fusion- patrol="sshowtitle"> Fusion Patrol was a Public Access television program produced by a team of dedicated volunteer workers at Lone Locust Productions, who frequently struggled 36 hours a day produce the finest in Public Access viewing and to bring a little entertainment into peoples' lives. Their labor of love was further hampered by the fact that their script ideas where encrypted, stored on CD-ROM, then locked in a safety deposit box in a Swiss bank (along with the key) to prevent anyone from ever finding out what their super secret five (5) year story-arc was.

Fusion Patrol originally aired on public access in Phoenix, Arizona.

Fusion Patrol is not currently in production; however, old episodes are being remastered into new special edition DVDs.

It was called Fusion Patrol for four (4) reasons:

1. To the best of our knowledge, "Fusion" can't go on patrol.
2. There was no apparent reason why anyone would want to patrol fusion.
3. The names Star Trek and Babylon 5 were already used.
4. We thought it would look cool painted on the side of Woody's Jeep, especially if we mounted a machine gun in the back and leaped over sand dunes.

It wasn't about anything. We were doing nothing long before that Seinfeld guy was doing nothing - if fact, we feel we were much more in tune with the artistic integrity of "nothing" as we routinely were required to produce our shows with nothing. Often, we could be found doing nothing about nothing with nothing. Despite that, we always had a story-arc you could count on. The format was unrestricted, free-form, foot-loose and fancy-free. It existed to fill a need: To fill up time on the Public Access channel and to attempt to prevent its overrun by more of those religious or artistic crackpots that waste our public access airwaves.

There should be room for all kinds of crackpots, and we helped fill that niche.

Many of the cast and crew of Fusion Patrol were Science Fiction, British Comedy and Japanese Superhero fans. And that tended to bias the program content.

Ahh yes, The Cat Poem... The Cat Poem was written by Ben Ragunton for our 1994 Annual Limp Cable Awards episode in the Poetry Podium segment. On the surface, the poem seems rather cruel, but in fact was part of our running theme for that episode.

A few years ago, Phoenix was visited by a very charming and funny gentleman known as John Anthony Blake. Under the professional name of John Levine, he portrayed Sgt. Benton on the TV series Doctor Who. John does a hilarious stand-up act, in the old vaudeville style, and one of those jokes concerns a cat who is hit by a car. The poem loosely adapted that joke for our nefarious purposes.

While John was visiting, I had the opportunity to spend some time with him (only days after purchasing my first camcorder) and he gave me lots of valuable information and insight on filmmaking.

Throughout the episode, this joke (which is meant as a tribute to John and the damage he unwittingly did by further inspiring me to produce Fusion Patrol) is visited and revisited, but Ben's poem is, by far, the most memorable and inspired manifestation of that joke.

The Cat Poem by Ben Ragunton, Fusion Patrol's Poet Laureate My precious cat, how I love you so. You're a special pet, I hope you know. I've cared for and raised you since you were a kitten. We've had fun together even when I've been bitten. You go out at night to romp and to play. Sometimes I won't see you until the very next day. Normally I worry about cars during the day, but since it's now night, I know they're far away. When from out a nowhere, I hear the squeal of a tire, no really, I'm serious. - Do you think I'm a liar?! A man comes to my door to tell me you're dead. Oh dear, I guess that means I can't take you to bed. I asked him, "Did you get a good look at my cat?" He says, "Yes, the poor thing is now perfectly flat." "No...", I said, "...before she was hit, did you see her?" "Yes. Her face was one of total fear." I look at your body, there's blood and guts everywhere. But where is your head? My god, it's way over there! I now pick up your body, your kidneys, your lungs your heart, but now since you're dead, you'll no longer fart. I take you to the kitchen, I pull out a knife. I'll remove your fur now... now that you're no longer alive. After I skin you, I feed your scraps to the dog. I wonder if you taste like Crunchy Frog? I use the knife to dig into your flesh, the aroma of fresh road kill, hmmm, you smell mighty fresh. I dig and I cut and I rip into your skin, all why I drink my tonic and gin. So here is to my cat, whom I will always love, whenever I wear my newly made cat-glove.

"Her face was one of total fear." "...my newly made cat-glove."

Are you asking if it is possible to have a life and be a fan of Fusion Patrol at the same time or are you asking if by being a fan you can get a life?

By the tone of your question, I'm going to assume the later, in which case the answer is an unequivocal "yes"! (But it is going to cost you.)

Handing out lives to the lifeless isn't as easy as developing a Super Secret Five (5) Year Story-Arc - any old hack writer can do that. If you want a life from Fusion Patrol, just send a donation (no amount too large) to the Fusion Patrol address listed elsewhere. All proceeds will go to the Gnathonic Church Of Joe (minus administrative fees).

Once we've cashed your check or money order, you can hold your head high, proud in the knowledge and confidence that comes with having a life. Your outlook will be different. Your day to day existence will have meaning. You will be one of the teeming masses!

Disclaimer: Our technique for imparting a life has not met with 100% success - remember, there are no guarantees!

Blitzkrieg (We call him 'BG') is an old pal of mine. He was permanently scarred by Mr. Colville's analysis of Catcher In The Rye when we were in High School English class. Subsequently, he spent too much time in film school, which further warped him.

Periodically, he would crawl out of the woodwork (where he believes he is the spirit of an extinct Pleistocene mammal) and drop a "video" in my lap. Desperate as we were for filling a half hour, and scared of his three-inch razor-sharp claws, we would show his films uncut and unedited.

Penguins are a common metaphor for modern society, but on Fusion Patrol we didn't take that view.

Sure, it's easy to demonstrate how the penguin's life mirrors the post-modernistic man's rigid, materialistic world, but have you ever wondered what it would be like to be a penguin? Of course you haven't, and that's why this question doesn't have an answer.

The fact that this question has been asked often enough to earn a place in the FAQ does however say an awful lot about the people who are curious about Fusion Patrol.

During Series One, the budget was about $25.00 per episode, which included the Hi-8 video tape, the S-VHS master tape, and my share of the pizza. There was also a one-time expense of $7.50 for an extra S-VHS tape to dub the Hi-8 onto before editing onto the S-VHS master.

Series Two's budget remained approximately the same, except for the production of The Twi-Lite Zone episode, which had an additional $0.49 expenditure to purchase the pig-nose. However, since The Twi-Lite Zone was held back from Series Two and was aired as the first episode of Series Three, I suppose you can't really include that in the Series Two budget.

Series Three, had an expanded budget of $35 per episode due to the recent addition of a $10 fee for using the studio or editing suite at the Public Access studios.

Series Four had a whole new paradigm. (I've always wanted to use that word ever since I was sent to Total Quality Management brainwashing.) We did everything ourselves and so prices dropped back down to Series One and Two levels while overall production quality improved.

No, we had more common sense than some other shows we could mention.

Choose one of the answers below:

• Sod off, you mean-spirited guttersnipe.
• Hey! Have you ever had your own TV show?
• Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy. A kid will eat ivy too, wouldn't you?
• So what do you think I am, a radio?
• Go back to school and get a degree. This is high-brow stuff.
• We got better.

Choose one of the answers below:

• You were watching the wrong channel.
• I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can let you have for a steal.
• Mares east oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy. A kid will eat ivy too, wouldn't you?
• If you're going to be a toady, go hang out in rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon-5.
• Thanks! Tune in again next time, on another episode of Fusion Patrol!

I'm glad you asked that!

It all started in about 1974 when I was in the Fourth Grade. I attended the birthday party for Scott Kosarich, who lived down the street from me back in Tucson. His dad broke out the Super-8 camera for the occasion and we had a great time filming fake events at this birthday party. (Running and bending metal bars like the Six Million Dollar Man, or making "ringers" at horseshoes.)

I've been hooked on "filmmaking" ever since, but it wasn't until the introduction of camcorders that things really got hopping. In 1991, nearly 20 years later, I cashed in my income tax return and bought a camcorder.

Luckily, I didn't have cable TV at the time, and wasn't really aware of Public Access, otherwise, those first months worth of tediously bad footage would undoubtedly have been yours to share right now.

Sometime in late 1993, I tuned into Public Access one evening when some friends were over and we stumbled across a program called Argyle Socks. We watched the show with the horrific fascination of people staring at a auto wreck.

Three young gentlemen (and I use the term loosely), stood in some semi-constructed (or perhaps destructed) building. For the next half hour, they took turns smoking, spitting and talking to the camera in turn. After 15 minutes, one of my friends realized that they were reciting the lyrics to heavy metal songs. It was difficult to tell because the wind was so loud that you couldn't hear a thing they were saying for 90% of the time.

I leapt from my chair (which was promptly occupied by someone who had been sitting on the floor, and was just waiting to take someone's seat when they went to the toilet) and shouted, "This is utter crap! This bilious swill is pathetic!"

"Surely we, as socially maladjusted individuals with higher than average intellect can produce quality programming as far above this blight as mammals stand above the amoebae! We can stand astride the highest mountaintop of broadcasting, and our words will be heard ringing like some clarion call across the fields, valleys and streams of this benighted land!"

"Our scathing wit will hold us in good stead as we rip aside the hypocritical facade that is mankind's claim to posterity!"

"Let's hear it lads! Who among you will stand beside me, triumphant and victorious, and let yourselves be heard above the rabble?!!!"

Well, none of them took me up on it, so consequently, I got a new group of friends, and the idea died for another few months.

One evening a few months later, David (one of Fusion Patrol's Triumvirate) and I sat around my house and filmed two things:

1. A skit for a new TV channel, the Pledge Break channel. A counter piece for Public Television which was getting more and more like an all-pledge break station - so why not do the job right and just have all pledge breaks and no programming?
2. A brainstorming session in which we outlined ideas for a new TV show we were going to produce. In retrospect, 80% of the ideas we discussed ultimately ended up on Fusion Patrol

After that failed start, Woody (the third member of the Triumvirate) and I discussed doing Public Access shows until, in December 1994, we got off our butts and filmed the first episode of Fusion Patrol.

In it's initial stages, Fusion Patrol was intended to be a combination news/comedy program. The news was intended to be of interest to Science Fiction types. Information on upcoming movies, TV shows, books, events and the like.

Little did we realize how mind-numbingly boring it was to listen to somebody read about casting details about next month's episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or read a list of books on the air.

After deciding that we weren't doing TV as a cure for insomnia, we began to concentrate more on skits than news, which was quite popular with the people at my work, who constantly surprised me by stopping me and saying things like, "I was in the kitchen cleaning dishes and my husband and kids were in the living laughing like crazy. I went out to see what it was, and there you were on TV talking to your car! They love your show and want to know when more will be on."

Who'd have guessed?

And so here Fusion Patrol stands, a monument to a little boy's afternoon at a birthday party. Perhaps our voices didn't (yet) ring a clarion call across the valley, but we did not go down without a fight.

While Fusion Patrol is, I think, finally at rest, Lone Locust Productions continues to work on new projects. I firmly believe that as our skills improve, and more people become aware of us - and want to get involved, we will be producing the best Public Access programming in Phoenix.

Many psychological studies have shown, or at least strongly indicated, that everything done by a male of the species is at least indirectly a scam to try to get laid. Far be it from me to argue with science.

That said, if Fusion Patrol was designed with that in mind, it must surely qualify as the single most unsuccessful women-meeting scam I've ever devised.

It could have even been a negative factor, for it only demonstrated my more radical, anti-everything sense of acerbic humor, rather than glorifying my more noble attributes. That notwithstanding, I'm sure that my wife would never have stood for it if it ever had become successful.

For you trivia buffs out there, the honor of devising the single most unsuccessful women-meeting scam of all time goes to Franz Mueller (1775-1821) a German ex-patriot who took up residence in France just prior to the Reign of Terror. Between March, 1793 and July, 1794, Mueller would unearth the decapitated heads of French Noblemen, cleft the skull in twain, discard the back portion, clean out the area behind the facial cavity, stitch a lining of leather behind them, and wear them as masks at revolutionary parties, claiming that they made "...great conversation starters."

Perhaps due to the fervor of the Revolution, Mueller's Scam (as it later became known as) was attempted 6,438 times (or an amazing average of 13.1 times per day) with a confirmed score of 3 sexual encounters directly resulting. Or, more digestibly, 0.04%. There is no available scientific data on the quality of the 3 encounters.

Have I mentioned that I'm a television producer?

*SLAP*! - the sound of my wife beating me senseless.

Yes! Much to my surprise.

During Fusion Patrol's run on public access, several people approached me at work and mentioned that they'd been flipping channels and seen me on the air. Other members of the cast reported the same happening.

We were mentioned (not negatively) on a popular morning radio program in the valley, and on one occasion a "fan" of the show intercepted me at a fast food restaurant and insisted on eating lunch with me. That was as odd experience, I must say!

As for the web page - the Fusion Patrol page has been bounced around from free web space provider to free web space provider for years now. Since the major search engines tend to reject pages from the freebie domains, like Tripod, Geocities, etc. it is difficult to get the hits. People must be seeing us though, for one day I ran across the web site of another public access program in Connecticut called S.P.A.A.N.C. TV. On their page they had a section describing "how it all began" - it lifted word for word parts from the "How did it all begin" section of this FAQ.

Well, they say plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery, don't they? Just for laughs, check out their page on the subject here.

(Update July 2004: The S.P.A.A.N.C. TV site is long gone - alas the ephemeral nature of the net is all too apparent, but their original site http://www.connix.com/~toasterb/history.html has been tucked away for posterity at archive.org's Wabac Machine page, and you can see the original flatering, yet plageristic page here.)

Now that we've moved Fusion Patrol's page to fusionpatrol.com, I anticipate that we'll get more exposure.

Well, I could tell you a tale about how a distant ancestor of mine was a member of the Order of the Knights Templar, founded in 1128 A.D., when Pope Honorius II declared the Templars to be a separate order and giving them sovereignty unto themselves. They existed until 1307 A.D. when King Philip IV of France, deeply indebted to them and jealous of their wealth, arrested those in France and spent the next 7 years torturing confessions from them. Forcing several of them to admit to being in league with Baphomet and other satanic practices. Ultimately, he burnt the leaders alive at the stake, because they refused to confess.

As any looney can tell you, the Templars survived, secretly, and infused themselves into the Freemasons, the Illuminati and the Rosicrucians. That they were the keepers of ancient Atlantean technology, and that for centuries they have been secretly pulling the strings of the entire world in their attempt at global domination.

And I could tell you how I have in my possession one of those secret Atlantean devices - a device which can make satire out of thin air.

I could tell you that, but it wouldn't be a secret then, would it? (Like the meaning of the 57 in Heinz 57 sauces.)

Instead, let's just say I watched TV, and I made fun of the silly people.

I'm not sure it ever left the air. I left a couple Fusion Patrol tapes over at Access Phoenix about 2 years ago, and i think they've been playing them every week ever since. Too bad, because 2 of the 3 tapes are really bad episodes.

That notwithstanding, we currently have no plans to produce new episodes this year.

Have you thought of hanging out at Science Fiction conventions? You meet a lot of interesting people that way.

Enhanced Artso-Vision™ is a new digital process pioneered by Fusion Patrol. With it we took old crap episodes that we never really liked and, through the miracle of technology, re-formed them into new crap episodes we still didn't like, but, and this is the important part, we liked them better than before.

Enhanced Artso-Vision™ is a process which allowed us to spend weeks editing an episode rather than just the three hours an episode originally allotted to Series One and Two.

For you, it means that each Enhanced Artso-Vision™ episode of Fusion Patrol was hand-crafted using the latest technological marvels, assuring a quality product time after time.

In 1999, the house where we did principle photography was blasted into deep space due to a freak accident involving an experimental space drive, a piece of cold pizza and a microwave oven. Things started getting weird from there. Check out the Fusion Patrol: 1999 web page for more details.

Probably Not. Fusion Patrol isn't actually broadcast by satellite. Hard though it may be to believe, it is broadcast via telephone line, so unless you work for the phone company, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI or happen to have a telephone pole in your backyard, you probably won't be able to intercept the uplink.

You probably can't. While we are returning to the original source material and re-editing each episode of Fusion Patrol, and then mastering them on DVD with a variety of special features, such as commentary from the cast and crew, outtakes, deleted scenes, running factoid subtities and mysterious easter eggs, the releases are generally only for cast and crew. Earlier episodes may have some issues with talent releases and other paperwork that make it impossible to release them to the public.

However, several of our later episodes may be released in 2005.