Chapter 10

Everybody who saw it during preparation thought that the episode with the Wolves was one of our best. With that in mind, I started pushing to find situations where Able, Baker, and Charlie could be the principal hunters. Lola went through the list provided by GSPCNB (Galaxy Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Non-Sentient Beings) to find suitable targets. Fortunately, there were about 20 that looked like they would produce shows as attractive as the Wolf episode. Those were used to concentrate the training, and most worked out to be the kind of show we wanted.

This meant that I could retire from being the principal hunter and only show up in a kind of cameo supporting role just to keep in the public eye. AC said that this was all I needed, and I trusted his judgment. At this point, I was ready to go with two other shows that I thought held a lot of promise. One was the time travel series where we traced the evolution of the local Aliens from their most primitive state to their current highly sophisticated society.

The other idea I had was to follow the idea pioneered by Disney Studios back on Earth to bring some of the better children’s stories to life. The Aliens had a collection of stories by their equivalent of the Grimms that had some excellent prospects for TV programs. Like the Grimm stories, some of them were too bloody to appeal to adults, and that was the audience that we had to satisfy because they were the ones who would be allowing their children to watch our productions.

The first one I wanted to go with was the Aliens’ version of “Beauty and the Beast.” It was amazing the parallels between the Aliens’ version and the human version. We did not even have to filch any scenes from the Disney version. We spent nearly a year working this show up into a 94-minute production. I knew we had a winner as soon as we did the initial screening for the marketing executives.

There were a lot of excuses presented, but we had to have a second showing for the executives’ children. They went wild over the show, I think, in part, because they all knew how it was going to turn out, so nobody was frightened by the first part of the show. “Beauty and the Beast” had taken so much unexpected work that I decided to have only one such presentation per year so that we could take our time and not get sloppy with the production values. Our second presentation was to be a version of “Sleeping Beauty.”

On the other hand, I wanted the time travel presentation to be a weekly one-hour show that lasted at least one season. This time, there would be no hunting, as such, but the featured players would be anthropologists, archeologists and historians. This was all going to be new ground because no one had thought of studying this period by means of the time machine. Therefore, the scientists were going to be learning as much as the general audience as they saw events take place in real time.

It turned out that there was a lot of “Oh, my God, did you see that?” type of dialog among the scientists. We preserved as much of that as we could, though we did have to edit out some of it to keep from sullying the reputation of the speakers. They tended to get carried away on occasion, but most of them took those outbursts in good spirit. Frankly, I was amazed.

The Aliens started out as amphibians who were forced from the water because of the pressure of larger predators. These amphibians became predators of the local equivalent of insects and grew in size until they were feeding on other amphibians who were late arrivals. This sort of thing continued as the original amphibians grew larger and evolved into purely land animals.

There were two sexes and propagation was through eggs, as it was to this day. It worked, so nature didn’t mess with a good thing. To make a long story short, the Aliens became the top of the food chain and gradually shifted from being pure carnivores to omnivores. Over the centuries, they became less aggressive and eventually moved into an agrarian society with farms and food animals.