Riding the Cosmic Range - Crafting LEGO Space Western Adventures

[00:00:00] This is the Battlegorilla LEGO Podcast, Episode 31, Writing the Cosmic Range, Crafting LEGO

[00:00:07] Space Western Adventures.

[00:00:11] The secret title of today's episode is Freeze Dried Baked Beans and Other Space Western Ideas.

[00:00:20] Way back in this podcast's third episode, I talked a little bit about some of the

[00:00:25] various unofficial themes and genres that got a little bit of representation here and

[00:00:31] there at LEGO conventions, but weren't typically among the major themes that have become somewhat

[00:00:38] standard.

[00:00:40] I then spent the rest of the episode talking about building mocks for the cyberpunk genre.

[00:00:47] Today's episode focuses on the traditionally science fiction subgenre called Space Western,

[00:00:54] which is an incredibly fun theme to build mocks for.

[00:00:58] So let's talk about LEGO Space Western.

[00:01:02] Wagon's Ho?

[00:01:04] Make it so.

[00:01:05] The Disclaimer.

[00:01:07] LEGO is a trademark of the LEGO group of companies, which does not sponsor, authorize,

[00:01:12] or endorse this podcast.

[00:01:16] Are you ready to listen to the world's number one LEGO podcast?

[00:01:23] Get in my apartment.

[00:01:50] Space Western.

[00:01:52] Seems like a fairly simple equation.

[00:01:55] Space plus Western equals Space Western.

[00:02:00] Of course, if in your robotic school mar, who never got round to teaching you the finer

[00:02:05] points of arithmetic, might be even simple equations just out of reach for ya.

[00:02:12] Wow.

[00:02:14] Okay.

[00:02:16] Let's not continue talking like that throughout this episode.

[00:02:20] Space Western is usually considered as subgenre of science fiction and, just like it sounds,

[00:02:27] is a specific fusion of Western-style stories taking place in science fiction-style space

[00:02:34] environments.

[00:02:35] There's also a genre known as sci-fi Western, which is not the same thing.

[00:02:42] To get into potentially weird and nitpicky territory, if it is a Western that happens

[00:02:48] to take place on another planet or in space, it is typically classified as a Space Western.

[00:02:56] If, on the other hand, it is a science fiction story taking place on the American frontier

[00:03:02] sometime between the 1850s and 1890s, then it is a sci-fi Western.

[00:03:09] And if it's that nebulous third thing, a story that uses both Western and science

[00:03:14] fiction elements, but is neither a Western nor sci-fi story at its core, then as far

[00:03:21] as classification goes, you're on your own.

[00:03:26] There have been Space Western prose stories going back as far as the 1930s, and while I'd

[00:03:33] hesitate to call them actual Space Westerns, the two biggest science fiction franchises

[00:03:39] were both heavily influenced by Westerns.

[00:03:43] Gene Roddenberry pitched Star Trek to the networks as being Wagon Train to the Stars.

[00:03:50] Wagon Train, being a very popular Western series of the time set on and around a Wagon

[00:03:56] Train crossing the country with a new story happening at every stop along their way.

[00:04:03] And with Star Wars, while it was actually a multi-genre blend from many sources of

[00:04:09] inspiration, it was always reportedly George Lucas' intention that he was making a

[00:04:15] Space Western, with characters like Han Solo and Boba Fett being direct re-skins of

[00:04:21] Western archetypes and the Moss Isley Cantina being the ubiquitous CD tavern in a

[00:04:27] Western town.

[00:04:29] I have vague memories of walking into a movie theater back in 1980 and watching

[00:04:35] something called Battle Beyond the Stars, which was a Roger Corman film that

[00:04:40] remade the Magnificent Seven, which itself was already a remake of Seven Samurai, as a

[00:04:46] futuristic sci-fi movie.

[00:04:50] One of the actors in that film was George Pappard, who would later go on to play

[00:04:54] John Hannibal Smith in the A-team.

[00:04:57] The only thing I remember from that movie is Pappard's character, whose name was

[00:05:02] Space Cowboy and who had a drink dispenser on his belt.

[00:05:07] Some of my favorite entries in the Space Western milieu are the far too short-lived TV series

[00:05:13] Firefly and its theatrical follow-up Serenity, the Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian, and

[00:05:20] anime series Cowboy Bebop.

[00:05:23] I'll also add The Guardians of the Galaxy movies if you're one of those people

[00:05:28] that consider that to be Space Western.

[00:05:30] Some do, some don't.

[00:05:33] I remain on the fence.

[00:05:35] I've recently watched a low-budget 1994 film called Oblivion, set in the town of

[00:05:42] the same name on another planet in the far future.

[00:05:46] Like a lot of your low-budget movies, it is a bad movie.

[00:05:51] The film's supporting cast includes Isaac Hayes, George Stokai, Julie Numar, and Meg Foster,

[00:05:58] all of whom are fairly wasted due to the poor script.

[00:06:02] The most of George Stokai's dialogue being references to Star Trek is nowhere near as

[00:06:07] amusing as you'd imagine.

[00:06:09] The only thing that makes me recommend this movie is the performance of Carl Streikin,

[00:06:15] who is best known as The Giant from Twin Peaks and Laxwana Troyes-Valais Mr. Homme from

[00:06:22] Star Trek The Next Generation.

[00:06:25] Streikin plays Oblivion's undertaker, Mr. Gaunt, who has the supernatural ability

[00:06:31] to know when and where a death is going to occur.

[00:06:36] Never the who, but always the when and where.

[00:06:40] So whenever someone is about to die he shows up right beforehand, which scares the Pajibbers

[00:06:47] out of the entire town when they see him coming.

[00:06:50] It is, in my opinion, the role he was born to play.

[00:06:56] Streikin has a sequel, Oblivion 2, that I have not yet seen, but that I am kind of looking

[00:07:02] forward to suffering through just to get more of Mr. Gaunt.

[00:07:06] Liko hasn't really done any space western sets.

[00:07:09] They've done space, classic space, and all of the continuations thereof, including

[00:07:16] this year's wandering sub-theme of space that has hit city, classic, creator 3-in-1,

[00:07:23] dreams, duplo, friends, and technic, as well as an upcoming collectible minifigure series.

[00:07:31] Liko has also released a couple of Star Wars sets here and there.

[00:07:35] They've also done western, although in a much more limited fashion.

[00:07:40] Liko western sets were released in 1996 and 1997.

[00:07:45] Then in 2002 they came back.

[00:07:49] And when I say they came back, I mean those same sets from 1996 to 1997 came back.

[00:07:57] There were no new sets added.

[00:08:00] Beyond that was the brief Lone Ranger theme and a single set from the LEGO movie.

[00:08:06] Not very much LEGO western presence at all.

[00:08:09] My personal involvement with LEGO Space Western can be traced back to 2004

[00:08:15] at the Portlog Summer Cookout.

[00:08:17] I was talking with my friend Kyle, who I'd only first met a few months earlier

[00:08:21] at that year's Bricks Cascade, and he mentioned his desire to one day organize

[00:08:26] a space western collaborative build for the convention.

[00:08:30] Over the years, he'd talk more about this, and we'd toss ideas for space western mocks back

[00:08:35] and forth. I always felt like he was getting closer and closer to actually doing this.

[00:08:41] Then in 2021, post convention, he started a channel in the collaborations section of

[00:08:47] the Bricks Cascade Discord called Space Western.

[00:08:51] There was quite a bit of enthusiastic conversation going on there,

[00:08:55] but in the end Kyle was unable to get space western up and running that year,

[00:09:00] which didn't stop a couple of people from building space western mocks anyway.

[00:09:05] Among these was a man named Robert Spring, who had already built

[00:09:09] a space western mock titled Skywalker Ranch that he'd built and been slowly adding to.

[00:09:17] So Robert Spring showed up at Bricks Cascade 2022 with a whole tables worth of space western

[00:09:24] mocks to display. This is one of several factors that caused Kyle to fully commit

[00:09:29] to the space western co-lab the following year, 2023.

[00:09:34] One of the things that Robert Spring had designed and built was the horse speeder.

[00:09:39] Which looked like the illegitimate offspring of a horse and a Star Wars style speeder bike.

[00:09:46] In the build up to Bricks Cascade 2023, he sent Kyle photos of an exploded view of the horse speeder

[00:09:54] so that you could make your own or make variants thereof. Anything from different color schemes

[00:10:01] to full on redesigns. I studied Robert's basic design and turned it into a bison speeder.

[00:10:09] Then I built a small herd of them. One of my earliest ideas for a space western mock was titled

[00:10:16] There's a New Sheriff in Town. I figured that law enforcement on the wild space age frontier

[00:10:23] would require constant replenishment. So I designed a scenario where a law man would land

[00:10:30] on a lawless world in a small spaceship that doubled as a sheriff's office once on the ground.

[00:10:36] The mock I wanted to build would start with one of these sheriff's ships on the ground

[00:10:42] completely vandalized. The body of the former sheriff would be lying on the ground out front

[00:10:48] or possibly even in the doorway half in half out of his office. Next to the former sheriff's

[00:10:55] ship slash office a shiny new sheriff's ship was landing, visibly piloted by the new sheriff

[00:11:03] coming to clean up that town. I had this idea in my head for years before the space western

[00:11:11] collab came to fruition. Then when space western finally got here, I discovered that it was much

[00:11:18] much easier to think about than it was to build. I'm decent at putting a building together.

[00:11:26] Designing and building a spaceship on the other hand is not something that anyone

[00:11:32] considers to be in my wheelhouse. I built the sheriff's office part of the mock for the ship

[00:11:38] already on the ground first. It had six jail cells that extended out the sides of the structure

[00:11:46] like the pop outs on an RV, sheriff's desk, room for a deputy, table and two chairs,

[00:11:53] nice little office. It ended up being bigger than I was initially thinking which

[00:11:59] was part of the problem. As a ship it really needed to be smaller than the building would allow

[00:12:06] and I wasn't interested in explaining that the ship was simply digger on the inside.

[00:12:12] Instead of building a full ship around it, I ended up building various ship components

[00:12:18] onto it. Whole sections that kept the doors and windows protected from the vacuum of space

[00:12:24] when in flight, thrusters and cockpit on the roof, stuff like that. Since the second ship wouldn't

[00:12:32] need to open being in the process of landing, it was much easier to build and I simply duplicated

[00:12:38] the exterior of the first ship when building the second. So now I had two ugly buildings

[00:12:45] with grafted on spaceship parts. Not really a winner. I'm hoping that some of my other mocks

[00:12:52] made up for that one. I don't think that the Space Western Colab at the 2023 Bricks Cascade

[00:12:59] had any sort of official name as far as a town, settlement or colony was concerned,

[00:13:06] but in my personal head cannon every Space Western mock that I built, I was building for a

[00:13:13] place called Crater Gulch which is the absolute most Space Western name I could come up with.

[00:13:20] The concepts for several of my mocks were arrived at by taking a space concept and a Western concept

[00:13:28] and turning them into some kind of fusion or amalgamation of the two. It started with me

[00:13:35] musing about building a bandstand, just your traditional gazebo style bandstand

[00:13:43] where the town folk could listen to musical acts. Okay, a bandstand seems fairly Western.

[00:13:52] Now I needed a spacey element. So what does a person think of when they think about space

[00:14:00] in a musical act? If you're only a casual fan of the Star Wars movies, you might not know

[00:14:07] that the alien band from the Cantina in that first Star Wars movie from 1977 had a name

[00:14:14] and those aliens had a species name. The band was Figurin Dan and the modal nodes

[00:14:22] and those alien musicians were members of a species called the Bith. I've always had a fondness

[00:14:29] for the Bith and Lego has done a Bith minifigure that's been available in a couple of sets.

[00:14:37] Between the ones I've gotten in sets and an extra I bought at a convention,

[00:14:42] I had seven Bith minifigures. But I wanted the mix and match to go a little bit further.

[00:14:49] So I built the bandstand using blue, light bluish gray and trans yellow,

[00:14:55] your standard classic space colors. Then I decided to go all old-timey instruments for

[00:15:02] the musicians and what could be more old-timey and more western than an old school jug band.

[00:15:12] I removed the heads and hands from all of my Bith minifigs and searched out seven overall

[00:15:18] wearing minifig bodies to attach them to. Then I started finding instruments for them.

[00:15:26] Three of those instruments were kind of boring, guitar, fiddle and banjo. But the rest,

[00:15:36] I put together a wash tub base. I had one guy on the washboard, another playing the spoons,

[00:15:45] and the band's leader blowing into a red jug from the old fabulant sets that I ordered from

[00:15:51] Bricklink. I looked at the name Figurin Dan and the other members of the modal nodes as kind of a

[00:15:59] guide on Bith naming conventions and decided that the leader of this jug band was named Grigri Dats.

[00:16:07] And once again, primarily in my own headcanon, just before the band starts to play,

[00:16:14] an announcer comes out and asks the crowd this question,

[00:16:18] Are you ready for the toe tappin', knee slappin', pants crappin' sounds of Grigri Dats and the

[00:16:31] interstellar brotherhood of hayseeds and hillbillies, sometimes known as the cosmic red jug band?

[00:16:43] So yeah, all Bith jug band. Perfectly normal.

[00:16:48] One of my other space slash western fusions was an update on the classic western undertaker.

[00:16:56] I haven't noticed a lot of undertakers in science fiction, but sci-fi does have cryogenics.

[00:17:04] So I built a little business called Undertaker Cryogenics. That one was on the maybe list

[00:17:13] until I realized that Undertaker and Cryogenics have the same number of letters,

[00:17:18] and then a vision of the business's sign popped into my head and suddenly I had to build the thing.

[00:17:25] The building front featured six showroom style windows and an entryway.

[00:17:31] Standing in that entryway was the owner and operator of the establishment.

[00:17:36] That mini-figure was composed of the long dark brown hair and cowboy gambler style

[00:17:42] hat combo from the Butch Cavendish mini-figure, the legs and torso from the Spider-Man noir

[00:17:49] mini-figure, and the frowning white head with silver goggles and red lenses from the Batman

[00:17:57] villain Mr. Freeze. In each of the windows could be seen one of the cryogenic devices

[00:18:04] offered all depicted in use. These ran from the cheapest option on the far left to the most

[00:18:12] expensive on the far right and were as follows. A dead guy in a bathtub full of ice. Captain America

[00:18:22] frozen in a block of ice. Ellen Ripley slumbering away in a hypersleep chamber.

[00:18:29] Han Solo frozen in a block of carbonite because I was afraid they'd revoke my nerd card if I

[00:18:36] didn't include that one. Philip J. Fry in a cryotube with a transparent front.

[00:18:44] And finally an opaque sealed cryotube with the stylized letter D from the Disney logo and

[00:18:52] blazoned there upon. At one point during the mock building process I asked myself

[00:19:00] what kind of food would people in a space western setting eat?

[00:19:06] And my brain didn't even hesitate before shouting out astronaut food is typically freeze dried

[00:19:13] and cowboy food is traditionally baked beans therefore space cowboy food is freeze dried

[00:19:21] baked beans. So I said my god brain you're a genius and then immediately went to work building

[00:19:30] the Chuck shuttle. One part shuttle craft, one part chuck wagon, one part food truck.

[00:19:38] The Chuck shuttle is primarily tan and white, tan spaceship body and white covered wagon

[00:19:45] looking covering down one side of the shuttle and rolled up to expose the serving window on the

[00:19:53] business side. I built a forearm robot wearing a chef's hat named C00K13 which sounds like your

[00:20:02] average alphanumeric designation for a robot when spoken aloud but looks like the word cookie in

[00:20:09] old school leet. C00K13 is tending to two pots of beans while several of the aliens from the alien

[00:20:18] conquest theme are hustling beans from the pot to the freeze dryers and from the freeze dryers to

[00:20:24] the aliens serving the food inside the back of the shuttle. And then out in front of the Chuck

[00:20:30] shuttle I set up a large seating area which I filled with all sorts of space western minifigures.

[00:20:40] About half the occupied seats were taken up by members of the red band gang who I had some

[00:20:46] unrealized plans for sadly. The rest of the customers were fairly random there were some

[00:20:54] semi recognizable characters including a trio of wookies, a table full of individuals wearing

[00:21:02] guardians of the galaxy uniforms and so on. My personal favorite contribution to the space

[00:21:09] western colab is one I've chosen to not say a lot about here because I don't really want to

[00:21:16] have to put a content warning at the front of this episode. Suffice to say I took the classic

[00:21:22] Wild West Bordello and filled it with alien working girls. Let's quickly move on.

[00:21:30] My second favorite contribution to space western was inspired by one of those classic

[00:21:35] Lego western sets. The largest set of that theme and one that I mentioned wanting back in my

[00:21:43] white whales and holy grails episode was Fort Legorado. They introduced several new pieces

[00:21:51] when they released that set allowing you to build walls that looked like they were made from

[00:21:56] upright logs and the fort was surrounded by a defensive wall of just that sort.

[00:22:04] I wanted to build space western's answer to Fort Legorado and I wanted to do it

[00:22:10] using primarily trans red one by one round bricks. Fort Laserado solid looking metal

[00:22:19] fort surrounded by a log wall made from thick laser beams. I included some laser cannons on

[00:22:27] scissor lift platforms inside the wall for defense but I still needed people to actually

[00:22:34] man those cannons and mount a proper overall defense of the fort. Fortunately the collectible

[00:22:41] minifigure series had recently given us the brown spaceman. Nothing says cowboy like brown

[00:22:51] and nothing says space cowboy like brown with the classic space logo on the front.

[00:22:58] I bought a bunch of those brown spaceman torsos off of Bricklink then added a variety of heads,

[00:23:05] brown legs with gun belts and brown fedoras or cowboy hats. I had my defenders but who were they

[00:23:13] defending against? Well to answer that question I had to return to Bricklink and buy a bunch of

[00:23:20] blacktron torsos along with more heads, black legs with gun belts and black fedoras plus one

[00:23:29] black sombrero because why not? I added one more cowboy to the fort this one being their leader

[00:23:37] white spaceman torso, white legs, white hat, the ultimate space western good guy.

[00:23:45] Okay brown space cowboys, white space cowboy. By this time I had the intention no actual

[00:23:55] plans yet but the intention of including a couple of mercenaries, your typical guns for hire.

[00:24:03] Then I remembered a classic urn of phrase and the existence of both pink and purple

[00:24:10] spaceman torsos and suddenly I knew what I had to do. I built a sturdy plain gray metal wagon.

[00:24:21] It had millennium falcon like storage compartments under the floor built in barricades to shoot out

[00:24:28] from behind space for two mercenaries to sleep along with some storage space for personal items.

[00:24:36] I modified Robert Springs horse speeder design again this time creating a pair of horse speeders

[00:24:42] tethered together with a laser cannon mounted between them and capable of pulling the larger

[00:24:47] wagon. I put together a purple space cowboy, a pink space cowgirl armed them and slapped a large

[00:24:57] sign on both sides of their wagon. These signs read Charles Rooton and Tootleidge McPherson guns for

[00:25:06] hire more commonly known as Rooton and Tooton freelance shooting. The final mock I contributed

[00:25:16] to the 2013 Space Western Co-Lab was entitled Reach for the Sky Robots and turned out to be

[00:25:23] another mock that was a better idea in my head than how I ended up building it.

[00:25:30] Actually, how I built it wasn't bad, it's just that I grouped all of its various components

[00:25:37] together as one small to medium sized mock when I should have broken it up and

[00:25:45] scattered it around the Space Western display as a bunch of mini mocks.

[00:25:52] You see, I felt that Space Western was really in need of a bank holdup. So I built a second gang,

[00:26:02] this one being in opposition to the earlier mentioned red band gang and I placed this

[00:26:08] second gang in front of a bunch of IBKs, individual banking kiosks. Think ATMs, but instead of that

[00:26:19] flat and impersonal touchscreen, these are booths that have a friendly robotic bank teller inside

[00:26:26] each one. I had nine of these kiosks in a row kind of like the cluster of ATMs you'll

[00:26:33] sometimes find at a shopping mall. When I had run out of building time for last year's Bricks

[00:26:39] Cascade, I had about as many unbuilt Space Western ideas left over as I did completed mocks.

[00:26:47] Sadly, none of these have been built since then. Everything I'm sending in for Space Western this

[00:26:55] year is either a rerun or a version 2.0 of a mock from last year, maybe in Space Western year 3.

[00:27:07] Next week's episode is about how in a world where almost all forms of art are a type of storytelling,

[00:27:14] some mocks qualify as fan fiction and how to use a mock to tell your own story using someone

[00:27:23] else's IP. Links to the podcast's social media and wish lists can be found at battlegirrilla.com

[00:27:31] slash links. As always, if you enjoy this podcast, be sure and tell your friends about it. And if

[00:27:39] you hate this podcast, well, why not recommend it to your enemies? The podcast's intro and outro

[00:27:48] themes, podcasting is awesome, inspired by Tegan and Sarah's Everything is Awesome,

[00:27:53] and Ode to Gibberish were created by Michael Reinch.

[00:28:00] I think I just closed Pandora's box and I don't know if you could punch a sucker. How else would

[00:28:07] you know that I've done everything except any of it? You can have your bald eagle afraid of fire

[00:28:15] and you can eat it too, and there could be so much joy in that one. Malavito well, how else I mean

[00:28:24] wish me luck on the prayers for junk food.