The History of Star Crackers
By Adam Browne
The genesis of Star Crackers comes from Star Trek fan fiction and role playing from my high school, of which I shared strange adventures with Jon Yeager, co creator, Tim Cantrell, Jim Buffkin and the like. Originally in 1990 this was called Silly Trek and the Graham Cracker Chronicles, after two unfinished (and one lost) fan films my friends and I made. Then late in 1991 we decided we would make a Star Trek like sequel but remove the references to Star Trek in it and make it a space comedy. I was in junior college by then, and so we got together over about a year and filmed our fan film for video release in 1992. We called it Star Crackers: The Sphere of Influence. Then we began writing teleplays which became stories, the Star Crackers series, and those stories went on for years, concurrent with Distant Cousins and all the incarnations of that, but in another universe.
Star Crackers was more of a comedy than a military space opera drama. It had jokes and classic characters. We did rip off names of people we knew to be in it, but figured they wouldn't mind. The stories continued until spin offs were made in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Recently, the complete 20th anniversary DVD was released for this month, but because it is nonprofit and contains material that may be copyrighted, such as a few songs in the background, and some names, it cannot be released to sale. Someday it might go online as a spoof, but there is no current plan as of yet.
Anyway, there were several years of stories, possibly 5 volumes, and those are being rewritten to be included in novels, including the first of which, Sphere of Influence, which should be published officially in 2014. We have to tkae out any copyrighted references and other complicated stuff that doesn't need to be there.
Jon Yeager and I are still working on this.
It is no longer a Star Trek story or taking anything from that series.
Adam Mayer Browne
18 February 2012
