelfth day of Christmas, Commander Walsh gave to me: Twelve Goosemans Goosing, Eleven Blasters blasting, Ten Plagos bumbling, Nine Kiwis dancing, Eight Spy Droids, Seven Black Hole bandits, Six Melliepoo's!, Five Evil Queens, Four shining badges, Three data discs, Two robosteeds and a Bubblehead in a pear tree... Parting Shot And, with much respect to Dan Fiorella and honestly not knowing where my mind went this morning in order to take 30 minutes to throw this one together, this season's parting shot:

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December 3.2018

Year One - Take Two Yesterday was one year since betamountain.org returned and a special thanks goes out to MaryNiko (back-story here)! It's been an interesting year. The site was converted from the original version, which itself sprang up from the fan-made Galaxy Ranger CDs, and then updating material began. The Character Guide was refreshed and includes the ability to cross-reference character appearances in both episodes and fan-fiction. Now the work moves towards the Episode Guide, re-watching the series and cataloging the cross-reference items. In between everything, fanfic and media included on the GRCDs are being added to the site. The biggest additional change are these forums, something that was attempted back in the 2000's with a "free" hosted solution and the results were less than favorable. My hatred of banner ads knew no bounds! It's a bit of work that I enjoy doing as a past-time and it gets done in between life, family, school, and other hobbies. My hope is to keep it going for as long as I can. Finally, thanks to the Series 6 Podcast for stoking the flame a bit (didn't take much, did it?)! https://twitter.com/betamountain/status/1069907981234507782

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November 25.2018

Dan Fiorella Interview, Operation Icarus, Betamountain Forums, Misc

Dan Fiorella Interview In Episode 16.1, Galaxy Rangers series writer Dan Fiorella drops by the Series 6 Podcast, discusses his time working on the show and answers questions from the fans! Check the episode out here! Additional helpful reference items: Writers Guide The Ax (Now with freshened images!) Did We Get Away With Murder or What? The Plague Magazine (Online)

Operation Icarus The "Betamountain.org" domain name has been in existence for 19 years (we're going to ignore how long it was in the Empty Zone) and Maria pulled together a secret operation to celebrate the site, it's sister site Beta Mountain Archives, and gather a few fond memories. Check out the tweet below for the full video. https://twitter.com/Marienro2/status/1060153693700538368 Locally we've posted the images from the video Category:Operation Icarus for viewing. Also from the project comes a brand new FanFic short from AKK written for the event! Check out Base Services! Thank you everyone who participated, it was truly a very pleasant surprise.

Forums We've added Forums to the site this past month and have been testing out the structure. You can register at https://betamountain.org/forums and be able to post with the rest of us. The forums will be available to discuss all things Galaxy Rangers! Note: We do not have a Slaverlord installed yet and we're going on the rules of etiquette that have been part of the mailing list rules for years.

Misc Top 10+ Things the Rangers Don't Want to Hear Added VHS and DVD images to the Media gallery Added a link to the Starlog magazine issue that contains the Galaxy Rangers article Prepping the 2004 Robert Mandell interview conducted by Tara O'Shea for posting next month FanFic categorized: Beyond the Edge of Darkness Renewed the domain (and checked "the auto-renew" box) Recovered email from as early as 1998 on a computer that I was ready to format the hard drives on. Eudora, PST, MBOX... this thing had it all! A fan-made Zachary Foxx t-shirt https://twitter.com/marijodibuja/status/1066026645608431616

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October 7.2018

32 Years Check out the Twitter post last month that marked the 32nd anniversary of the airing of the show! There's a combo pilot video\music mash-up to celebrate the occasion.

Creator Updates Larry Rosenthal Dan & John's nod to the Marx Brother's stateroom scene as drawn by Larry After a Twitter exchange that came after I posted a picture of the stateroom scene from Murder on the Andorian Express, it ends up Larry Rosenthal had the hands that drew that one. Who? There's no Rosenthal in the show credits... right? Larry tweeted a link to his site and the question was answered on why not. CTRL+F for Rangers and read about it. CubicSpace.com Interview We have Larry included on the show credits page! Dennis Woodyard Series storyboard artist Dennis Woodyard has a couple of sites, mostly showcasing his work on Thundercats and his interests in music: https://dennis-woodyard.squarespace.com Dragon Fly Ent Judy Elliot Brown Finally, we found a little mention off Judy Elliot Brown's involvement in the show in a snippet that reads "has worked on several Grammy nominated albums and was a sound engineer for a Sci-Fi cartoon show."

Series 6 Podcast Upcoming Podcast Featuring The Ax Since the last update, the Series 6 Podcast has put out two episodes: Ep 14 - Progress and Ep 15 - Queen's Lair. Be sure to check out Episode 15 to hear #OperationLongshot, where we delivered fan submitted recordings to the RD & Jay in appreciation of completing year one. Not only do we hear a few fellow podcasters in the mix, we were able to include surprise recordings from Galaxy Rangers writers Dan Fiorella and Lance Strate! Rumor has it that there will be a guest writer on the next podcast episode when they review The Ax.

Toys In the About the Series article, we learned about the background of the toys of the series and to this day they are somewhat elusive to find, occasionally popping on eBay as things do. Pulling from sources of material such as GRCD1 and EBay, we've started uploading pictures of some of the series toys. You can see those here. If you happen to have a Galaxy Ranger figure of your own and have the ability to take some quality reference pictures, we'd welcome them on the site.

IRC I've started logging back into the IRC server during the week (8-4:30 EST), I'm at work but I keep an eye out. On the late evenings you might catch Bruinhilda! Connection info here should be accurate (if not, let me know): IRC

Sites in the Empty Zone It pains me to see sites fall off the Internet and recently The Guild’s Ranger Page slipped into the Empty Zone. Unfortunately the site doesn't appear to have been parsed by Archive.org and only parts remain there. http://home.mindspring.com/~allronix/galaxy_rangers/ I didn't dig too deeply into Earthlink\Mindspring\Windstream acquisitions, but not only does the whole home.mindspring.com subdomain now resolve to EarthLink's website, EarthLink started charging EL's customers to keep their email addresses in 2017. One can expect they are trimming the virtual fat.

Under the Hood Those URL brackets bug me, however the templates fail if the default single brackets are used with URLs. It's almost like they don't escape properly. Update: I may have found a way to handle this. -RabbiBob (talk) 16:13, 17 November 2018 (EST)

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June 30.2018

Captain Kidd A tweet out on the Twitters prompted the addition of some old pictures of Captain Kidd toys to said character's bio page. The message was: https://twitter.com/CustomScenery/status/1012292238272090114 Will be working on a #GalaxyRangers #CaptainKidd bust, such an amazing character, voiced by the late great Earl Hammond! #80scartoons And you know that got my attention! Custom Scenery has done some very cool and high quality renditions of various characters in scenes for different genres and we are looking forward to seeing what develops. Be sure to check out CS's Twitter account and posted pictures of past work.

E-Mail Finally set up email (thought I had something sorted back in December, but due some back end functionality, it did not work as intended). RabbiBob and Webmaster [at] betamountain.org are now active. Don't expect much, it's just an address to the same guy.

Forums? Forums... are they worth the effort these days? I'm not much a Facebook user these days and things in the Twitter timeline get lost to time, but are forums a foregone thing these days? In lieu of a forum to discuss feel free to send me an email or a tweet with your thoughts.

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