Actually, Flash was created as competition to Buck Rogers, much like Captain "Shazam" Marvel was to Superman. Buck was fighting "Mongols", the warlords who were lead by Killer Kane and Ardala.
Lorraine Williams did... what?
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Actually, Flash was created as competition to Buck Rogers, much like Captain "Shazam" Marvel was to Superman. Buck was fighting "Mongols", the warlords who were lead by Killer Kane and Ardala.
Ranger REG
Explorer
I don't know if I agree with that. Is it because the whole franchise is centered around the one titular character, of an Earth guy from the 20th Century living in the future? As opposed to franchises that feature a crew, party, or groups, like Star Trek and Star Wars, that provide a social game?
Does that also applies to other title-character franchises like James Bond 007 and Rambo?
Meh. Didn't WEG feature their own (Lucasfilm-approved) setting within the Star Wars Universe?
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Krensky
First Post
WEG more or less invented the expanded universe. Look almost any book from Zahn to WEG lost thew license. There's almost certainly a thank you to WEG in the beginning of it.
wingsandsword
Legend
He wrote a very nice preface to the Thrawn Trilogy Sourcebook that WEG produced recounting the whole story of how WEG essentially created the heart of the Expanded Universe.
Essentially, Zahn was given the contract for what would become the Thrawn Trilogy, the novel series that kicked off the publishing and merchandising juggernaut that is the Star Wars Expanded Universe. He was asked by Lucasfilm to coordinate for continuity purposes with the work that WEG had already done, as the only entity to have written officially at any length about the larger Star Wars universe beyond just what happened in the movies and even at that relatively early phase Lucasfilm was fairly concerned about canon/continuity.
Zahn said he was very resentful at the idea at first that he would be hemmed in by what others had written when he thought he would have a nearly blank slate to flesh out what happened beyond the movies. However, once a big box of WEG sourcebooks arrived and he read through them he discovered he loved them and thought that it was a pretty good foundation to work with and gave them a huge endorsement.
As he wrote his books WEG started using what he wrote as grist for their own mill and made more material based on his books, and they together really got the ball rolling for what we now know as the Expanded Universe.
As you read his novels, lots and lots of little references here and there were things WEG first came up with, and Zahn himself made his big contributions to the EU (he coined the term Coruscant, replacing Lucas's earlier suggestions of Jhantor and Had Abbadon for the capitol world of the Empire and Republic that preceeded it)
I was just starting in TSR's book division when the Buck fiction got underway. One of my early assignments was proofing parts of Buck Rogers: The First 60 Years in the 25th Century, a very nice hardcover retrospective the company release in late 1988.
As I recall the process, upper management informed the various departments how many Buck products would be on the schedule in a given year and the managers reacted accordingly, trying to put together the best games and books to fill the spots. Approvals for all Buck products went through Flint Dille, who was out on the West Coast, though Lorraine Williams also reviewed everything. Flint generated ideas and suggested directions for the Buck product lines; he was much more active in this than the typical license owner. The licensing approval process--TSR was technically licensing Buck from the Dille Family Trust--was definitely "hands on," meaning a lot of changes were required (from Flint and Lorraine) as the products went through development.
As much as possible, top designers and artists were assigned the work. Everyone understood that Buck was important to management. Certainly some of the products were great. Jeff Grubb's Buck Rogers board game was a lot of fun. (I ran many demos of that game in my first few conventions as a TSR employee.) Some of the RPG material was top notch, too. And the company put a lot of effort into advertising the lines.
I wasn't working on the Buck fiction line formally, but everyone in the department got pulled into a Buck book at one stage or another. The initial idea was to showcase authors with solid SF reputations outside of shared worlds: Robert Sheckley, Jerry Oltion, Martin Caidin. However, TSR was still operating under really short deadlines for fiction at the time. (Most of the books before 1988 had been written by people within, or close to, the company; without everyday use of e-mail and computer files, that proximity shaved at least several weeks off a book's production time.) Couple really short deadlines with a very rigorous licensing review process, where a lot of changes are going to be requested by the IP owner, and problems are all but inevitable.
I can't speak to how this situation impacted the game products, but the short deadlines and intensive IP review process/owner involvement had a profound impact on the fiction. There are seven stories in the first Buck anthology, Arrival. Two are written by Flint Dille, three are written by the named authors (with a lot of revision, in at least one case), and two--the ones by "Abigail Irvine" and "Ulrike O'Reilly"--were penned as very hasty group efforts by various people inside, or directly connected to, the book division, to replace stories from "name" authors who quit or were fired during the review process. If a third of your content is generated that way, you have a problem.
The Buck Rogers IP could be successful this time around. Enough time has passed that any new material will not be operating entirely in the shadow of the TV show; I've always felt the TV show's image hampered the TSR releases, since they took the property in a different direction. (Battlestar Galactica has certainly shown that an IP with similar baggage can be revitalized, under the right direction.) The Internet has made more people aware of the older Buck material, too. We'll just have to see how things shape up with the new material.
Cheers,
Jim Lowder
Talath
Explorer
If by "Lorraine created the company TSR..." one means:
"Lorraine created the horrible pile of bankrupt broken dreams and crushed fantasies situation known as TSR..."
than one would be correct in saying she did create TSR
By the by, if you look around the official Buck Rogers site, the place that started the whole discussion, you'll also find the claim: "Buck Rogers is known as the birthplace rockets, robots, and ray-guns!" (see: http://www.gohero.com/buck_rogers/buck_rogers_influence.htm)
That statement needs a bit of rewording. The Buck strip and serials were incredibly influential, but not the "birthplace."
Cheers,
Jim Lowder
That statement needs a bit of rewording. The Buck strip and serials were incredibly influential, but not the "birthplace."
Cheers,
Jim Lowder
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rgard
Adventurer
Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister at the time. The Labour Party controlled parliament. Taxes then were worse than punitive.
I always wondered how close to the truth Gygax's account of the things that happened was; he had a relative monopoly on telling the story over the net, I'd say, and it always seemed to be that Gygax was right, an ace designer and a good businessman and if he had a flaw it was just being too trusting. Which isn't to say that the accusations against Williams aren't substantially true, but I always felt that Gygax's explanations appeared a bit self-serving and were also sometimes rather ungenerous (such as saying that Dave Arneson couldn't design his way out of a paper bag).
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