I’m doing something a little different this week.

I’m working on the restorations of our Doomwatch review episodes, and I’m not ready to release the audio versions of them, but, I’m been experimenting with Auphonics ability to generate audiograms as I restore these episodes, so i thought I’d plop them out on the Fusion Patrol Classics YouTube channel.

Why now? Well, although Doomwatch was next in line anyway, it occured to me that Doomwatch is one of the most confusing series we’ve ever done. It is so badly dated in places, especially when it comes to attitudes about sexual harassment, that it can be cringe to watch.

At the same time, this ancient program brought up so many issues with regards to science and technology that are still 100% relevant today. You watch these episodes and ask yourself, “How did we know all this back in the 70s, and yet still here were are?”

So, in honor of the start of a new year where we are still on a doom watch of the world, I decided to push all 26 episodes of our podcast covering Doomwatch out onto YouTube. Starting earlier today, I’m releasing 1 per hour until tomorrow evening.

Do yourself a favor, find Doomwatch at watch it (but beware the cringe) and marvel and laugh at what they got wrong, and what they got so damn right.

…and, if you want to hear Ben, Simon, and I discuss the episodes, for the moment, you catch them on YouTube at the Fusion Patrol Classics Doomwatch Playlist.

Gerry Anderson’s UFO (1969–1970) presents a deceptively simple premise: Earth faces a silent invasion from an alien species, and a secret military organization called SHADO fights this war without public knowledge. Set in the (then) near-future year of 1980, the series unfolds through the eyes of Commander Ed Straker, a driven astrophysicist who abandons his life to lead humanity’s hidden defense. With a moonbase, attack submarines. and a space-based interceptor squadron, SHADO fights to protect civilization from beings who harvest human organs for survival.

What makes UFO remarkable, however, isn’t the aliens. It’s the quiet, devastating exploration of what it costs to fight an invisible war — a facet that didn’t endear itself to Anderson’s American backers. The series examines the institutional politics that hamper even well-intentioned defense, the moral compromises required to keep secrets safe, and the human relationships destroyed by duty.

Newly-remastered from the best available original sources, our podcast discussions look at the full arc of this fascinating series. We dissect the strange logic of SHADO’s operations, debate what the show really means beneath its space-suit imagery, and argue about whether Straker is a hero or a cautionary tale. Join us as we unpack all 26 episodes of political drama, philosophical questions, and (occasionally) UFO attacks, discovering why a 1969 British science fiction show remains unexpectedly modern in its concerns. We’ll talk about why the real story was never about the aliens at all (and it wasn’t about the friends we made along the way, either.)

All 26 episodes can be found right here on fusionpatrol.com or you can listen to them on Apple Podcasts.

Television has woven its way through my life. You could say that’s a sad indictment of a life, but I counter that it was the zeitgeist of people my age.

In my childhood it was perhaps the heyday of the television networks. There were three (and only three) of them. There were no streaming services, and no VCRs.

For those of you who are younger, for perspective, the Fox Network — the fourth network — didn’t start until I was an adult, in my 20’s, living on my own for several years. To this day I still think of Fox as “not a real TV network.” They didn’t exist during the true time of the networks, and they’ll never have that cachet.

With few exceptions, you watched what the big three offered, when they offered it, and, if you wanted to see it, you scheduled your life around it. It was the trellis that the vines of life grew over.

It was highly-compartmentalized, too. Daytime was the realm of game shows and (yuck) soap operas. Night time was when the “proper” TV shows were on, and Saturday morning — and to a lesser extent, Sunday morning — was the domain of the children.

My oldest TV memory isn’t even my own, it was recounted to me by my father. At some point, at the age of two, I came barreling into my parents’ bedroom one Saturday morning, climbed up onto, and started jumping on their bed, saying “Danken-Dang-Duno, Danken-Dang-Duno!”

My dad had to get up and go to the television to figure out what I was talking about. I’ll give you some time to try to figure out what I was on about, but here are some clues: it would have been 1966 or 1967, Saturday morning, and I was referring to a TV character, from an eponymous TV series.*

My oldest TV memory that is my own, is seeing a commercial with a still image of Kirk, Spock, and the USS Enterprise, and the announcer (or the onscreen text) pronouncing that “Star Trek was returning” and giving a date and time.

I do not remember Star Trek from before this date, but I do remember that, when I saw the commercial, I knew what Star Trek was. Perhaps it’s odd, but I remember remembering Star Trek. (And for the record, I was excited by the prospect at the time.)

I don’t know if this was a network commercial during Trek’s initial run, or perhaps one of the earliest of the syndicated rerun promos.

BOOM! RECORD SCRATCH!

I bet you’re wondering where this piece is going. So am I. I wrote the above piece 2 years ago and it is clearly unfinished. (I would never leave you, dear reader, with the “Danken-Dang-Duno” mystery unresolved. Here’s another clue: My very first book was a Danken-Dang-Duno tie in.)1

Even though I don’t remember where I was going, or why I left it unfinished, it still speaks to me.

It’s starkly stands out how strong my memory of that Star Trek promo was. How can I remember the promo, and remember that the promo sparked a memory, yet not remember what it sparked?

And as I sit here, removed from the 1970s by decades, I think I do remember the television ads — the hype, if you will — that the networks generated more than the lasting memories of the shows.

There was that promo period coming into Autumn when all the networks we hawking their upcoming Fall Season, when I got my first glimpse (and a carefully-curated glipse, at that) of shows like Man from Atlantis, Planet of the Apes, Logan’s Run, and the Fantastic Journey. Shows that were disappointments upon arrival, and yet I loved them dearly because I wanted to love them. In fact, maybe I needed to love them because they were all the science fiction I had.

Brains are weird, memory is weird, and we are all indelibly shaped by marketing.

So, what was the show that I came bounding into my parents’ room about? Frankenstein, Jr. The story of (and I have not looked this up, and am intentionally doing this from memory) a giant flying robot, in a mask and cape, named Frankenstein, Jr. and a young human companion, who was either his creator, or the son of his creator. His name might have been “Buzz.” as I seem to recall the unmistakable, booming voice of Ted Cassidy as the robot saying the word “buzz” quite often. Maybe I should see if it’s on YouTube later today?

I don’t believe I’ve seen a single frame of it since the 1960s, but I do remember this well-loved book, which I got as a Christmas present all those years ago.

…and as today is Christmas, all of us here at Fusion Patrol wish all our listeners Happy Holidays, whereever you may be, and whatever holidays you may or may not celebrate. How’s that for a segue?

Christmas present follows later today?

Every 100 episodes of Fusion Patrol we have an anniversary episode. Of course, they’re not “anniversaries” per se, they’re centennials, and our octocentennial is scheduled for August of 2026. (If we were doing anniversaries, we’d be doing our 16th this April.)

What are we doing for The Big Number 800? I don’t know. (But it’s gonna be big! (Probably.))

Typically, we’ve done “big” or notable movies or specials, such as:
• 2001 A Space Odyssey
• Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan
• Quatermass and the Pit
• Forbidden Planet
• Star Trek: The Cage
• The Day the Earth Stood Still

But as we approached our 100th episode, we didn’t always have an idea of what we were going to do for it.

As I’ve been quality-checking the remastered episodes, I recently re-listened to episode 094, where it was clear it was up in the air as to what we were going to do. One idea that I mentioned, half-jokingly, but also half-seriously, was the idea of a clip show of the first 100 episodes.

It never came to pass, of course, but I did actually spend some time and effort seeing if it could be done, and, ultimately, I decided that it could not because of lack of foresight. 99 hour-long episodes was a lot to go through to try to find “clips.” If I had been planning ahead for the idea, I could have jotted down timecodes of interesting clips as I edited the episodes. 1

This would have made it possible to go back to the recordings and dig them out, but without that, the task was simply too onerous.

Having finished episode 094 in my re-listen, and, indeed, having now re-listened to most of the first 100 episodes, and heard myself discuss the idea for a clip show, it hit me like a ton of bricks — I should have been marking down timecodes of interesting bits during my re-listen!

I could have made a clip show for potential new listeners introducing them to the re-mastered old episodes.

And thus, sometimes, hindsight isn’t always 20/20, either.

As part of the remastering process, and to my family’s chagrin, part of what I’m doing is listening to every episode to hear what the reprocessed version sounds like. At this point, if you get in car with me, you’re going to be listening to 15-year-old podcasts.

They’re also a little bit of a time machine as I listen to myself reel off all the ways you can (or could) contact us.

• There were the Fusion Patrol forums — now, long gone, but at least the address fusionpatrol.com still gets you to the podcast. Ah… forums! Remember them?

• Then there was our Facebook page, but that’s dead now. No updates since January, and, I will not. It’s too easy to stick your head in the sand and say, “I don’t like the way these people run this place,” and just keep on doing what you were doing, but I couldn’t stomach it any more.

• Which leads us to Twitter, the Internet’s unwiped butthole. The smell was too much, and like Facebook, I will not be associated with them.

•The Great Twitter Disaster is what lead us to be on the Fediverse as our sole social media platform, where you can find us as @podcast

• …and finally, there’s our good-old, old-fashioned, reliable email address, [email protected]. We don’t get much email, but it’s been less than usual lately.

It’s that email address I want to talk about today. I honestly don’t know where along the line it happened (although I have my suspicions that it coincided with my domain registrar being subsumed by another hosting company) but somewhere back there, [email protected] died.

I haven’t actually given out the email address at the end of the podcast in quite some time which, perhaps, accounts for the fact that I completely failed to notice the trickle had dried up completely.

What’s all this in aid of? Well, after a multiday fight with my (former) registrar, [email protected] is back! (And, yipeee! Within just 12 hours I got some spam, so I know it works!)

There’s nothing I can really do (without tampering with the episodes) about the old episodes mentioning the forums, Facebook, and Twitter, but I can at least fix one of them.

I am in the midst of remastering old episodes of the podcast.

I know that the conventional wisdom is that podcasts are often transitory things — heard when new, then cast off into the Great Void of Forgotten. This is the same logic that got many classic episodes of Doctor Who erased from the archive.

I refuse to bow to this logic. If I can still be watching 1960s’ episodes of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, then why can’t I listen to 2010 commentary on it? (Honestly, anybody out there know of a VttBotS rewatch podcast?)

By the time this has posted, I will have remastered three segments of Fusion Patrol episodes: Those covering Sapphire and Steel, Man From Atlantis, and the Starlost. Our episodes on UFO are being prepped in the wings even as I type.

Sadly, I haven’t necessarily kept the raw recordings of the earliest episodes and now all that remains of them are the finished episodes and, arguably, the ones I have kept don’t really need remastering.

Also, at the same time, hopefully to aid discovery, I’m renaming the episodes to be a bit more specific about what they are with the aim at improving SEO, and I’m creating dedicated podcast feeds for each series of episodes that I remaster (as well as for current series) so that people can find the episodes in the Apple Podcasts directory.

What remains to be decided is which series to remaster, and in what order.

To answer that I have to look back… back into deep time, and try to reconstruct how each episode was originally recorded and edited.

The first 82 episodes were recorded over Skype, using an application called Skype Call Recorder. Skype, one of the pioneers in internet calling, used to sound like you were talking over a telephone, and Skype Call Recorder captured that faithfully. Those first 82 episodes have the most to gain. Sapphire and Steel, Man From Atlantis, The Starlost, UFO, and Doomwatch all started their runs in that first 82.

If somebody came across those podcasts today, and started with the first episode, the audio could easily be off-putting. I feel those shows have the most to gain from an audio upgrade, and that’s where I’m concentrating my effort. While I’m not planning on a complete remaster of our episodes on Doctor Who (DW), there are several DW episodes in the first 82 that I’ll likely remaster just to remove the scourge of Skype Call Recorder.1

After episode 82, things began to change. Like many podcasts that wanted to get a more professional sound, I moved to Audio Hijack (a nifty piece of software from the folks at Rogue Amoeba.) Audio Hijack allowed me to record my audio locally, getting the best quality from the recording, and it would hijack/record the remote co-host from Skype or FaceTime. Of course, these were still “coming over the line” and not as high a quality as possible.

Somewhere along the line, we started phasing in the idea of having the co-host record a copy of their own audio. In the edit, I could take their local recording and synchronize it to the Audio Hijack copy, and make a finished episode that was recorded locally on all machines.

…and then it gets complicated.

Somewhere in that next phase we began to record podcasts in advance, rather than the week before they dropped, and not necessarily in the order they’d air. For example, Ben and I would be working on Battlestar Galactica, and Simon and I would be working on The Prisoner. This makes it a little harder to piece the timeline together, but, approximately speaking, when episode 436 (Firefly — Jaynestown) dropped it was the first episode we recorded using an online service called “Cast.”

Technology moves on and various services were catering to podcasters. Cast, like others, was entirely browser-based. It allows you to establish a call between people and the software uses the local browsers to record high-quality audio of all participants. While this probably didn’t change the audio quality, it certainly made it easier for me to edit, and it made it possible to bring in more co-hosts without having to get them setup with software.

Cast gave way to Ringr around episode 535 (Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds,) and Ringr gave way to Zencastr around episode 694 (Quark — The Old and the Beautiful.)2

None of those changes probably made a noticeable difference in the audio quality. I simply changed service providers because of problems with one provider, and better feature sets. Changes just to make my life easier.

But there was a change at episode 692 (Space Above and beyond — Never No More) that made a noticeable difference.

Recording good audio is a bit science, a bit art, and whole lot of control. The mic you have, it’s position, and how well you control the environment you record in all make a huge difference, and slowly, over the years we’ve improved our recording environments. As I type this, I’m sitting in the “Black Void” that is my desk, surrounded by PVC scaffolding and black acoustic blankets.

Episode 692 was the first episode that I took the raw audio recordings and passed them through Adobe Podcast Enhance Speech. This is an AI tool and it took our raw recordings from reasonably-well-recorded quality to almost-studio quality.

When it worked.

The rub is in its name “Enhance Speech.” This AI tool has been trained on audio recordings of human voices. If you feed it music, it destroys it. It tries to turn it into a human speaking, with hilarious results. Less hilarious is what it does with sometimes almost imperceptible background noise, which it tries to boost and turn into a human.

Sadly, despite our best efforts, we have not achieved studio level silence in our home recording setups and so there are background noises. My neighbors, for example, tend to schedule their lawn maintenance on the same mornings Simon and I record episodes.3

While this made our audio ever-so-much better, it also introduced a lot of extra editing for me.

This is when I first hit upon the idea of remastering the old episodes, but Adobe couldn’t handle it. Not by itself. It would require a lot of editing to get rid of strange aberrations, and I’d have to recut in the titles, which I’d have to recreate, or use new ones, and I’d have to fix, if possible, any places where I had inserted music, which, if we were talking over, was damnned near impossible.

I decided if I was recreating the episodes, then they weren’t the originals, then why not “tighten them up?” Why not replace the outdated Twitter and Facebook comments? Maybe add “next time” trailers? Remove outdated references? Fix factual errors?

Down that path lay madness.

Then I heard about Auphonic, a similar product, which from my experience is in every way better than Enhance Speech and it has the added benefit of not giving any money to Adobe. Auphonic is much smarter about isolating stray sounds, and can identify music and isolate it so that it doesn’t get screwed up. We started using Auphonic at episode 731 (Doctor Who — The Savages.). It’s abilities to do things like remove coughs and deaden silences has cut my editing time down to the quickest its ever been.

Now, the ability to isolate and protect sections that have music in them doesn’t really matter with our recordings — music is always added in post — but what it does mean is that I can process the old podcast episodes, and as I showed in a previous video, while not perfect, it works miracles on those old Skpe Call Recorder episodes.

If there is one disadvantage to Auphonic over Adobe Enhance Speech, it’s that Auphonic effectively costs more. Both services have monthly quotas of processing time that you pay for. For the ongoing podcast episodes, assuming two hosts per episode, and a length of one hour recording for each host, and publishing 4-5 episodes a month, I need 8-10 hours of processing time.

Adobe is the better deal here, their Premium Plan ($10/mo) nets you four hours of processing per day. That’s plenty of time for me to not only edit the 4-5 episodes per month, but also “get ahead” and edit into the future.

Auphonic is quite different. Auphonic’s $11/mo plan gets you 9 hours per month. Effectively 112.6 hours less per month. And it’s also almost but not quite enough each month. Some months it is, some months it isn’t, but there’s a provision for that. You can buy credits for additional processing, which, depending on how many you buy at a time, range from $2.40 down to $1.60 per hour. These credits never expire and the monthly allotment is always used first, so I keep a bank of them in reserve for the months where we yak a lot.

None of this takes into account the remastering of episodes.4

Remastering requires buying as many additional credits as the podcasts ran, and I buy in quantities that bring the cost to about $2/hour. So, for every series I remaster, take the number of episodes and double it, and that’s how much it costs me.

At 50+ episodes, I’m not looking forward to Blakes 7 or Space: 1999.

I see absolutely no value in remastering episodes 692 and up, but prior episodes would add up to $1,384 (approx,) and for what? To assuage my OCD?

I have much to consider as to how far I’ll take this project.

In the meantime, here’s my estimates of the series I’m considering doing, and the order I plan to address them.

It gets more complicated after that because episodes span the gap between those that have already been enhanced and those that haven’t. Nonetheless, it just lays out what I’m looking at.

All that said, if there’s a show you’re just dying to hear in new-and-improved sound, and you want to adopt the show and pay for the processing, I’ll bump it to the top of the list.

…and no, I didn’t say “Throwaway Thursdays.”

What can you say about the Starlost? It’s infamously awful. It was the brain child of Sci Fi legend Harlan Ellison, but it was abandoned by its creator before the first episode was completed.

Is that Harlan Ellison’s notorious intolerance of any changes to his work? Or perhaps there was something to his ire towards what the show was to become?

From 2010 to 2014 we meticulously — if less than reverently — analyzed each and every episode of science fiction’s most infamnous train wreck.

Each episode has been digitally restored and you can check them out and subscribe here or at Apple Podcasts.

A Sample of the Remastering Process

https://youtu.be/l45O1OWO6sc

This video gives a quick demo of what kind of a difference the audio remastering process makes.

#Announcements #PatrollingBeyondFusion

It’s time once again to update the podcast calendar and look forward to what’s scheduled for the first six months of 2025.

Coming into the year, we’re rotating through Star Maidens, Space: Above and Beyond, and Real Humans, Series 1.

We’ll finish our coverage of Space: Above and Beyond in January, and in the ongoing spirit of 1990s military nonsense in space, we’re (finally) starting our complete coverage of 1993’s Space Rangers.

Our coverage of Real Humans’ first series concludes in March, and Simon and Eugene will cover the animated reconstruction of the Doctor Who serial, The Savages, which is due to be released in March. They’ll then move on to the fourth and final season of Bugs.

All good things must end, so it shall be with our coverage of Star Maidens, which is also scheduled to end in March, at which point, John and Eugene will dive into the much-anticipated, and much-requested coverage of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century!

But always remember, no matter how meticulously planed our schedule is, the BBC and Disney+ are expected to screw it all up one of these days by announcing the release date of the next series of Doctor Who.

https://fusionpatrol.com/2024/12/30/coming-in-2025/

#BehindTheScenes #PatrollingBeyondFusion

On Monday, July 22, 2024, Simon and I will record Fusion Patrol’s 700th episode. We will examine the classic 1951 sci-fi film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” The episode is scheduled to drop in Early September.

That we’ve produced 700 episodes boggles my mind.

Sometimes, I look at the podcast indexes out there, and I see the littered remains of so many podcasts that started to look at many of the series we’ve already covered and they failed to complete their run for just a single series.

Perhaps they were thinking they were going to make money at it and gave up when they realized it was just the opposite.

It’s these times that I think that my combination of bloody-minded stubbornness and borderline OCD has its place in the world.

Listeners, we don’t get too many opportunities for interactivity, but if you have any comments about The Day the Earth Stood Still or even about the fact that we’re hitting 700 episodes, get them to us before Monday, and they might make the podcast.

https://fusionpatrol.com/2024/07/19/700-and-counting/

#BehindTheScenes #PatrollingBeyondFusion