LUCIDMEDIA

Rick Green, The Comic Commander

Written by Andrew Skinner Friday, 28 August 2009 09:05

“Greetings, prisoners of gravity, this is Commander Rick”. Now you might say that’s a nerdy thing to say, but hey, it introduced Prisoners of Gravity (PoG) with host Rick Green, an innovative show about comics, sci-fi, fantasy, books, authors, horror and video games. Rick will be appearing at this year’s Fan Expo Comic Con, so aside from remembering the glasses, leather jacket, interrupting static and hitting that large contraption on his wrist all the time, it is worth noting his contribution to comics.

I knew even then that the show was well ahead of its time and at this time I can’t help feeling that we need Commander Rick back. “As I said in my audition tape, nobody in the world is talking about the big issues except in Science Fiction,” explains Green.

Green’s quirky eccentricity was perfect for hosting the show. Long before the ground breaking PoG Green helped found ‘The Frantics,’ a Canadian comedy troupe who are probably best known for their CBC radio show ‘Frantic Times’ which ran from 1981 to 1985.

During and after PoG, Green went on to write and act in The Red Green Show and currently works on a project called History Bites, which with some parallels to PoG, channel surfs through history imagining what it would be like to interview people and explain events if media and TV were around. Two anticipated titles coming up soon in early September are Sex & Power and The Filthy Stinking Rich.

Although I always imagined Green as doing the interviews on PoG most were in fact carried out by co-creator Mark Askwith. The two of them along with Daniel Richler intended the show to be more of a children’s program for 7 minutes between two Dr. Who episodes but with production changes it was expanded and Silver Snail guy Askwith didn’t want to be in front of the camera. “I happened to be in the building with a couple of other ideas… pitching ideas,” says Green. Richler discovered that Green and Askwith played ball hockey together, and Green came in the next day with an idea about being up in space and the rest is history.

Thinking the world doomed, our host decides to strap a rocket booster to the hood of his car and blast off into outer space. He collides with a communications satellite and, with nothing better to do, decides to make his own pirate broadcasts where he discusses issues of the day with his sidekick the unreliable sentient hacker computer Nan-Cy. Every show starts with Rick interrupting a show called “Second Nature,” and ends with “signal loss” returning to the banjo playing TVO program.

With a unique presentation of great visual graphics, it was the slew of episode subjects that really made PoG stand out. The list of topics included Adaptations, Aliens, Alternate Histories, Censorship, Comic Book Layout, Creator’s Rights, Cyberpunk, Dreams, Evolution, Fans, Heroes and Superheroes, Jack Kirby, Memory, Sexism and Feminism, Space Travel, Tolkien, Virtual Reality, Watchmen, and the list goes on and on. There were 139 episodes that ran from 1989 to 1994 and featured interviews with over 400 people.

But even with very good ratings the public broadcaster cancelled the show because of failing budgets and the need to spread the wealth to a greater number of TVO communities. Green emphasizes that they had a pretty good run with their five seasons and that today you’d have to sell product and not ideas, “You want to sell something interesting and educational or just intelligent, you’re doomed unless it’s forensics,” he explains. “Unless it’s here how the corpse rotted.”

In trying to explain the success of the show Green says “People we were speaking to were normally used to being interviewed by mainstream press who didn’t know the material… the reputation quickly got established that these people knew what they were talking about and they were worth talking to, it wasn’t another ‘Good morning Wisconsin, we’ve got a woman here who writes funny stories about robots!’”

Because they were working on 40 or so shows at a time they were able to ask questions to their interviewees on a number of subjects to use in other episodes. The personalities interviewed included: Alan Moore, Anne Rice, Bill McKibben, Clive Barker, David Cronenberg, Frank Miller, Jim Woodring, Len Wein, Mike Mignola, Mike Ploog, Neil Gaiman, P.D. James, Ray Bradbury, Robert Silverberg, Stan Lee, and Will Eisner.

Prisoners of Gravity has unfortunately ended but Green is still involved comics including the revival of the Hoverboy project, a long lost superhero whose only power is his ability to hover. “It’s like finding out there’s another country in between Canada and the United States called Moldor and everyone knows about Moldor except you and you feel like, what!” says Rick. “To me, Hoverboy, whose been called the 73rd greatest superhero ever, I think is actually at least the 63rd greatest ever.”

At Fan Expo, Green will be appearing as ‘Commander Rick,’ ‘Bill’ from The Red Green Show, Rick himself from ‘The Frantics’, his ‘History Bites’ manifestation, and as Hoverboy’s facilitator. There’s clearly a pattern running through his career of using comics, history, audience participation, and discussion for comedy, to explore real issues. “That ability to make fun of anything and everything, as a comedian, it’s the best to write for” he says. Hoverboy’s motto, “There’s no time to think!” clearly does make us think. But Rick Green will always be Commander Rick to so many.