Longstar’s Rangers, a television series created by Wade Wando

Longstar’s Rangers was a science-fiction television show that premiered on American network television in 1972 and ran for two seasons. The show was targeted at the teen market and ran as part of the network’s Saturday morning lineup. It was cancelled after the second season due to poor ratings, attributed to the show being “too scary” and “too cerebral” for the intended audience.

Longstar’s Rangers was notable for being the first live-action show for the Saturday morning youth audience to feature a Black lead actor, newcomer Martin Greenberg, who would go on to fame for his starring role in the 1980’s prime time legal drama, Shelley’s Game.

Achieving Cult Status

During the 1990s, Longstar’s Rangers enjoyed a renaissance and acquired a cult-following after it was regularly parodied by a popular comedy group on a late-night television show. The original network briefly considered resurrecting the show, but eventually decided against it when the original cast members were not available to participate.

Through the 90’s and the first decade of the 2000’s the show inspired a long and successful run of comic books and graphic novels, plus a movie with a high budget but lackluster reviews. There are also intriguing rumors of an as-yet-unpublished series of spin-off novels written by the show’s creator, Wade Wando.

The Smash Video Game

The show became the basis for a video game called LONGSTAR that was launched by startup Orbital Arena Games in 2015. LONGSTAR quickly became one of the most successful online games of the decade, and was the basis for Orbital Arena’s meteoric rise into a Silicon Valley giant.

Original Television Concept Pitch by Wade Wando

Here in its entirety is the original show concept as presented by Wade Wando to network executives in 1970.

Longstar’s Rangers Show Premise

Our galaxy is under attack! Striking from an extra-cosmic dimension, the evil GUROTHIM use their TRANS-D STARDRIVE to pop in and out of our universe, anywhere, anytime. We try to defend our worlds, but we are helpless to counterattack. The GUROTHIM strike without warning, sometimes in small bands of covert raiders, sometimes with massive fleets of invincible starships. We don’t understand their reasons or motivations for attacking our worlds. Sometimes they kidnap people who are never seen again, sometimes they burn a settlement or city to the ground, sometimes they bombard an entire planet and destroy it completely.

Meanwhile, the galaxy is filled with hundreds of alien empires, all of whom are vying for control. They are all under threat from the GUROTHIM, so alliances form and disintegrate. DEK LONGSTAR is a citizen of a small federation of planets called the HOMEWORLDS, led by Earth and her colonies. DEK and his crew are members of the STARSHIP RANGERS, the space navy that protects the HOMEWORLDS from the hostile neighboring star-empires.

Season One Premise

In the opening episode of the Season One, DEK and his cadet-trainee crew learn of a fabulous discovery: a badly-damaged and abandoned GUROTHIM starship, complete with its TRANS-D STARDRIVE, the strange space-twisting engine that enables inter-dimensional travel. With this drive, humans and their allies can take the fight to the GUROTHIM home dimension. The ship has no fuel, however, except for a tiny fragment of crystalline material left in one of its fuel tanks. At RANGERS CENTRAL COMMAND on Earth’s moon, PROFESSOR FOX tells DEK that the alien engine is fueled by TIMEDUST, an ultra-rare substance that can be found in tiny quantities scattered randomly all over the galaxy. The TIMEDUST material is believed to be a remnant of a universe that existed before the Big Bang, and is the only material to survive from before the birth of our cosmos. It has very strange properties that defy the laws of physics, and legends from the time of the ancient PREDECESSOR civilization suggest that it may be this material that the GUROTHIM are searching for.

A Crusade for Timedust

The ancient PREDECESSOR race also treasured TIMEDUST, and so to find it most prospectors follow the traces of PREDECESSOR civilization. PROFESSOR FOX uses a component from the GUROTHIM drive, along with the remnant of the TIMEDUST material from the fuel tank, to develop a TIMEDUST DETECTOR which he installs on DEK’S ship.

During the show, the overriding arc will be to collect enough of the TIMEDUST material so that the RANGERS can fuel the captured TRANS-D STARDRIVE, outfit one of their warships, and take the fight to the extra-cosmic dimension from which the GUROTHIM hail. DEK’s ship, the STARLIGHTER VIGILANT, is dispatched with the only operating TIMEDUST detector to search unexplored systems of the galaxy to find enough TIMEDUST material to power the captured stardrive.

DEK and his crew will explore the galaxy, searching for traces of timedust and clues to the nature of the mysterious GUROTHIM. In doing so, they will deal with the competing alien tyrants that populate the galaxy (mainly CLAN-MOTHER VA’MARGH from the nearby GHASTWHAN EMPIRE, who also hordes the TIMEDUST for her own nefarious reasons). Episodes of the series will often have a similar format: The VIGILANT visits a planet where TIMEDUST is detected, DEK and the Ranger cadets must locate the material, and are forced to buy, barter, fight for, steal, con, etc. to obtain it.

Pilot / Episode One Summary

SEASON 1 begins with Dek at the RANGER ACADEMY selecting the crew for his mission. He interviews many cadets and finally selects three promising teens: JIMMY, JOHNNY, and TWERKY. These cadets go through a rigorous training regimen meant to strengthen their minds and bodies (and further develop any special abilities they may have.) As part of their training, they are given a glimpse into PROFESSOR FOX’s ultra-secret DEPARTMENT ZED, a cordoned off section of the RANGER COMMAND BASE that is adjacent to the RANGER ACADEMY. DEPARTMENT ZED leads the scientific effort to understand the origins and purpose of the mysterious GUROTHIM MENACE, and many of Earth’s top scientists live and work in the ZED facility, which is deep inside MONS HUYGENS, the largest mountain on Earth’s moon.

The Secret of Mons Huygens

At the heart of DEPARTMENT ZED, and the reason for its location deep inside MONS HUYGENS, is a massive subterranean excavation. Years ago, explains PROFESSOR FOX, before mankind developed the STARLIGHT DRIVE that powers their FTL ships, they found a strange magnetic anomaly on the moon that emitted a radiation signature that was obviously artificial. After the establishment of the first international moon colony at IMBRIUM BASE, scientists bored a tunnel deep into the heart of the mountain and what they found shook the foundations of galactic civilization. Trapped inside the frozen rock of the mountain, apparently during the massive bombardment that formed the vast MARE IMBRIUM, was a 4-billion-year-old starship. Humanity didn’t realize the significance of their discovery until, some ten years later after they’d invented starlight drive and encountered galactic civilization. FOX, who is 150 years old and who is Earth’s foremost galactic historian, immediately recognized it as one of the vast and mythical WARFANG ships of the GUROTHIM MENACE, the extra-dimensional and extra-temporal enemy that had plagued the galaxy since before recorded history.

PROFESSOR FOX knew this find would rock the galaxy and bring Earth to the attention of the many alien empires. He stressed the need for total secrecy, for if it were discovered that Earth was in possession of a GUROTHIM warship the warring empires of the GALAXY would immediately attack to gain control of it. So, ironically, the GUROTHIM WARFANG was Earth’s most ominous, and most valuable, possession.

FOX tells the cadets that the damaged hulk of the WARFANG is critically dangerous to explore. Teams sent inside to map the interior and extract GUROTHIM artifacts rarely returned intact, due to the fact that some parts of the interior of the ship were somehow located outside of time and space, and when these sections were entered, the explorers would go insane, or vanish.

The Timedust Mission

After FOX reveals the vast underground pit and the visible portion of the WARFANG’s hull that has been partially excavated, he takes them into his lab, where he shows them the few mysterious devices that have been successfully extracted from the derelict. For most of them, their function remains an enigma, but the prize is the core from the TRANS-D REACTOR, the heart of the inter-dimensional engine that transports the vessel across dimensional boundaries (and possibly through time).

FOX and his fellow scientists at DEPARTMENT ZED have been studying the TRANS-D reactor for nearly a decade and have discovered that it is powered by a substance that he named TIMEDUST, an incredibly rare material thought to be only remaining ashes from whatever reality existed before the Big Bang. It has very strange properties that defy the laws of physics, and legends suggest that it may be this material that the GUROTHIM are searching for.

FOX and his team suspect that the ancient PREDECESSORS, the oldest and original civilization in the galaxy, whose technology is so advanced it cannot be distinguished from magic, also used TIMEDUST to power their cities and bases, and that it was this use of the material that somehow attracted the attention of the GUROTHIM from across dimensional barriers. He speculates that the entire PREDECESSOR civilization was wiped out as the GUROTHIM raided it for TIMEDUST.

Fox’s Theory on the Origin of Timedust

 PROFESSOR FOX has a theory, which he shares with JIMMY, that the GUROTHIM are from the UNIVERSE BEFORE that existed prior to the BIG BANG, and that because the TIMEDUST is the ash of their destroyed reality, and that its existence in our reality somehow reaches back across the singularity of the Big Bang and affects their reality.

The Trans-D Drive

FOX reveals the mission of DEPARTMENT ZED: repair the TRANS-D drive and use it to travel to the GUROTHIM dimension and collect intelligence, to try and understand why the GUROTHIM have been raiding and destroying worlds since the beginning of time, and why in the past few centuries the raids have begun to increase in intensity. But, in order to activate the drive, they need to procure a large enough sample of TIMEDUST, about a hundred pounds. Currently, only a few ounces have been collected.

PROFESSOR FOX, along with his mentee JIMMY, has used a part from the GUROTHIM drive, along with the remnant of the TIMEDUST material from the fuel tank, to develop a TIMEDUST DETECTOR which he installs on DEK’S ship, the Starlighter Vigilant. He recommends that the best way to find TIMEDUST is to follow the traces of PREDECESSOR civilization, and find where they mined it, and try and locate any remaining stockpiles.

The Send Off

Encouraged by the COMMANDANT and by PROFESSOR FOX back at the RANGER ACADEMY, DEK and the cadets venture forth on their first mission with the TIMEDUST DETECTOR, an experimental DEPARTMENT ZED device developed by FOX with help from the brilliant CADET JIMMY. The DETECTOR is very delicate and sensitive and requires constant attention and becomes JIMMY’s obsession to make it work and prove his theory.

Read LONGSTAR now!

Hi, readers, Patrick here. All of the above is, of course, completely made up. It just a fun bit of in-universe background that is relevant to my new novel LONGSTAR: A novel of the Known Arc.

Check it out:

IN THE DEEP EXPANSE OF THE KNOWN ARC, AN ANCIENT COSMIC MYSTERY HAS AWAKENED…

“Epic… great depth and ambition… not your average sci-fi yarn.”
– Manhattan Book Review