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From Betamountain.org
Within this site you'll find episode and character information, insight on the creation of the show from the creators themselves who have shared with us over the years, and fan created fiction & art. We are updating the site steadily and if you have a question, you can get in touch with us at @betamountain on Twitter.
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Happy New YearWelcome to 2024! We hope everyone had a good and safe transition from 2023 into the new year! The new webserver appears to be running well. I was happy to confirm that the weekly\monthly\annual backups ran over the weekend and that they rsynced to remote storage. There's nothing like setting up a schedule and then waiting the week to see it play out, but doing this all at the end of the year paid off. This update took about two and half hours (update: three hours, I couldn't just walk away from a couple of things) to prep and post and I hit a few rabbit holes, which is usually the case, along the way. Luckily I left myself some "to do" items after post in December, which helped get going. The next list is a little more involved as it includes remembering the approach to organization on everything (lists, categories, naming conventions, etc.) which may be a time sink to get back into. We'll see how it goes! 3D Ranger Interceptor ModelI picked up the LYPstudios printable Ranger Interceptor and it's a nicely done piece of artwork. I may post some pictures in an upcoming update for comparison of my version and LYP's. There are a couple of artistic choices, and ones that were done very well, that separate it from the source artwork however it is a nice model. I haven't used Blender in almost a year so it's been a bit of relearning the program interface while fiddling with the model. I'm hoping to get my 3D printer running again to print off a new model. Blu-Ray ReleaseBack in September last year Maria, a friend of the site and a huge Galaxy Rangers fan posted that after she had been in contact with series artist Ken Landgraf over the summer, he let her know about an upcoming project out of Germany: a Blu-Ray release that included some new booklet material featuring his artwork, as well as the box cover art! This was very exciting news and you can see more on the box set here. Currently the average price appears to be around $70 USD. TV StationsWe added some international stations to the Syndication Listings page (thanks to Maria for that information)! |
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ArtworkAI Generated ItemsI can't remember where\why I found this, but here is an AI generated image of Niko (presumably a much younger Niko). That got me thinking about it and I started playing around with a prompt which led to the picture on the right, a Shane Gooseman-esque. It was interesting and I may dabble more in the future, but not now. Mike CollinsMike Collins, comic book artist who worked on the UK Galaxy Rangers comic book, posted an image for a Throwback Thursday post and it was of a panel for the comic which never made it to production. You can see that here. You can read a little more on Mike's back ground here at the Comic Vine website or check out his website.
MastershizakeMastershizake posted a great picture featuring The Women of The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers over on DeviantArt. After checking out some of the work by Mastershizake, I have a suspicion that Ken would enjoy the artwork as well. It might be time for a re-watch of Galaxy Stranger and Supertroopers to fix that (and maybe do Episode Reviews as well).
VideosIf you don't know the back story on the Series 5 Implants, check out this YouTube post by Retro Toons Rewind |
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Creator UpdatesJohn Van TongerenBack in September, JVT surprised us with a redux version of the "No Guts, No Glory" theme song. The original (further down) was written and composed by Phil Galdston and John Van Tongeren, and performed by Van Tongeren under the stage name Johnny Vancouver
Chris OverlandFM is responsible for one of my favorite Galaxy Rangers songs (one that as a guitar player myself, I have a tendency to play the song (like me stumbling through it here a few years ago) now and then), "Rangers are Forever". Chris Overland, who founded the British band FM with his brother Steve, was the lead guitarist for FM and played with them up to 1990 before leaving the group. You can hear Chris, Steve and the rest of FM in this 1990 recording of them live at The Town and Country here: Unfortunately Chris passed away in August of 2023 and this update comes very late due my hiatus. RIP Chris. Thank you for the music! |
December 03.2023
Welcome to 2023!
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Well That Was A PauseThe "Welcome" above wraps this up fairly well: it's been a while since I've posted. There has been a bit of "real life" and just plain being busy, some of the passing of John Rawlins deflated the balloon a bit more, and then there's a whole "behind the scenes" thing on the technical end. You know that scene in the episode "Invasion" that went like this:
It was a lot like that and the longer I put off the upgrades the harder it would be to fix it. This past week I took a day and created a new server and went through all the steps and here we are, upgraded Mediawiki and phpBB forums!
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Sixth AnniversaryWelcome to year six since the rebirth of the sites since we got the domain back (see News Archive 14). The domain was renewed back in November and we are good for another year. Eternal thanks to @Marienro2 for pointing out that the domain was available again! For those on the other counter, welcome to year 24 1/12th! |
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Creator Updates
Curtis King, Jr.How the he** did I not see this in the TWELVE YEARS he’s been on X-Twitter?!? I'm shamelessly co-opting one of his tweets about a YouTube video (UA:LA) because I really can't believe I haven't run across Curtis's twitter[1] account before this past week! That's right, there is storyboard artist and production designer Curtis King, Jr. on Twitter! I may come back to this later.
Masaaki Endo and Yoshiteru TsujinoMid-last year I had a Twitter exchange with two TMS employees who worked on the pilot and the outcome was wonderful! Masaaki Endo posted a series of sketch artwork from the show and Yoshiteru Tsujino joined in, posting a series of four frames from the escape pod sequence in Phoenix. I responded with the four final frames from the episode! The exchange is captured here and the artwork has been uploaded (with permission) here.
Dan Fiorella - The Audio SeriesIt's not an update without a mention of Dan, right? |
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3D Model Ranger InterceptorIt's been a couple of years since I made my first printable Ranger Interceptor model (and I may have 3 or 4 of these printed around the house) and then Iskelderon's version (I need to add that version here), but a new model just popped up and it's a-maze-ing! You can check out the internal page here and from that page you can see the Facebook posts that have a bunch (40+) of pictures and links to where you can buy this thing to print yourself! I am seriously passing the Etsy link off to my kids later this morning as a gift idea. I may need a resin printer after this... |
January 16.2022
Welcome to 2022!
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Dan Fiorella remembers John RawlinsThis week Dan posted on his blog concerning the passing of John Rawlins and it is probably better to let the writer's words speak for themselves by reading the post yourself versus my writing some exposition: R.I.P. John Rawlins. |
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3D RendersI've been working on a couple of GR related item in Blender. First is Harvey the Robot!
This one was fun as it used a lot of basic shapes to make the character. As an intermediate user of Blender I wasn't able to translate some of the subtleties of the drawn character, such as the eyes and how they relay a high brow attitude without any eyebrows, into the model however I'm happy with how it turned out. In the animated clip, I was able to get some thruster flame variance for an added touch. |
 I continue to play around with the 3D model I created for 3D printing and I tried it in a 3D rendered scene. This is my first attempt at this outside of some very basic physics work with a bouncing ball and of course after a 17 hour render I see things I'd like to do differently. I hope to learn how to emulate the hyperspace jump ring next as an effect. You can check that out the output here: |
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Niko meets BravestarrNot sure how Goose is going to feel about this one, but Niko sure seems ok with it! See Grobi-Grafik's artwork over on DeviantArt for the picture. |
December 3.2021
Neither my time machine or cloning project seems to be panning out, but apparently back-dating is an avenue!
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John RawlinsNews reached us concerning GR series writer John Rawlins and that he had left us this past Tuesday after a long illness. John had at least nine episodes in the run and his story "Tune-Up" was the first story to approved for production. His writing ran the gamut from comedy to ecological themes and, often working in collaboration with Dan Fiorella, worked to put the spotlight on the secondary characters of the show. In the late 90's, the Ranger-L list members had the pleasure of John joining the listserv for a time. As noted by Dan: was a good guy, a great writer and a wicked wit. John, an avid gamer and designer, creating Hax for Realmz and Swamplings for the open-source turned based game The Battle for Wesnoth and the latter project lives on in the hands of others now.
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Fourth AnniversaryI never really know what to call, well, the rebirth of the sites since we got the domain back (see News Archive 14). We'll probably run dual anniversaries and just be happy with it (21.5 for those counting). The domain was renewed back in November and we are good for another year. As always, big thanks to @Marienro2 for that polite Twitter poke that resulted in four more years of BM.org! |
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Original Animation Cels A series of eBay auctions went up over the last couple of months from Peter*Alien. These sets included a subset of the artwork seen in the Licensing Packet, five original hand-painted animation cels (four from Horsepower and one from Armada), and the original pencil sketches. If you've sought after GR cels ever, you probably have seen that there are less than twenty seen around the web and are very scarce. LadyNiko's cel is the closest degree of separation I have to a single cel. Peter MosenThrough some searching around, and then later confirmed, I've added Peter Mosen to the Show Credits page by way of a new "Pre-Production" section. Peter had also worked with Robert Mandell on a couple of other projects as well. |
September 14.2021
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On This Day in 198635 years ago today, Phoenix aired on TV stations across the United States, starting a 65 episode run of the show that combined classic Western themes with adventures in deep space!.
You can read about the series here and read Tara O'Shea's 2004 interview with series creator Robert Mandell for some insight behind the scenes and his thoughts on the series. Don't miss our extensive collection of Galaxy Rangers fan fiction!
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Original ArtworkSeries artist Larry Rosenthal shared a tweet with his original series drawings of a few Crown assets! Check that out here! |
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Printable Ranger Interceptor That's right, you too can hold a Ranger Interceptor! Almost year in creation, with 56 iterations, 3 printed and assembled test models, I've made the .stl files publicly available for free on Thingiverse. See the full page for the Interceptor here and see the Ranger Interceptor category page for images of the creation process. If you make Interceptor, let me know! I would love to see pictures and add to the fleet. |
April 10.2021
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Cyrus Voris InterviewLate last year I tracked down one Mr. Cyrus Voris, writer of the Renegade Rangers and Rusty and the Boys episodes and one of the storyboard artists for the series. Cyrus is a wealth of background information and as we near the 35th anniversary of the show, his torch still burns bright for the Rangers! Was he up for an interview on the Series 6 Podcast? You bet! Check out part one of the two part interview over at Series6Podcast.com or on your podcast player of choice.
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February 13.2021
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Ranger Interceptor
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- ↑ Note: I'm going to continue to reference Twitter as Twitter, maybe sometimes as X-Twitter (as a joke reference to eX-Twitter that no one will get) and it'll be a long time before I refer to it as Twitter (see what I did there?).