SciWhy? F.U!: William Shatner's TekWar

William Shatner's TekWar is a so-so cyberpunk cop story that somehow grew into novels, comics, trading cards, syndicated TV movies, a USA Network and Sci Fi Channel series, and a PC video game that many people still call one of the worst ever made. The real story is not the plot, it’s the momentum. We follow the money, the branding, and the era’s obsession with recognizable names to figure out how this franchise kept getting revived even as it struggled to become genuinely good.

Transcript

Cold Open And Q Jokes

SPEAKER_04 0:00

Yahtzee.

SPEAKER_02 0:00

John Delancey.

SPEAKER_04 0:02

Fair enough. For some reason I thought you were gonna say Bosco, and I don't know why.

SPEAKER_02 0:06

Because we've done that before.

SPEAKER_04 0:08

We have done that before.

SPEAKER_02 0:09

Now I just like to think of all the times that Q was on the ship, but his name was Yahtzee Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 0:13

Take us back, Yahtzee! Oh god, it's Bobicle again. Hungry, hungry hippos. Ugh, it's Q. He's pop of magic trouble.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Gentlemen, let's broaden our minds. Humbling the proper approach to Pokemon. I suppose you're wondering why you're here. It's simple. You're the best. At least I think you are. You've already figured out that if this weren't important, you'd still be in cryosleep, so I'm not gonna waste your time. Or more importantly,

Tech War’s Wild Release Timeline

SPEAKER_01 1:01

mine. Welcome back to Dispatch Ajax.

SPEAKER_02 1:03

This is Jake. Mm-sk. Yep, you skip. Let me whisk you back to the year 1994. January 17th, 1994, on the USA network and also on Sci-Fi channel, a little feature called Tech War premiered.

SPEAKER_01 1:18

The year is 2045. It's been up. It's been updated by the end of the day.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

That was the first of the Tech War movies, Tech War the Movie. Followed by Tech Lords in February, Tech Lab also in February, and then Sell Out, or Tech War sellout, or Tech Sell Out. Who cares? In December of 1984. These actually did quite well to the point where January 25th, 1994. Uh flip that, reverse it. These actually did quite well. And so in January of 1995, Tech War the Show, episode one, came out and scored a 3.4 rating, which was reported at the time to be the highest-rated premiere in basic cable history.

SPEAKER_04 2:34

Now, granted, this is 1994 basic cable.

SPEAKER_02 2:37

True, but still, Tech War was the highest-rated basic cable premiere ever. Now, this was the latest journey for the multimedia franchise non-juggernaut that was Tech War. A property that started out as nine schlocky novels, then comic books, then trading cards, then movies, then a TV show, and later a video game. A wide-ranging footprint for such a lackluster realization of a concept. Perhaps one of the biggest examples of media cult of personalities, a product completely sold on the name attached, rather than the quality or the specialness of the property. We will discuss it and its place on the SciFi channel, but as Jake, the main character in the books, not this Jake, but that Jake.

SPEAKER_04 3:25

Wait, which one am I looking at?

SPEAKER_02 3:27

It's all in one, baby. As he says in the books, try to relax and don't get excited. That's the secret of a successful life.

SPEAKER_04 3:34

Thrilling. How thrilling.

SPEAKER_02 3:36

One of the many uh knowledge drops that Jake provides. Let's travel back in time.

Shatner’s Comeback And The Pitch

SPEAKER_02 3:42

Back to the early 80s. So at this point, as we all know, Star Trek had been done and dusted for a long time. After Star Trek, Shatner had tried to do many things. Um, some some TV work, some various movies, but he was essentially a failure in just about everything.

SPEAKER_04 4:02

He did do the um Battle of the Network Stars. That's what it was.

SPEAKER_02 4:06

He was on it?

SPEAKER_04 4:07

Oh yes. He appeared in Battle of the Network Stars. He did multiple episodes of Columbo, because I that's just kind of what you did back then. And he settled into Rescue 911.

SPEAKER_02 4:18

So that was 89. So we're still in the late 70s, early 80s here.

SPEAKER_04 4:24

Yeah, basically he'd only been in Columbo, TJ Hooker a tiny bit later.

SPEAKER_02 4:28

Yeah, TJ Hooker was coming up. Chatter had been failing in a lot of things. He was cast as the captain in a new cop show that had a different name, but when they saw the premiere and saw like what he was bringing to it, I guess, they reworked the show and made him the lead, renamed the show to his character, TJ Hooker. That was in 1982, and that ran five seasons.

SPEAKER_04 4:53

But we were skipping over Star Trek Phase 2, the project based on fan reaction and fervor to create a second Star Trek show called Star Trek Phase 2, which brought back Shatner as Kirk, did not bring back Leonard Des Moines, but actually shot a few episodes, or at least the principles of a few episodes. And because it was shot and done around 1976 when Star Wars came out, all the studios were like, Nope. We're making movies now. And so they scrapped phase two in favor of Star Trek The Motion Picture. The reemergence of William Shatner.

SPEAKER_02 5:30

Yes, that was in 1979. And up until this point, he had had mostly failures. He had walked away from the Star Trek franchise. He had a we'll say cantankerous relationship with the fans and the character. Did he ever? That is something that's never really left him, but he realized that he needed to come back. That was kind of his meal ticket, that's what he was known for. So in 79 again, they made Star Trek the motion picture. Quite the success. So they went on to do many sequels, as you guys know, which we don't need to cover, up until they were on the production of Star Trek V.

SPEAKER_03 6:04

Oh boy.

SPEAKER_02 6:05

Now, they were in the midst of making that, but there was a union truck driver's strike, which halted production of the picture. So essentially they were kind of like left with nothing to do until that got resolved. None of the sets, none of the props, none of the people, nothing could be moved from place to place. So, with time on his hands, supposedly, William Shatner sat down and began to pen ideas for a novel and his downtime. Let's see. What have I done? Oh, I'm sorry, I should do this as Chatterer. Let's see. What have I done? I was a cop in TJ Hooker, and the captain of the enterprise. What if I combine the two? So he made what he calls TJ Hooker Meets the Fugitive in a Star Trek future.

SPEAKER_04 6:52

It's like having Shatner in the room. Get out of here, Shat.

SPEAKER_02 6:55

Nobody wants your hats.

SPEAKER_04 6:56

That's Kevin Pollock. No, come on.

SPEAKER_02 6:59

Fuck your father in the shower and have a sandwich.

SPEAKER_04 7:03

I want to see Shatner deliver that line.

SPEAKER_02 7:08

And Tech War was a bad novel.

SPEAKER_04 7:10

Oh yeah. Apparently so.

SPEAKER_02 7:12

But Tech War was quite popular. In 1983, when the Tech War novel came out, it sold 500,000 copies and was quite popular.

SPEAKER_04 7:21

Yeah, which was 80.

SPEAKER_02 7:23

In 1993.

SPEAKER_04 7:26

That's what I thought.

SPEAKER_02 7:27

Take ninety-seven. In 1989, the first Tech War novel came out, and by 1993, 500,000 copies had sold of the first book. It was quite popular. That was the first of a nine novel series. Now, whether Shatner came up with the idea or wrote it, or maybe just wrote an outline, it seems more than likely that Ron Goulart was the actual writer. Ron was a travelman writer for various sci-fi properties, comic books, writing a lot of like dime store sci-fi stuff. But William Shatner's name was big and bold on the front of the books. And Goulart was a professional ghostwriter. So it went under Shatner's

The “Tech” Drug And Cyberpunk Roots

SPEAKER_02 8:12

name. Tech War is set in 2120, where Jake Cardigan, he's a grizzled cop, but he has an addiction, an addiction to tech. Now, this is uh probably the thrust of the entire series is the idea of tech. This is a future drug, but not a drug you ingest, but more that you you wear. It interacts with your brain and separates you from reality. So you're kind of living your own fantasy world. It's addictive and can lead to death.

SPEAKER_04 8:42

You know what? Not a bad premise on its surface. It's very cyberpunk, it's very neuromancer.

SPEAKER_02 8:50

Yeah. Or uh Strange Days will come out.

SPEAKER_04 8:53

Which is also a kind of all taking from all of the neuromancer stuff. Yes. Before Johnny Mnemonic. It is actually a very cyberpunk idea.

SPEAKER_02 9:02

Well, Johnny Mnemonic was only a couple years later.

SPEAKER_04 9:05

Yeah. Well, which is also not neuromancer, but yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_02 9:10

Yeah, but they're all based on that neuromancer idea of uh cyberspace. Cyberspace, the creation of cyberpunk, as opposed to Star Trek, which is high ideals and clean aesthetics and interacting in space. Neuromancer in Cyberpunk was the opposite. Gritty. It was more internal than external. It was all about getting online and inside the machine rather than exploring the outside world.

SPEAKER_04 9:38

Uh think more Philip K. Dick than Gene Roddenberry.

SPEAKER_02 9:42

Jake was addicted to tech and he was framed for trafficking it. He was made to serve time in a cryogenic prison off-world, frozen for 15 years. But four years in, he was unfrozen and released by a shady character named Basco. Unfortunately, he comes back to his life and he's unable to be a cop.

SPEAKER_04 10:01

Basco!

SPEAKER_02 10:02

Basco runs a private dick agency and employs Jake to take on the Tech Lords, these are the gang bosses in Greater Los Angeles, and try to try to uh get rid of tech.

SPEAKER_04 10:15

Wow. I feel like this is the crazy thing is, as dumb as this is, and as bad as the whole thing is, if you think about the time it's coming out and the other stuff that came out in the Zeitgeist at that time, it's kind of right on point. I mean, it's right there with Demolition Man, it's right there with Time Cop. It actually is extremely timely. Accidentally, I think.

SPEAKER_02 10:37

Yeah, that Demolition Man and Time Cop all coming out about the same time, 93 and 94, the same year this book came out. Right. It's in the Zeitgeist. Tech is his way to escape from life, and Jake is an addict. Though it doesn't get used well in the first book, but obviously this was a thinly veiled allusion to the Reagan's war on drugs.

SPEAKER_04 10:56

Yeah, no shit.

SPEAKER_02 10:57

With uh a mix of high Asimov-esque future and a twinge of gothic cyberpunk.

SPEAKER_04 11:03

Yeah, it's very derivative and yet at the same time remarkably prescient, which is a strange contradiction. And the fact that it never caught on is both baffling and also predictable. I don't know. It's very, very strange.

SPEAKER_02 11:19

It's tough. I mean, it's a mix of good ideas and and not uh not so good. You know, there are like kamikaze robots and humans that dress like robots, and people have sex with life like robots, the plants in the snow are fake, and tech is a fake reality, which is really kind of the major themes of the novels. It's this like look at what the future is and how unreal things are becoming, and what does that mean for our existence and for people in their personhood, but it also is filled with goofy portmanteaus, exmas facts or tech sex, really kind of lame in a lot of ways. These were fairly standard, if not substandard, sci-fi fair with a few good ideas, but poor execution.

SPEAKER_04 12:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 12:09

There was this idea of, you know, against against robots and doing drugs in the future and and cyberspace wars, you know, all of these things, but all the books seem to be self-contained, the characters seem fairly flat, a lot of the dialogue was rote and lame. There's a lot of weird racial stuff going on with it. There's a lot of Hispanic characters that have to throw in weird broken Spanish into all of their dialogue, which I would love to hear William Shatner have to do in an audiobook.

SPEAKER_04 12:40

Well, essentially what they're doing is they're they're cribbing from Blade Runner with Cityspeak. And uh watching a white Canadian Jewish man do dialogue from his own book about that kind of thing with Hispanic people would be both the most awkward thing I could think of and also oddly satisfying. I don't know. Uh, it's uncomfortable.

SPEAKER_02 13:01

Yeah. But I mean, Shatner, he obviously loved having his name on these and putting them out, but he described them as disposable entertainment. A true airport novel. You get to the airport, you have nothing to do for a couple hours, you pick up this book, you read it, and you throw it away. That's literally what he said.

SPEAKER_04 13:18

Yes, though, later on we will probably discuss the idea that he then had misgivings about putting his name on all of this stuff, which is totally ironic and hilarious considering exactly why he's doing this.

Comics Cards And Franchise Momentum

SPEAKER_02 13:35

Yeah. But it did not uh deter him enough because in 1992, three years after the first Tech War novel had come out, and uh two other subsequent ones had come out at that point, the Tech World comic book started up with Marvel Comics. Tech World, which was through the epics epic comics imprint through Marvel. It lasted 24 issues, written by Ron Goulart and Evan Skolnick and artist Lee Sullivan, who had worked on previous sci-fi cyberpunky properties like Robocop and Judge Dread. Really, from what I can tell, this seems to be the best version of this uh interpretation of Tech the Tech War books. You know, they're allowed to keep some of the more fantastic bits. The comic book storytelling format allows for maybe some of the schlockier elements of the stories to play out sequentially and maybe work a little bit better in the comic page. There is a fantastic element to this, and you can kind of roll with that in the comic book.

SPEAKER_04 14:43

I think one of the reasons that Marvel approached, because Marvel approached Shatner about this project. He had pitched this to studios, multiple television and movie studios, who were not interested in any way, shape, or form. They thought it was niche, they thought it would cost too much to make, it wasn't as established as something like Star Trek, they didn't want to create a new franchise. I mean, this is like long before bullshit like Avatar or whatever. He wanted to make it set 200 years in the future and like super cyberpunk, and everybody said no. Then Marvel came to him and said the only way to make this vision work is if you do it in comic book form first. But even then, the argument that was made, and I'm not sure if it was made by Shet or or Marvel, but it was to be set 50 years in whatever current time span we are, kind of like Max Hedrum, where it's like a sliding timeline. And I think that was because that was the demand of the studios. And if you wanted to get this property out there and then option it for film franchise, it had to be something that they were more willing to accept. And so they set it 50 years in the future from 89.

SPEAKER_02 15:55

Looking at the comic book, it doesn't feel like that, but I know that when they did the show, it was.

SPEAKER_04 16:00

Yeah, which was his entire premise. Like he didn't want a comic book. The comic book was an afterthought, though it was before this, this is not the format he wanted. This was just like his chance to get the property out there and maybe option it.

SPEAKER_02 16:12

I'm sure the little chunk of change that he got from the rights certainly didn't hurt.

SPEAKER_04 16:16

Oh no, he definitely was into that for sure. It's a good channel. I mean, come on.

SPEAKER_02 16:20

Tech War didn't necessarily help Marvel comics, that's for sure. Uh especially for Comic Aficionados, Tech World is a bit of a joke. I remember that I would constantly find them. In the old days, they used to package multiple comics up and sell them in different stores, like at different toy stores or uh drugstores, things like that. And tech world that didn't sell very well was always shoved in those, and you'd always get stuck with these shitty comics. When I'm 10 years old, I do not want to read Tech World. I did, and I didn't like it.

SPEAKER_04 16:55

No, it wasn't good. It was never good.

SPEAKER_02 16:57

It was not good.

SPEAKER_04 16:58

If you'd go to the arcade and they'd have prizes that you could get with tickets, oftentimes they would have packages of comic books back to back. There's like six comics in this bundle, but you'd only see like the one in front or in the one on the back side. I'm specifically talking about the Fun Factory and the Independent Center in K in the Kansas City area. But they'd give you these bundles of shitty comic books they couldn't give away. And you'd open them up and it'd be like, oh, the first one is like, oh, this is an Avengers book from a while ago. It's like on its third printing or whatever. And then behind it, it would be like an Epic Comics or what are those other ones that use Tyvek for their fucking covers or whatever. You know, and then you get like a tech war in the back, and you're like, ah damn it. They always get me with this.

SPEAKER_02 17:40

Yeah. That's how you get stuck with fucking tech world.

SPEAKER_04 17:43

That's how it propagated.

SPEAKER_02 17:45

But it only lasted 24 issues because it folded not long before Marvel went bankrupt. So maybe investing in tech world was not a good financial strategy.

SPEAKER_04 17:55

Wow. I wonder how much that had to do with that.

SPEAKER_02 17:59

I doubt that much. It was probably another straw on said camel's back.

SPEAKER_04 18:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:03

I think they had much bigger issues than throwing peanuts at uh William Shatner.

SPEAKER_04 18:09

I wonder if that's what got Jim Shooter thrown under the bus.

SPEAKER_02 18:13

Tech War still was coming out in a wide variety of places in 1993. The card company Cards with a Z made the Tech War trading cards with a comic book art produced for the cards. That's a thing that happened. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. In 1994, the producers I have I have a little bit on this.

SPEAKER_04 18:36

So after the Tech War comic books came out, all of a sudden studios were actually interested. Though they weren't before, which is funny because it was a failure of a comic book on a failing comic book publisher. But whatever. They hired a producer named Steven Roloff, was hired by Atlantis Films, whose Shatner's organization because I don't think he's really making day-to-day decisions necessarily aligned with because they were the ones who were getting given the best deal for the property. Roloff talked about his role after this point. And this is important because it proves that Shatner had no real vision. He had no real concept of what he was going for or what it would mean. But I think stumbled his way ass backwards of sort of Mr. Magoo style into this media conglomerate thing that could have worked, but ultimately didn't. Roloff said, quote, I was just supposed to sit around and think about how we would actually try to create the future for television on a television budget with restrictions, knowing that we wouldn't be financed like Star Trek, which is hilarious because I had no money, and to put together a pitch book. So I did that over a period of a few months and put together a pitch document which included a series of images and a kind of written description of our world. That went out, and after a little bit of wheeling and dealing, Atlantis Films struck a deal with Universal. Yeah. Basically, this is a non-idea, a nebulous non-idea that was ghostwritten and formed into an idea that made books, then pitched a studio that didn't want it, but was then picked up by Marvel, who made a book that no one liked and bought, and then studios were like, Great, let's do it. Sign him up, and then hired a guy to figure out how to make it work. And he was like, I don't know what the fuck to do with this.

SPEAKER_02 20:28

Yeah. Supposedly the owner of Atlantis Films, or like the head executive of production, was actually a fan of the tech war novels, and it's because of him that the project was given the green light and he was given some money and and hooked up with the universal.

SPEAKER_04 20:43

What if that guy wasn't a fan? Like that never would have happened. Of course, he kind of didn't happen anyway. I mean, it happened, but never no one remembers it happened, so it didn't happen, you know? So that's fascinating the way that that works. Because, like, what if it had been a hit? We'd have reboots and franchises and everything, you know?

SPEAKER_02 21:00

Like that's we'll get to that.

SPEAKER_04 21:02

Oh, yes, yes, we will.

SPEAKER_02 21:04

In the works. Oh boy.

Budget Reality Turns LA Into Toronto

SPEAKER_02 21:06

But through that deal with Universal, they went ahead into production of four feature-length films that would essentially act as the first season of a tech war show. If that did well, they would green light more and it would become an ongoing tech war program. Because of some of the budget stuff, a lot of things within the tech war story were changed. Namely all the space stuff, namely all the robots and robot tech, all of the gritty cyberpunk world that they were trying to create.

SPEAKER_04 21:40

All the blade runner stuff.

SPEAKER_02 21:42

Yes, yes. Gotta get rid of all that. And because the original ones were set in I think what was it, twenty one forty or twenty one twenty something like that, because the budget was so low and they weren't gonna have enough to do all of the production design and the special effects and whatnot, let's roll it back. So they just sent it fifty years in the future. So things could seem more normal. And instead of being on a space prison in cryo sleep, he was just uh, you know, in LA Toronto for everything.

SPEAKER_04 22:11

100% Toronto.

SPEAKER_02 22:13

So much Toronto, so many Canadian actors, so many Canadian spaces. There are multiple times in the making of both the movies and the show. There are things they talk about. Like there's a bit where there are some revolutionaries for nature. They're militant and they're right on the edge of LA, and they're like a paramilitary group that is doing incursions. Eco-terrorists. Yes. They're just in a forest outside of Greater Toronto. And it doesn't make any sense in the context. There's so many times like the Dark World, but it's it's just sunny Toronto. They talk about oh man, I remember when birds used to exist. You just heard birds last episode. There was this doesn't quite work with some of the story that they wanted to tell, but it is what it is.

SPEAKER_04 23:03

Side note and very funny, I think. I was re-watching some of Strange New Worlds. And they do that episode where Laan goes back in time and runs into Khan, and she's with the alternate universe Kirk, and they don't pretend. They just go to Toronto.

SPEAKER_02 23:19

I love that. You're like, oh, if you're gonna shoot everything Toronto, at least just like Toronto can be a place. Yeah, I just said it there.

SPEAKER_04 23:26

It's a place that exists, it's fine.

SPEAKER_02 23:27

It doesn't have to be New York or LA. It can just be Toronto.

SPEAKER_04 23:32

Yeah, you don't have to pretend that Vancouver is fucking Georgia. Like you could just you go, hey, we're in Toronto. This is a North American city. We're from the future. It's all kind of the same thing. Fuck it. No, this is Toronto. We're not gonna pretend anymore. We're shooting at Toronto, put it in Toronto. Who cares?

SPEAKER_03 23:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 23:48

That way you don't have to do weird cutscenes where you're showing the fucking LA skyline or whatever. It's fine.

SPEAKER_02 23:54

So by the time the show came out, William Shatter had envisioned himself as Jake Cardigan when he was writing the books. But in the you know, early 90s, he realized I'm too old to play this character. So he took over the role of Bascom, shady boss, who gets him out of prison. And Greg Evigan took the role of Jake Cardigan. He's a New Jersey-born actor, just kind of a generic, dully, good-looking kind of guy.

SPEAKER_04 24:21

Yeah, did a bunch of uh Columbo and Murder She Wrote. I literally saw him on a Columbo episode the other day. I've seen him in a Murder She Wrote episode. I've seen him in uh he was probably in a Matlock episode. I mean, just generic, good-looking dude.

SPEAKER_02 24:35

Yep, just kind of in lots of B movie, straight to TVs, your megacondas, your Phantom Racers, your Hoboken Hollow.

SPEAKER_04 24:43

You know, just um I thought there was one that was really good, but I can't remember now. I don't even want to.

SPEAKER_02 24:48

I mean, the best thing he probably was in maybe Deep Star Six.

SPEAKER_04 24:52

That's a good one.

SPEAKER_02 24:53

It's solid. It's solid enough. It's not great.

SPEAKER_04 24:56

It's a poor man's abyss. Yeah. Or a poor man's Leviathan. I don't know which one. I don't know which level that's on. Or those tiers. Leviathan at least had uh Peter Weller in it, so it's like Leviathan has Peter Weller.

SPEAKER_02 25:08

That's a step up.

SPEAKER_04 25:09

Yeah, yeah. It's probably Deep Star Six, Leviathan, and then Abyss.

SPEAKER_02 25:13

Wait, as in like like which one is I'm sorry, which one's higher or lower on this?

SPEAKER_04 25:18

Well, I think Abyss is good.

SPEAKER_02 25:19

Okay, so you were ranking from lowest to highest, is what you're saying. Okay.

SPEAKER_04 25:23

Yeah, and there are others as well, but they're not even really worth mentioning.

SPEAKER_02 25:28

And really, Greg was coming off of probably his biggest continuous work, which was My Two Dads with Paul Reiser.

SPEAKER_04 25:35

Oh, yes, that's right. I was gonna mention that.

SPEAKER_02 25:37

He took Tech Wars kind of like, hey, let's do something a little different, you know? A little less wholesome, let me uh do some action, and I'm gonna be a guy. A leading man guy.

SPEAKER_04 25:47

You can't blame him though. I mean, he does have a look. He's a little generic looking, but he's a conventionally attractive guy. You can see how he could be a leading man. I mean, look at fucking Shatner!

SPEAKER_02 25:58

Let's let's be honest, he had little to work with here.

SPEAKER_04 26:01

Very little to work with.

SPEAKER_02 26:02

I mean, everybody on the show had very little going on. Other than Evigan and Shatner, trying to think of anybody else who had much to say. Uh, there's Tori Higginson, who did a whole lot of Stargate, SG1, and Stargate Atlantis.

SPEAKER_04 26:18

Wow. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 26:19

I mean Natalie Redford, who had some X-Files and stuff.

SPEAKER_04 26:25

Also shot in Canada. Yeah, just Canadian character actors.

SPEAKER_02 26:29

Yeah. Lexa Doig, who did some Andromeda and Continuum, you know, some other sci-fi shows.

SPEAKER_04 26:36

Two other Canadian-produced sci-fi shows, one of which was Gene Roddenberry. Yes, interesting.

SPEAKER_02 26:42

Uh Eugene Clark, who plays Gomez, his partner in the show. He was on Trailer Park Boys the Movie and Land of the Dead, but he was kind of race swapped out for obviously Gomez is a Hispanic guy in the books, and it's a black man in the show. I would say the most interesting is Maurice Dean Went, who plays Lieutenant Winger. Now, in the books, he's described as a tall, shiny chrome robot officer with uh like a stark white suit on. In this, he is just a dude, but he has given a prosthetic forehead that makes it flat.

SPEAKER_04 27:18

Um the classic Star Trek archetype.

SPEAKER_02 27:22

He's doing the best acting here. He he rarely blinks his eyes. He's kind of the antagonistic parole officer role for Jake in this. Now, what you may remember him from, he was the guy in Cube, or in Hedwick and the Angry Inch, he was the military man who provides the Gumi Bears for Hedwick.

SPEAKER_04 27:44

Damn, I can't believe you're not a girl.

SPEAKER_02 27:49

Uh, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_04 27:52

No, I know exactly who you're talking about.

SPEAKER_02 27:54

Exactly. It's very evocative in the memory. Oh, absolutely. But other than that, you have lots of, you know, just Canadian character

Why The Show Feels So Bland

SPEAKER_02 28:02

actors. Most of the plot in the first four feature-linked films revolves around the same crime boss that they are trying to take out. Uh I think it's uh like Tagawa. Though I could be mistaken on that. Anyway, but essentially they're they're just like establishing the world, the production's fairly low rent. There's a lot of like just plain dialogue. You know, there are some decent ideas there, a few decent lighting choices, but a lot of the action is really subpar, poorly worked, the dialogue is so exposition-heavy, they shove in things all the time, and there's so much of it just boring. A lot of just like people sitting in a car, you're just filming them from the back, so you just see the backs of their heads, and they're just talking about the plot, what needs to happen in the next scene. It's kind of amazing that people took to this in the way that they did because of so little it had going for it. I think one of the movies is considered a throwaway filler episode of a TV show, but they made it into a feature-length film. Yeah, I do not know why. And there's so much about the story that is ridiculous, but each of them kind of fits into one of the books fairly closely, up until you get to the series, which again, production on the Tech War TV series was dependent on the TV movies doing well. And according to Variety, stations that picked up the action pack block, that was uh Oh boy! Yeah, that was the block of programming.

SPEAKER_04 29:31

We've talked about the action pack before.

SPEAKER_02 29:33

Yeah, yeah. They picked up those stations that picked up the block for syndication did major ratings boost, with tech war as kind of their uh shining example that people seem to flock to. So yeah, it was picked up by the USA network due to its massive success, and as I stated before, became the highest-rated premiere in basic cable history. But because it's tech war, and I think because maybe some people saw it, ratings quickly fell off and viewers dissipated with subsequent episodes, and it was canceled a bit over halfway through its first and only series. Though technically, when they showed it, the TV movies were counted as the first season, and the 45-minute episodes were the second season. Because when you start the the first episode of the tech war show proper, it doesn't give you, it just assumes you saw the movies and just jumps in. You're just in the tech world um knowledge base. And again, this is something that a lot of other shows did. I think Hercules did this, uh, a show that we spoke about on our Psy YFU series that we're currently doing right now. Lex um did the exact same thing, making these movies, counting as the first season, and then the success or failure of those prompted the show after that. So it ran 18 episodes, uh, same cast. Although Shatner wasn't in every episode, which was a bit of a disappointment, as he was one of the more engaging aspects of the show. Kind of fun. He did direct both the first episode, sellout, and the last episode, bookending the series.

SPEAKER_04 31:19

What kind of message is he trying to send there?

SPEAKER_02 31:21

It was kind of the same fair, uh, maybe slightly better in a shortened format. There was less lag because they weren't beholden to the books for their plot as much. They were kind of able to write new things within the world with some interesting new ideas. But a lot of like the ridiculous stuff that happened in the books is when he's thought out, it's been years, so his wife and his son had left him, and he goes to save this this scientist woman and her husband, but there is a robot woman that's taken her place. He kind of like falls in love with the robot woman, but when she's killed, the actual woman that he found just leaves her husband and decides to become his his uh girlfriend for reasons. Okay, and then in the show, again, that's the same thing happens, but she is quickly killed off, and then his his wife comes back because convoluted reasons of how the son murdered this now stepdad, and uh it was just shoving things in, and there's so many times when Jake is he's either overexcitable or completely non-plussed. He's on either extreme, and the character doesn't work very well. You don't really get a good feel for anything that's driving him. And also, like he's supposed to be detective, and detective work is shoddy at best.

SPEAKER_04 32:42

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:43

He mostly just bumbles into various adventures of the day, happens to know XYZ disposable characters that will feed him plot information and details for said episode, who quickly vanish, and then uh it just wraps up and it resolves itself.

SPEAKER_04 32:59

Yeah, it's like how to not do Columbo, which Shatner was doing often at this time. Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:05

Columbo without any of that, I don't know, police work.

SPEAKER_04 33:07

Yeah, any of the actual technical stuff.

SPEAKER_02 33:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 33:10

It also feels like if Runaway was a series.

SPEAKER_02 33:13

Yeah, but at least at least you felt like that guy had technical know-how. I feel like Jake is just like this disgraced cop who's like, I'm on the edge, but I'm really not, and I care, but I don't tech.

SPEAKER_04 33:26

I've got vices, but I don't do drugs. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 33:29

That's the whole thing. He was a drug addict. The premise of the story is that he was addicted to the thing that the whole story's trying to get rid of. But after their first book and the first episode of the show, Gomez, his partner, finds him doing tech after he comes home and his life is ruined, and he's like, I'm not gonna do tech no more. Uh and then he just doesn't for no reason.

SPEAKER_04 33:51

There is some potential here for interesting stories and characters. I mean, because there are a couple of movies about that, like what is the movie? Rush. There are ideas here that work that would make sense and would be compelling, but they never want to go far enough to make them interesting. They just want to make a procedural shot in Canada that vaguely, superficially links with Star Trek because he calls it tech and it's William Shatter.

SPEAKER_02 34:14

Yeah. And it's supposed to be kind of cyberpunky, but not really. Not really? You do have some scenes of like hackers on their decks, you know, traveling the web. Yeah, that's true. Saying their goofy future speak. But it's, you know, it's 1994 graphics. The CGI is is bad. It's very like Lawnmower Man-esque.

SPEAKER_04 34:35

Oh, big time.

SPEAKER_02 34:36

But like without the money.

SPEAKER_04 34:38

It's like Lawnmower Man 2.

SPEAKER_02 34:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 34:40

We're dealing with Matt Frewer, famous Canadian actor, also in Star Trek.

SPEAKER_02 34:44

Uh yeah, but even though um techmore was was on USA Network and Canadian TV and the sci-fi channel, it was also being made into a video game.

The Tech War Video Game Disaster

SPEAKER_01 34:54

I want you to take down Carlisle Rossi's operation. He conducts business from somewhere near People's Park. Try to bring him back for questioning. If the Tech Lords think he's selling them out, it might buy us some time.

SPEAKER_02 35:06

In 1994, Capstone Software made Tech War, the video game, which was first person shooter before first person shooter was a title.

SPEAKER_03 35:15

Yeah. Doom-esque. Doom-esque. Wolfenstein and Doom-esque.

SPEAKER_02 35:19

Yes. The thing that is different is that this was from the build engine created by Ken Silverman. Now, Ken had seen Doom and thought, oh, I can do that but a little better. And so he went on to make his own like FPS engine, which would become the build engine and achieved fame with the shooter Duke Nukem 3D. Wow. It is through Duke Nukem that it kind of like reinvigorated the idea of the first person shooter, and it it changed the way like Doom was one thing and Wolfenstein was another, but Duke Nukem was a different thing. It added some different graphic possibilities and some interactions with the world. Another game was, I think it was uh Star Wars, was it Dark Force Rising?

SPEAKER_04 36:06

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 36:07

Which again was a first-person shooter, came out about a similar time. The problem with the game of Tech War, which is, I believe, by a lot of people considered one of the worst games made of all time. The graphic design was awful. It was like this pseudo 3D graphics, but also like this photo-realistic stuff, and it it's just it's horrible to look at. The the game layout is horrendous. Uh, your interaction with people and your environment is really bad. And apparently, as you progress through the game, uh you get to this point that's almost at the end where you go quote unquote into the net, and then it it's like this uh this uh polyphonic nightmare of flashing lights and weird sounds, and it it just it was hard for me to watch people play it, let alone play it myself.

SPEAKER_04 37:36

A polyphonic spree, as it were.

SPEAKER_02 37:40

Um but a a lot of people this is how they know tech war. Um they played this game, they knew of this game. Um it's through the the tech war video game and its failures. Um but it the it is how it's known, but it really kind of was a a a stepping stone for a lot of other games to be made that really progressed the first person shooter um realm of games into like the next generations after that. Kind of a a a bridge between uh a doom and the the next stuff. Goldeneye. Uh sure, a golden eye. But you know, you have to have some failures that don't quite work to see why they don't work and then improve upon them and make things that really do. So at least tech war was good for that.

SPEAKER_04 38:33

Doesn't that sound like Shatner in a nutshell, though? He was the third pick for the Captain of the Enterprise. He had his moment. They kept up with it, they brought it back, he became iconic, but then they figured out how to do it better later.

unknown 38:46

You know?

SPEAKER_02 38:47

Yeah, it's tech war kind of through and through. A premise that has some legs, but it's kind of half-assed almost all the way through, and they keep they keep plugging away at it. In in 2009, Blue Water Productions, Scott Davis and Eric Owen, they made Tech War Chronicles, another comic book based on the Tech War world. Currently available digitally through Devil's Do Digital. There was also some production that didn't quite come to fruition for a tech war animated adaptation. It was uh supposed to be developed and written by Matt Miknovits, who you might not know, but he was a writer on 24, on the uh Star Wars Clone Wars and Star Wars Rebels and Bad Batch. Um, he did uh a lot of that. A guy who knew about animation and these sci-fi stories, and you know, had some some heft behind that. It was to be produced by Pure Imagination Studios with Shatner's Shatner Universe. In a future I created called Tech War in 2021, but it still has not come to be. Indeed.

How A Mediocre IP Spreads Everywhere

SPEAKER_02 40:00

But one thing that has materialized, strangely enough, is Tech War itself. The Tech War multimedia franchise, this intellectual property that seemed to have no legs, but spawned all of these different avenues for telling this generally mediocre and by Shatner's own admission throwaway story about a pseudo-cyberpunk future with a disgraced cop battling a technological drug to little or no fanfare, really. The cultural footprint of tech war, despite running the gamut of books, TV, movies, comic books, trading cards, video games, it equates to a one-off joke in the Simpsons episode. Nobody really knows about tech war nowadays. It's so odd. How did this middling property get so much traction in the greater multimedia landscape? What other properties have that kind of reach, especially things that aren't great? You can see how a Star Trek or a Star Wars, Marvel and DC comics properties, things like that, they have that scope to do things. Or other, you know, movies like a Robocop or a Terminator, things that had these really fascinating concepts, really good initial property vehicles, maybe even great sequels, and then spun into like video games and comic books and TV shows and multiple sequels, but those all come from a truly great initial realization. Right. Tech War didn't have that. Tech War had Shatner's name. That's it. Yeah. But yet it had so many legs.

SPEAKER_04 41:36

This era was the peak of Star Trek. We're talking about '94. So TNG had just ended, DS9 had was in its second season, Generations is coming out. By the time you get to like season five and six of and I think that carries it to a certain extent, although kind of coincidentally, because other than Generation Chattered sort of written off Star Trek, and I think he was trying to piggyback on all of that. And because this is his first attempt to go back to the sci-fi genre in general. This is a really amazingly weird property because it both is of its time, but also an enigma even in its time. It wasn't popular, it didn't have any fan cachet behind it, but managed to span a multimedia approach, the type of which we would not see again for years. Not that it was successful, but it did seem to work at the time. And now that's almost the standard for multimedia properties now. He failed to make it a movie. So then he tried to make it a TV show. And then Marvel Comics picked it up, and so he made it a comic book, and then it became a movie again, sort of. And then it became a TV show. So then he had novels and comic books and TV shows and video games, but kind of not on purpose. He stumbled his way backward into how media would work later. And that's really bizarre. The only thing that it reminds me of that I can even come close to likening it to is do you remember the show Defiance?

SPEAKER_02 43:05

Yes. That was uh let me see if I can off the top of my head. Sure. It's kind of a sci-fi western in a way, set in St. Louis. Yes. After aliens had come, I think there had been a war, and now there's like an uneasy alliance with aliens and humans living in the same place.

SPEAKER_04 43:28

Yes, this is also a sci-fi channel show, by the way. Which is very funny. Yeah, essentially that. But the idea was when they launched it, the premise was they were going to release as a a television show and also concurrently a video game. Like a massive so that you could explore this world through other places affected by this. Because the show was set in St. Louis, but then the video game was set in like LA or New York or something. I can't remember. But it was like it was supposed to be set somewhere else. And so the idea was that they Would be interactive, that they would be like a multi-platform universe to create an entire continuity around this project and in multiple platforms. It didn't work, but the show wasn't very good, and apparently the game wasn't very good. So but it's the closest thing I can think of to what Tech Ward accidentally stumbled into. Which is, I guess, kinda kinda how like evolution works. Shatner just kept failing at all these things, and so he kept finding different avenues that were willing to bake on his name, and then all of a sudden it was a multimedia thing, and and now multimedia properties are all the rage. You know? It portented things to come accidentally, and didn't even work. But for some reason everybody's like, there it is, that's the way.

SPEAKER_02 44:45

Yeah, so bizarre, really.

SPEAKER_04 44:47

How bizarre.

SPEAKER_02 44:48

That's a fastball down the middle of the plate right there.

SPEAKER_04 44:51

Oh, damn it. I when he knows that he's sort of like been written out of the cultural zeitgeist for good reason and keeps coming back, like the Terminator.

SPEAKER_02 45:00

You cannot get rid of the shit.

SPEAKER_04 45:01

You can't. Most of the original series cast? He's in his 90s.

SPEAKER_02 45:06

He's still out there, possibly the most recognizable element of that cast. Keeps putting out shows and books.

SPEAKER_04 45:13

He wrote a bunch of Star Trek novels. Yeah. Which were ghost-written, of course, by uh the uh Garfield Stevens couple, who famously write a bunch of Star Trek novels, kept trying to come back to Star Trek eventually. There's a good Roddenberry production thing that actually a very good video about him visiting Spock on Spock's deathbed. He keeps shattering all over society. I mean, there's really no other way to put it.

Sci Fi Channel Names Over Substance

SPEAKER_04 45:39

This wasn't good, but it was a big deal on Sci-Fi channel that they landed.

SPEAKER_02 45:44

Yeah. I think it occupies a space for the sci-fi channel in a couple of things that they really wanted and were pushing for, especially in that 90s into the 2000s era. One was a possible franchise of a product that had legs, that had some cultural zeitgeist behind it, and could spawn more seasons and possible spin-offs. Obviously, that didn't happen. But I think what they really liked was their starfucker approach, is that they wanted names. And Shatner is, I mean, especially 1990s, the biggest name in science fiction.

SPEAKER_04 46:21

Yeah, I mean, who else do you get? A lot of the older dudes had died. I mean who is the number one name in this genre? It's probably the Shatner. William Shatner. It's either him or Nemoy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:31

So if you put William Shatner's Tech War, hopefully people are gonna flock to it. And strange enough, they did. At least for an episode.

SPEAKER_04 46:40

Yeah, right. Yeah, an episode before they realized it sucked so hard. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:43

First season that first episode they came to, it's like it's not an awful episode. It's just bland.

SPEAKER_04 46:49

Kind of he's nothing. It just feels like an amalgamation of other things.

SPEAKER_02 46:53

Yeah. The show was never bad. It was just kind of dull and a little uninteresting. And it didn't get enough Shatner to like make it quirky and interesting. It didn't have enough of the action or science fiction elements or really, really pushing some of the sci-fi ideas. It just kind of like politely was middle of the road, and that just wasn't good enough to keep it going, sustaining, or relevant long term, which is how we get it as lost property.

SPEAKER_04 47:22

If it had come out a couple years later, like when UPN launched, that would have been a UPN stand. But it would have been like a Nowhere Man or The Sentinel, one of those UPN shows that lasted way more seasons than it had any right to. The fact that it was part of the action pack feels like that was their best shot at that point. Like Hercules and Xena and all that shit. Maybe if they had had more behind them somebody like Sam Raimi, maybe it would have worked. This isn't that much different than a lot of other shows that I've seen in that ill that lasted way longer than this. Well the last, like, what, four episodes of the show? Didn't even air? Nope.

SPEAKER_02 47:58

They cancelled it and left him on the shelf.

SPEAKER_04 48:00

That's it. Last night I was watching MST3K and they did Master Ninja with Lee Van Cleave. That was a 13-episode series that they canceled and then didn't release it as a series, but in a series of movies, quote unquote, where they just mashed the episodes together. This didn't even get that. And yet everybody's like, this is the way we're gonna do business.

SPEAKER_02 48:22

Well, I mean, you can see it and you can see how it works. You just need something good, I think.

SPEAKER_04 48:27

At least watchable.

SPEAKER_02 48:28

Yes. It's amazing that the thing that spawned that revolution and the way that intellectual properties are distributed multimedia-wise was something that just didn't have any legs from the get-go. No. A completely no-cultural cachet, disposable entertainment property that no one really wanted and no one was asking for.

SPEAKER_04 48:48

Ten years later, it might have actually worked.

SPEAKER_02 48:50

Maybe. They keep trying. Sure. Maybe Tech War will come again someday. Maybe as an animated show it might do decent.

SPEAKER_04 48:58

I mean, maybe. I don't know. I don't I don't see the appeal any more of that than than what we've got now. I I don't Yeah. Honestly, it's not that bad. I I'm kind of surprised it didn't at least have a couple of seasons. If it had come out maybe just a few years later, when it had been around when when they took over the action block or whatever, maybe it would have worked. I don't know. Who knows? It's very confusing. There was no sincerity behind it. It was just a cash grab by William Shatner. I think that's probably the long and short of it. It was Shatner trying to cash in on his name, even though he himself was wary of that. He was afraid of doing that, of putting his name on it. Everybody involved wanted to call it William Shatner's Tech War. And he was like, what if it fails? I look like an asshole.

SPEAKER_02 49:48

Ding ding ding.

SPEAKER_04 49:50

Yeah. And you know what? He was right. It's hard to wrap your head around the fact that he was right almost on every level here. Just like he was third pick to play Kirk. Boy, he's a fail son that keeps stumbling into advancing the culture that we have now. Maybe this is the most Shatner thing that ever happened.

SPEAKER_02 50:09

He's the too big to fail.

SPEAKER_04 50:11

But also not big at all. And fails constantly.

SPEAKER_02 50:16

That's just if you like go by reality. But in my tech reality, he's winning, baby.

SPEAKER_04 50:26

It's a baffling property to look into, and I would encourage any of you if you have, I don't know, downtime, because I wouldn't make it a priority. But if you can check out tech war.

SPEAKER_02 50:35

Yep, and skip, you said that the game is now playable via your browser online.

SPEAKER_04 50:40

You can. If you go to myabandonware.com, you can play William Shatner's Tech War in your browser. So have fun with that.

SPEAKER_02 50:49

How much do you hate yourself?

SPEAKER_04 50:51

Yeah. Are you bored playing Doom or Wolfenstein? Then play William Shatner's Tech War.

SPEAKER_02 50:57

But uh In the meantime, before you uh boot up your tech deck and listen to the future.

SPEAKER_00 51:04

In a future I created called Tech War.

Closing Thoughts And Listener Support

SPEAKER_02 51:07

Check out the next episode of Dispatch Ajax, which will be coming down the pike. And like, share, and subscribe to this one. We hope you've enjoyed. We've obviously enjoyed bringing this chat reality to you. Um if you wouldn't mind leaving us five chat hats on the podcast app of your choice, ideally Apple Podcasts, it's the best way for guests heard and thus seen. We'd greatly appreciate it. Follow us on social media and check us out for our next episode where we'll be again diving in to the sci-fi channel universe and all that it had, all that it was, all that it could have been. But until the next episode, and they get hauled off to a space cryo prison to live out their uh unevolved fantasies in perpetual shittiness. Skip. What should they do?

SPEAKER_04 51:57

Well, they should probably go watch Demolition Man. No, they probably shouldn't. Make sure they have uh uh paid their tabs, cleaned up cleaned up after themselves to some sort of reasonable degree. Make sure they've tipped their bartenders, their KJs, their DJs, their weight staff, anybody involved who uh works a living wage, and make sure you support your local comic shops and retailers. From Dispatch, Ajax Jack and I would both like to say no matter where you go, there you are.

SPEAKER_01 52:25

Please go away.