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Revision as of 09:28, 2 December 2023
Welcome to BetaMountain.org, the online spot for all of your Galaxy Rangers needs!
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.
January 16.2022
Welcome to 2022!
Dan Fiorella remembers John Rawlins
This 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.
3D Renders
I'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:
Not 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!
John Rawlins
John Rawlins
News 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.
In 2019, I shared with John via Twitter that Invasion was the episode that is one of the most fun places to start into G.R. for my kids. My daughter, now 18, still says "TV... TV PARTY TONIGHT". A bit of Boru the Dragon lives on.
I 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!
Life at home is going well, however if I ever thought that things might slow down with one kid off at university and one almost midway through high school... I was wrong. Simply wrong.
If anyone out there is a fan of the series and would like to help with the site, feel free to reach out and let me know, I'd love some help!
Finally, I've changed up the banner for a while in honor of John with a stitched picture from the co-authored (with Dan) Murder on the Andorian Express.
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.
I could not resist.
I now have five cels!
I'll upload the others over time. For now, I am debating on which and how to frame. If you happen to see any more from Peter, he packages the bundle with care and as of the last correspondence may have two or three packets left. Peter includes some additional items and you realize that when you were a kid, Peter was out doing cool things way before the current convention standard of cosplay.
Peter Mosen
Through 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
On This Day in 1986
35 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!
Happy anniversary Galaxy Rangers!
No guts, no glory!
Original Artwork
Series artist Larry Rosenthal shared a tweet with his original series drawings of a few Crown assets! Check that out here!
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
Cyrus Voris Interview
Daisy O'Mega, created by Cyrus
Late 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.
On the 2nd part of the episode coming out later, Cyrus and the boys will discuss Renegade Rangers (and we have the scanned screenplay that Cyrus sent to Lee T way back in the day)! Listen to Cyrus talk about one of his first jobs out of college, discussing how some of the production took place, and at some point in one of the two episodes you'll find out what happens when a few lines of story get a clip instead of a fade to black... and you hear the thing about Gooseman that all the hardcore fans and harem fanfic writers already knew!
February 13.2021
Ranger Interceptor
Blender 3D modeling
Doc checks out his new ride
In November 2020, I started working on something familiar and I was able to print a prototype of the model as well.
The project is still a work in progress, but it was certainly nice to hold the model in my hand!
Unfortunately I need to go fix the kitchen sink (plumbing, specifically the water aspect of it, and I do not get along).
I hope everyone is doing as well as possible these days.
