:: Earl Green - Freelance Television Writer / Producer ::

The original Voyager launch campaign had served us well, won us our first award…and, after the better part of a busy year in which I had no time to replace or significantly update it, it had outstayed its welcome as well. With a year of 3-D animation experience under my belt, I decided to do away with using footage from the show, opting to create my own Star Trek scenes instead, using Lightwave models of various ships from the series. None of those ships, however, was Voyager itself. Out of necessity and desperation, the promo became about a galaxy-wide search for Voyager - and it told viewers where they could find it at its new time on UPN 32. The Lightwave animations were some of the most elaborate and best-executed 3-D scenes I had done, and were accompanied and composited by graphics created in Targa TIPS+. The fans loved this one - aside from one who hade taped the promo, gone through it frame-by-frame, and called up to complain that my quickly-made graphic accompanying a searching Klingon ship was incorrect in giving the name of the ship - in tiny, almost unreadable print - as the “K’boom.”

The Huddle could only survive on a rehash of its original launch promo so long, so I rounded up show hosts John Wilhelm and Marty Houston to shoot an amusing little piece from a script I had hastily written. It went a little something like this:

Marty: John, it’s hot in here! Would you quit hogging the fans?

John: Why, sure, Marty!

John turns a large number of desk fans and oscillating fans toward Marty, who is suddenly blown back across the room, landing in a pile of blowing papers.

Marty: That wasn’t very nice, John!

The promo ended with the tag “We Hog Fans,” which has a double meaning for fans of the Arkansas Razorbacks (a.k.a. the Hogs).

An F-3 tornado slammed into downtown Fort Smith, including the KPBI/KFDF studios, on April 21, 1996. A lot of that year was spent recuperating from the considerable damage (one of the production/promotion department’s two Video Toasters was a total loss) and adding new capabilities, such as the FoxAlert weather warning system. Though it was billed as “the last word on the first word in weather,” we were more often plagued by the downtown area’s tendency to lose electrical power during even small thunderstorms (thanks to the electric company’s slapdash repair job to the nearest substation).