StarTripper!! Launches a Light-Hearted and Whimsical Cosmic Experience
An adventure through a review of the first episode of a new, delightful science-fiction podcast, aided by creator Julian Mundy
I have long dreamt of adventures in space and what shape they would take, what other planets would sound like, what the stars look like when you’re hurtling past them at speeds I’m not sure I know logically would be reasonable. What would it be like to be almost alone in space and happy about it — not completely alone, but this is your adventure, and you make it what you want? Whisperforge’s new audio drama, StarTripper!!, aims to answer those questions with the wonderful, cheery duo of Feston Pyxis and his integrated assistant, Proxy.
Join Feston Pyxis on a road-trip through the cosmos, as he leave behind his old life in search of the best and wildest experiences the galaxy has to offer!
I listened to this first episode before my interview with creator Julian Mundy, who is precisely the quick-thinking and warm person I expected to find behind the curtain of this podcast. I listened to it after a long and arduous day that had not gone well, and those nineteen minutes and change of exploration and fun completely turned my mood around.
“StarTripper!! wants to imagine a universe where we can trust each other again.”
Feston and Proxy, played by Ian McQuown (The Bright Sessions, Deck the Halls) and Giselle de Silva in her voice-acting debut, already have a very particular, wonderful dynamic embodying their characters. They and the StarTripper!! universe used to be much bigger and more complicated; originally, it was “going to be a Deep Space Nine ensemble that ran a transdimensional gambling organization. Feston was going to be the ringmaster, who built the space station, who kept it in slipspace, the interspace between realms, and could take bets from any dimension on anything.” But it didn’t stay that way.
Elena: Why not?
Julian: There’s a lot to structure around one kind of gag. At the end of the day you can keep that going for a while, but it would wear out its welcome.
Somebody suggested to me, simplify. Boil it down to what this is going to be about, what are the feelings that you want to elicit. Feston and Proxy are the only two characters that survived the cull. When you personalize it and bring it down to one guy trying to escape a humdrum existence and the only person he has to rely on is this integrated assistant, this digital entity that exists in his ship as an autopilot, almost like a Wilson, someone to talk to that will respond…
He didn’t need to explain anymore. StarTripper!!’s actors don’t bring only their characters to life, they bring their blossoming relationship into vivid technicolor. Ian McQuown is acting something I’ve never heard from him before, a whimsical, clever, fast-talking person who has broken free from the confines of his office and has had the eureka moment of the whole of space at his hands. McQuown is upbeat, excited, and him being excited makes me excited, like a thrill in my veins; he’s clearly genuinely enjoying himself. Feston is also rational and logical; I noted at one point that Feston’s decisions to just go with his heart and impulse are also informed by reason, like we see in the teaser trailer for when he gets the money he needs for a specific item or in the first episode when he make choices to take a step back for his own well-being.
“Life doesn’t stop just because you want to have your power fantasy. You have real life hurdles to overcome and we want to make StarTripper!! a grounded sci-fi, for the tone we want to set of Saturday morning cartoon. Our Twitter hashtag is #StarTripperSaturday, which is a great feeling to have, but the best sci-fi feels like…there are reasons for things, that whatever you encounter is not just there for contrivance’s sake, but because someone thought of a genuine reason for it to be there.”
“PROXY IS MYSTERIOUS…SHE IS, ON SOME LEVEL, A REAL PERSON.”
De Silva’s debut in this episode as Proxy is a strong entry to voice-acting, unhindered and enhanced with the gentle modulation of her voice from sound design wizard, Mischa Stanton. De Silva’s Proxy, the integrated assistant, is a caring force behind Feston’s impulses, willing to do what it is he wants to do and offering everything she can do for him to realize his dreams. Talking about Proxy took up a large part of an hour and a half, because Mundy’s view of artificial intelligence and the way forward, at least in fiction, completely fascinated me.
Elena: Who is Proxy? Where does Proxy come from?
Juian: The idea of there being an emotional AI that does not make its emotions your problem, who’s there as a stabilizing influence, not as something to cause you more stress. Proxy is kind of mysterious. I want to leave some questions open, but the idea is of something like a Siri, a machine that is thinking about your needs. I want to give us a reason to think about the needs of the machine. Proxy has a lot of potential there and Giselle does an amazing job bringing her to life and giving us that more complete feeling of a ship being a home and not just a mode of transportation or a tool. Proxy does not feel like a tool; she’s there to put her hand on your shoulder and say, “hey, you want me to help you with this. I’m here for you.”
User-friendliness is not just a marketing ploy, it’s a real thing that drives innovation. Proxy is a fantastic character and person over time. We are at a place as a society, I think, where we can begin to accept machines as people, and for that to be a starting point, not a thing that we have to grow into. We’ll learn things about Proxy, but we already know that she’s a person on some level.
Elena: I love Proxy. Artificial intelligence characters are very popular in sci-fi audio drama, partially I think because you can modulate their voices to make them distinct from the rest of the cast — Archive 81’s sound designer talks about this with his love of robot characters, for instance.
Julian: We use the term integrated assistant in the show because I want to step away from the term artificial intelligence, because yes, she’s artificial, yes, she’s an intelligence, but more than that, she is…on some level a real person.
An integrated assistant is this idea that I’m cribbing a little bit from a show called Outlaw Star, because there’s a character called Melfina who is a girl who walks and talks and has her own physical form, but also she is the navigator-slash-navigation-system bio-android for this entire ship. Proxy is partially my love letter to Melfina; that’s such a beautiful idea that you have someone who is doing her job, but can become something even more than that and give you a whole other dimension that you never thought possible.
Elena: Proxy comes across as, to some people’s perspectives in-world, “outdated” technology, who is highly adaptable to her surrounding and care about who is on her ship, who’s making a home with her.
Julian: There are examples throughout history of amazing ideas that are put into production for a little bit but, for whatever reason, don’t stick around while being ahead of their time in ways no one could have expected. That’s where I want to lean with Proxy. She is somebody’s baby, and that somebody was an absolute genius.
The world-building in StarTripper!! is detailed and careful, but not overly expository. Mundy knows what the difficulties are in presenting a new science-fiction universe and takes his cues from Douglas Adams for several parts of the show. My training in linguistics meant I honed in on the futuristic, alien slang and technical language that was distinct, but dolloped cautiously in places where the humans listening would be able to interpret what was meant.
“I want to imagine a universe where all of these things are shared,” Mundy says, having long ago in our conversation kicked back in his chair and grasped at the air with occasional, expressive hand motions. “We’re not trying to overload or be overly expository about it, so that you become comfortable and familiar and it’ll just become wallpaper for the show, the furniture, so that you know that you’re listening to StarTripper!! which means everyone is going to say “kak” a lot.”
Mundy has some great advice for world-building and writing fiction, coming from a long history of teaching media creation like videos and comic books. “Do it because it will interest you and ignite someone’s emotions, and get them to seek out more. When you use references and slang and things as gatekeeping mechanisms, it makes it harder for people to find a way into your show or whatever you’re making.”
But most importantly?
“To start with, just… don’t be racist. You’re trying to add flavor to the world, not make caricatures of people.”
This is the strength of StarTripper!!: it is fantastical, adventurous, fun, just like a Saturday morning cartoon, and coming from a place of needing to form positive connections with and provide something uniquely good for the wider community, not just for the sake of itself existing.
“Ever since I joined the working world, you see the effects more accurately…when the strain builds up and the stress it too much, it can be a huge problem. The driving force behind the show is of giving people a refuge or, not an antidote, but a palliative, something to relieve that tension because we are bombarded by it… I wanted to give people something that would nourish them and me.”
Mundy is inspired heavily from growing up with Toonami, as well as his love of anime, like Trigun and Cowboy Bebop, and his desire to join the list of shows like Steven Universe, Brooklyn-99, Parks and Recreation, and Kekkai Sensen. These are all shows about “a group of people whose best episodes are when they’re all invested in each other and really pushing for each other to succeed. There’s adversity because that’s how you make the best stories, but the reason everybody is invested to the extent that they are is because there’s no sarcasm in the support that is offered, even in the cases that it’s begrudging support.”
“The best openings are the ones that give me goosebumps.”
The music in StarTripper!! reflects the sheer delight Feston has in the universe and the people in it. But unlike what I thought, the music here was not composed specifically for the show, but curated from one artist: Ketsa. Ketsa’s music that Mundy and Stanton selected for the show are varied, linked by an intrinsic bubbly quality, and run a large gamut of references to other music, such as a calypso feel in one awed storytelling scene and the callback to something like arcade racing games during a high-speed action scene.
“We wanted the music to be more of a presence than we’ve gotten to have in our other shows, which tend to be more diegetic… People told me that we should think about making it have that presence, because in everyone’s favorite movie, they’ve got that track that kicks in and they’re there, in one of those moments they remember forever.”
And it’s not just the music that’s incredible, it’s all of the sound design brought to us by Mischa Stanton. I keep thinking there’s nowhere else in the upward direction for Stanton to go and I keep being wrong. They’ve designed sound effects that drive home exactly what’s happening, as much as you need it — the heights of which can be heard in Feston’s mysterious ship race — and carefully balanced music and voices so their presence are complimentary, not eclipsing. I can’t wait for future episodes of StarTripper!! and what they bring us next in terms of alien life, its sounds and music, and the song of the cosmos.
We talked briefly about hype and how that plays into StarTripper!!’s creation, whose first episode’s atmosphere is zealous about exploration and trying new things:
“Hype is a living thing that visits you if you have the right things set out for it. It responds to your emotion, hype is a thing that’ll visit you and take over and get you out of your chair screaming about something that’ll look absurd to an outside observer. I wanted to give people something to get hyped about.”
We’re hyped, Julian.
StarTripper!! launched today, and you will always have time to jump on board and detox a little alongside Proxy, caring and relaxed integrated assistant, and Feston Pyxis, someone who is “a little Spider Jerusalem, a little Han Solo, a little Flash Gordon, and a little Dr. Who.
And probably that guy from The Office.”
See you, fellow travelers.
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