Tuesday 16 March 2010

Creating Captain Proton

The Adventures of Captain Proton was Tom Paris’ holonovel of choice in which he featured as the titlecharacter, “Captain Proton” himself. After being introduced in the season five episode, “Night,” Captain Proton would return (or be mentioned) in nine more episodes, with each time more characters added adventures.

“[Captain Proton] was an example of a holodeck-like show,” explains Rick Berman, executive producer on Star Trek: Voyager, “putting our characters into a very fanciful environment that ended up having an element of danger to it. We decided to go high-camp with it and go black and white with it.”

Richard James, the show’s production designer, recalls about the Captain Proton episodes: “We wanted all the cliches in it, and on a set which we kept black and white as well. I thought it would help the actors feel it too. When it was aired it was processed and in post [-production] the color was taken out.”

Captain Proton took elements from several Republic Pictures science fiction serials, including Commando Cody, Rocketman and Mysterious Doctor Satan, as well as popular comic book heroes such as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon.

Alan Sims, property masters for Star Trek: Voyager recalls how the props for Captain Proton were inspired by these classic science fiction serials. “I homed in on exactly what was required in the script,” he says, “such as the hand ray gun; Satan’s Robot, which came right out of the Commando Cody episodes; and the Commando Cody rocket pack.”

The ray guns for Captain Proton were supplied by HMS Creative Productions. Steve Horsch of the company recalls how they, “rented a bunch of the old serials and watched them to get the ideas. One thing we noticed right off was the use of the villains’ weaponry; they used to hold them up, with an underhand grip, then fire. So we thought it would be cool to try this approach as something new. The other guns were pretty much stock, borrowing on the .45 handgun, with unique barrel designs.”

The guns took a week to make. Knowing that they would be using the .45 handgun as the base, creating the main style was done by Max Cervantes, another member of the HMS team. “Once he saw it in his mind, he basically completed it in 3D,” says Horsch. “Alan [Sims] just had to OK the tip designs, suggesting that they put in a few body lines here and there on the sights.”

Each of the three guns were made from polyurethane resin and cast in RTV (room temperature vulcanisation) rubber. Once demoulded they were given slightly different barrel designs and painted in one of three distinct colour schemes: blue and silver for Captain Proton; red and silver for Harry Kim’s character; and red and gold for the character Tuvok was supposed to play. This version, however, never appeared on screen.

Robert Duncan McNeill, the actor who played Tom Paris, was particularly fond of the Captain Proton character. “It allowed Tom to have his history buff side come out,&rquo; he eplains. “Here it was, this space programme, the nostalgia, the Flash Gordon type of space programme. I loved it. It was a show within a show. We could spoof ourselves in many ways. In the Captain Proton stories we could spoof a lot of things that we do for real on Star Trek in our stories. [...]”

For the episode, “Thirty Days,” McNeill was required to portray Captain Proton flying with a jet pack in the vein of Flash Gordon and The Rocketeer. “We did this shot against the blue screen,” he says, “and the jet pack was meant to have sparklers in order to look really cheesy. They said: When you’re up there we’ll turn on the sparklers. Your pants are fireproof. I put on fireproof long johns. They had wet down my clothes and said: It’s like a sparkler. It won’t burn anything. You won’t even feel any warmth. So I said OK, and I was strapped into this teeter-totter blue screen thing, and they’d hoist me up thirty feet into the air and light the sparklers. It’s really cool: the sparklers are spraying out, and I start doing my lines into my walkie-talkie watch. After 10 seconds or so I feel this warmth that they swore I wouldn’t feel. But I kept going and kept doing my lines. Then it happened in a flash. It went from warm to: Oh my God, my cheeks are on fire! And I screamed. I went Stop! My pants had caught on fire. The jet pack came down right over my rear end and the seat of the pants had caught on fire. That was quite memorable. There I was: thirty feet in the air, with a fire extinguisher spraying on me, and with two big holes in the back of my pants. It was a very humbling experience.”

The incident did not discourage Captain Proton from returning, in the episode, “Bridge of Chaotica!” which saw the introduction of The Doctor as the President of Earth and Captain Janeway as Arachnia, Queen of the Spider People.

 

N. Ottens
24 August 2008

Sources for this article include:
• “Captain Proton,” Star Trek: The Magazine, volume 2, issue 11 (March 2002)
• “Captain Proto Holoprogram,” Janet’s Star Trek Voyager Site