A Theatrical Cartoon Crossover Story By Me · 8:00am Mar 13th, 2022
I have a habit of downloading dozens of fanfics from this site at a time to read at work when I’m bored (i.e. all the time). As a result I tend to be weeks to months behind on reading posts and posting comments.
And so it was only now that I learned about the “Who Crossed Over My Little Pony” writing contest, a contest that encourages writers to cross My Little Pony over with pre-1947 theatrical cartoons.
My avatar is taken from the 1920’s Koko the Clown cartoons by the Fleischer Studios. My user name is a reference to the 1943 MGM cartoon “Dumb-Hounded”, which introduced the character of Droopy. Theatrical cartoons are kinda my thing.
So I dashed off this little story in the spirit of the contest. Am I going to actually enter it? Well that depends on if I manage to finish either of the other ideas I have in mind before the March 31 deadline. One of them is a lot better than this story, in my opinion, but risks going over the 12,000 word limit. And the other one is only a vague synopsis at the moment. If neither of those stories pan out then I’ll submit this one, the one that stars that character from my avatar. And Discord. Because otherwise it wouldn’t be a MLP crossover.
“Discord’s Equestria Earth Control Room” is so short that I felt that adding a “Credits and Acknowledgements” chapter would be overkill. And silent cartoons barely had credits. So I’ll stick them right here.
First of all, My Little Pony is property of Hasbro (the toys), Allspark Animation and DHX Studios Vancouver (Friendship Is Magic series), Entertainment Media and Boulder Media (A New Generation). That includes Equestria, Discord and most of the list of characters at the very end.
Fitz the Dog as a sidekick to the character Ko-Ko the Clown was created by Max Fleischer for the Fleischer Studio, and appeared in cartoons from 1927 to 1929 under the series name of Inkwell Imps. This series included “Ko-Ko the Kop” (released October 1, 1927) and “Ko-Ko’s Earth Control” (released March 31, 1928). The latter cartoon is quite celebrated among silent animation fans, but I rather prefer the former myself. I just wish I could find a clearer print—what you find on Vimeo is exactly as bad as the version I have on VHS.
The image of upright Fitz in the story is taken from a model sheet of Ko-Ko and Fitz by Fleischer animator Dick Huemer. The image of this sheet available online is rather low resolution, so I had to scan it myself from page 38 of my copy of The Fleischer Story (1988 revised edition) by Leslie Carbarga (DeCapa Press). The quadruped version of Fitz was created by me by altering another Fitz pose from the same source. The three frames showing the girl in the window morphing into Fitz were taken from "Ko-Ko the Kop", specifically the print on my copy of Pioneer Animation, an undated VHS tape from the 1980's, put out by Festival Films. (I told you that theatrical animation, particularly silent theatrical animation, is my thing.) It is absolutely criminal that this cartoon is not available in higher quality on a commercial DVD or Blu-ray.
That was the easy part. Now to move on to Star Frontiers.
Star Frontiers was a science-fiction role-playing game produced by TSR in 1982, the same company that made Dungeons & Dragons. It’s my second-favorite role-playing game (after Dungeons and Dragons). The fact that none of you have ever heard of it shows how well it did. The game was designed by David Cook and Lawrence Schick, and the rulebooks were edited by Steve Winter. The core rules introduced the four races of Dralasites, Humans, Vrusk and Yazirians, united to fight against the evil Sathar. The humans of this setting were supposed to have evolved independently from the humans playing the game, but the writers of the thirteen modules frequently had the human characters make references to contemporary 80’s pop culture. There was an expansion that came out in 1985, Zebulon’s Guide to Frontier Space Volume 1 that was supposed to revolutionize the game, but no modules ever supported it, and there was no Volume 2. Nevertheless, I read the book so many times it nearly fell apart. I don’t care for any of the “Outer Rim” races the Guide introduced or the overly-complex skill rules, but the rest of the world-building stuck in my head more than some of the original material.
The Eleanor Moraes and all of its crew except for the s’essu Ash’Yorl and the peeloven Pholus are taken from a trilogy of modules that featured them, the last three official modules ever made for Star Frontiers: “Mutiny on the Eleanor Moraes” (1984), “Face of the Enemy” (1985) and “The War Machine” (1985), all written by Ken Rolston. The last of these adventures is set on the planet Snowball, populated by the Mhemne, which I referenced in the story.
I stopped all involvement in Star Frontiers around 1988 and put the rulebooks, modules, maps and millions of cardboard counters away in a box until this year, when I realized it was the fortieth anniversary. That’s when I discovered the mass of new content that had been posted to the internet. Since I incorporated a bunch of this stuff into the story I need to credit those contributions:
The S’sessu were a fifth player character race created by David Cook which was dropped from the final product, noted for their amoral outlook on life. They were the original version of the Sethar until the powers that be decided that the target audience needed the game’s morality to be more black-and-white. Cook documented them in the article “The Coming of the S’sessu” in Issue 96 of Dragon Magazine, dated April 1985. Issue 16 of the fanzine Frontier Explorer (dated Spring 2016) had a trio of articles written by Joseph Cabadas that expanded on this information, placing them in a pair of systems “south” of the main Star Frontiers map, in an empty area known as the “Vast Expanse”. One of the articles referenced the elphosha phorad, a fictional parasitic plant documented by Daron Patton in Issue 19 of another fanzine, Star Frontiersman (dated February 2013). I had no idea how to name my s’sessu character, so I stole the name Ash’Yorl from the example character suffering from Calcium Disease in the “Things Wormy” article written by Cabadas.
Cadabas’ first article also gave a location to another fan race, the Peelovens, putting them “south” of the S’sessu. That race had been introduced in Issue 24 of Star Frontiersman (dated February 2014) in an article by Ken Ryan. The author admitted upfront that he was basically reskinning the race of Pierson’s Puppeteers, who had been created by Larry Niven for the 1970 science fiction novel Ringworld. Puppeteers have names that are unpronounceable by humans, so they use the names of centaurs from Greek mythology. And that’s why I named my peeloven Pholus, after the wise centaur who doomed himself by hosting Heracles for the night. The “OPS” in “OPS 18” stands for “Outer Peeloven System”.
(Frontier Explorer back issues can be found in online and PDF forms on the magazine’s website—it is still in production as of Winter 2022. Star Frontiersman is available on the magazine’s old site—it is maintained by Frontier Explorer, but stopped publication in October of 2014. Both publications are also available on the DriveThru RPG website as “pay-what-you-wish” downloads, just in case you’d like to throw a little money at the publisher. And no, I have no relationship with either fanzine.)
The information about the Tetrarchs given in official and fan material was organized by C. J. Williams in an article in Issue #7 of Star Frontiersman (November 2007), including the speculation that the Vrusk might be descended from one of the Tetrarch races, the Clikk.
The “myth” of Earth was suggested by writer Tim Costello in Issue 20 of Star Frontiersman (dated August 2013). The myth of Yazira, the corresponding lost homeworld of the Yazirians, originated in the article “Origin of the Species & the UPF”, written by Thomas Verrault aka jedion357 for Issue #16 of Star Frontiersman—absolutely essential reading—and was expanded upon by Tom Stephens in “Yazirian History”, a post on his blog Expanding Frontiers.
There, that’s it—every source I borrowed from for the throwaway last section of the story. Fanatical Star Frontiers fans might accuse me of getting a couple of facts wrong. To which I will reply that in most cases I made those changes deliberately to make this little section flow better.
