1. Okay, I give up - what is JCC?
   • JCC is Jump Cut City. JCC was a no-budget, strictly for laughs parody of sci-fi and action flicks. Four episodes ran on Access 4 Fayetteville for untold months and then the show disappeared. Thank God for that.

     JCC's genesis was an endless series of often stupid home movies that Robert Heyman and I made, starting in the spring and summer of 1987 after I got a camcorder. We weren't even of driving age at the time, we weren't having to pay bills, I still had hair, and life was good. We kept every single frame of video that we shot, whether it was priceless or putrid, and compiled them onto a bunch of 6-hour tapes under the title of "Jump Cut City," and thus was the legend born.

     In the beginning, JCC was ad-libbed and very stupid. (Well, go figure - in the end, JCC was scripted and slightly less stupid, but who's counting?) However, the stupidity of JCC was part of its charm. Never mind that inside our vast spaceships looked like my house or Robert's house, or that every "alien planet" looked a lot like my back yard - it was just hysterical, at least to those of us who made the shows.

     After about four years of ad-libbing our way through JCC, we began to write scripts. After coming up with a handful of scripts and shooting a few of them, Robert approached the cable access channel in Fayetteville, Arkansas where he was attending college with the idea of airing JCC. They loved it - and so, almost disturbingly, did quite a few other people. Both Robert and I were recognized in public on a couple of occasions, and the four episodes we completed for Access 4 aired continuously for at least two or three years! I bet the people of Fayetteville HATE our little show now...

     Some of the episode titles were kinda funny too. Some classic episodes of "prehistoric" JCC include: Showdown at...well...a new location, The Life and Times of -30- (owing to our mutual participation in journalism class in junior high school), The Incredible Sentimental Molecular Adventure, How the Win-a-Prize Was Won, Puppy (the ORIGINAL JCC pilot!), Plasmodium Spazmodium, Cosmic Whiplash, I Married a Fiddygibber, The Thunderous Breeyat (?!?), The Third Nostril, Countdown To Destruction, T'aag You're It, I'm Gonna Git U Hukka, Dismember Me, Bright Lights Big Fiddy, and so forth.

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2. Uhh...all right, I'll take your word for it. What's the storyline?
   • Assigned to the excessively sleek and luxurious USS Win-A-Prize, Captain Geraldo "Heroic" Hukka and his reluctant first officer, Polonius L. "Demented" Buh, bravely patrol the galaxy attempting to do good. They seldom succeed. In the course of the show's four broadcast episodes, Huk accidentally starts an interplanetary war and Buh turns a diplomat into a frog, they fail to deliver medical supplies to a plague-stricken world on time, and they then proceed to awaken a race of hibernating, all-powerful conquerors. And all this in four shows! Uncompleted future stories called for Huk and Buh to contend with some alarming discoveries made about the true nature of their fiddygibber friend, Burchuss, who still speaks in a language entirely incomprehensible to them or the audience. Is Burchuss a secret agent, the intergalactic harbinger of doom, more than a Time Lord, the tooth fairy, or just God? As if that's not enough, there would have been further sinister hints of the return of a powerful enemy from the galaxy's past.

     Other characters, who dropped in and out of the stories as other friends of ours dropped by wherever we were shooting, included Bubba Buh (the Buh's older brother), the mighty and evil Flibt, Captain A.P. (All-Purpose) Hukka, the Emperor T'aag (one really mean dude who, in a rarity for JCC, really appeared mean and powerful on video), the Subatomic Bwee, the Thermal Guf, Buppaziddy Bubbasmolsky (the Subatomic Bwee's pilot/chauffeur), Shprelok Pholok, and Mrs. Buh, who we never see, but we always hear about Burchuss knocking her up. These random characters would often show up in such vessels as the ConsolationPrize, the DoorPrize, the U.S.S. Insipid, and Ed MacMahon's personal favorite, the YouMayHaveAlreadyWonThisValuablePrize.

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3. How long do these improbable things last? And just how funny are they?
   • We assume you're asking that question about episodes of JCC, and not bits of asparagus.

     Most of them are about 30-40 minutes, no commercials. We did one two-part cliffhanger and planned to thread story arcs through several episodes. As for humor...well, imagine "Ren & Stimpy," in live action, with in-jokes on nearly every SF show or movie your squishy little brain can think of. If you can imagine that (and if you can, we don't feel sorry for you), you're probably imagining something similar to JCC! For example - Burchuss's voice should floor you. If it doesn't, you have no discernable sense of humor whatsoever. Huk and Buh, seeing large signs with the word "LIFE" posted on the wall, decide they've found life signs after all. Hukka, on Buh's advice that maybe we should look at things from a mosquito's point of view, whips out a pair of psychedelic sunglasses and gazes about in wonder. Buh has been awarded a badge for scatological excellence. An entire planet comes to an explosive end after a world-sized fart thanks to deadly "Borshudan destructo beans." The ship's toilet ceases all function and the crew must restrain themselves until their next planetary stop. And there's more! But occasionally, for the sake of contrast, we'd do a pretty serious episode, but the ratio of silliness to sanity was about two to one.

     We've been asked/accused of taking the idea for the show from Red Dwarf, but alarmingly enough, we came up with the JCC concept around the time RD hit the air and neither of us even saw RD until late 1992. We were alarmed, to say the least!

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4. We just simply have to see the episode guide!
   • Well...okay.

     FIRST SEASON: 1993

     1. "Like Hukka, Like Buh" - our heroes run into trouble before leaving base...
     2. "Stellacide" (part 1) - someone attempts to hijack the Win-a-Prize.
     3. "Stellacide" (part 2) - someone is still trying to hijack the Win-a-Prize.
     4. "Future Tense" - ancient artifacts of an alien species endanger the crew. This synopsis has actual pictures!

     UNFILMED EPISODES: scripts actually exist for most of these, believe it or not!

     • "100% Repsychled" - a Hukka penal colony has turned into a madhouse - and the tenants don't want any visiting space travelers to find out.
     • "Containment Breach" - failure of a vital system aboard the ship reduces the crew's efficiency. That vital system happens to be the toilet.
     • "Omnivores" - they're vegetables. They eat stars. And they live among us. My favorite unused script!
     • "The Undiscovered Pastry" - Hukka's home planet suffers a horrible fate. This script was the center of some amusing debate on the merits of using fart sounds on TV...
     • "Theatre of Operations" - a mysterious alien artifact is discovered by the gang; unknown to them, they've encountered its distant cousin before... (This would have been the sequel to "Future Tense.")
     • "To Make Matter Worse" - Burchuss meets his maker once more, and this time he's trying to free people's molecules from them.
     • "The Benchwarmer" (part 1) - Huk is accused of a bloody massacre.
     • "The Benchwarmer" (part 2) - Huk is still accused of a bloody massacre.
     • "Proof of Burchuss" - it's a wonderful plot cliche as Burchuss becomes the Buh's guardian angel for one episode!
     • "The Impaler" - a mysterious mercenary intercepts the Win-a-Prize to check for evidence of a dreaded legendary creature...and finds it in Buh. (This one would have raised at least a little controversy, as it dwells on some extremely moral dubious ground where Buh is concerned; oddly enough, it started life as a parody of "Highlander.")
     • "Killers" (part 1) - Huk and Buh stumble across an abandoned alien training device and try it out, unaware of the true nature of their discovery.
     • "Killers" (part 2) - having unwittingly assassinated an important leader, Huk and Buh find themselves on the run from just about everybody.

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5. What happened to JCC?

   Well, we got lives.

   Shortly after the Access 4 episodes started airing, I began working in TV for real, and Robert graduated from college and joined the world of work himself. We were quite simply too busy to keep going. We continued writing scripts in the hopes that we could someday pull off another episode or two, and we were looking into entering the world of computer animation for our visuals, but alas, time once again didn't permit. As of this writing, Robert has moved to New Jersey and is pursuing his writing career, and I'm working full time in television production and taking classes after work. JCC is probably dead; this is terribly sad, as the best was yet to come.

   But never say never. There are always whispers of something new...

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6. How can I see JCC?

   Well...you can't!

   You must understand, a lot of the older stuff is just too silly, not to mention its extensive use of "stock footage" from other shows and movies, so we can't just go showing it to everyone.

   And, in all honesty, despite reviving the legend here on the web, we'd be very happy if no one ever saw JCC. Its legend is so much more fascinating than its reality, and both of us have done much more impressive things professionally, so it's just as well that JCC has disappeared into obscurity. We have the tapes, so it's not likely to air anywhere again!

   But, just to give you a taste of the goofiness, we're making available short selections of still shots from various episodes, starting with:
   

   • The unaired CGI main titles (1996)
   • Like Hukka, Like Buh (1993)
   • Stellacide, part one (1993)
   • Stellacide, part two (1993)
   • Future Tense (1993)

   Also, I wrote evaluations, some at the time of production, some later, of our four glorious broadcast episodes. If you really wish you could have been there to see "Like Hukka, Like Buh", "Stellacide" part 1, "Stellacide" part 2, or "Future Tense,", you can read them.

A Star Is Born! Yes! See a new tell-all exposè of Burchuss the Fiddygibber's career after JCC! Click here for the sordid details.

We've Got Music! Yes! Two CDs of the original Jump Cut City soundtrack music are now available. Both contain, as the covers boast, "funky fiddygibber grooves" by Earl Green from the show's pre-cable years, including the immortal Burchuss theme!

Photographic Evidence! Yes! Nobody's really gone out of their way to ask for it, but we're giving it to you anyway! Video stills from all four episodes of Jump Cut City, starting with the unaired CGI title sequence (hey, it's really cool!) and stills from Like Hukka, Like Buh, Stellacide part one, Stellacide part two, and Future Tense, the final cable episode!