A Blast from the Past: Star Rangers

I don't know who started drawing the cartoon characters you see in the photo of my doodle above, my elementary school friend Chris or myself, but once we started drawing them and made up an inside joke about them, I continued doodling them in the margins of notebooks and class note handouts throughout elementary, middle, and high school.

At one point I made an entire comic book in a notebook full of multiple panels about these little guys in space suits and their adventures, but that is long lost, like so many other things I made as a child. The memory has endured, though and is still one of the standard go-to things I doodle when I'm stressed, bored, or just start subconsciously doodling for whatever reason.

The joke, I'm afraid, isn't really translatable from Little Kid to Adultese. So much is lost in translation after we've grown up. However, the cartoon involved several space suit wearing agents or rangers using grappling hooks to make their way from their rocket ship to an alien ship. The smart one, who had a smiley face on the outside of his helmet, for reasons I don't know (maybe Chris did, but he never told me!) always found a way to access the aliens' transporter beam somehow and made his way up and into the ship, dismantling it from the inside while his bumbling comrades failed outside on the ship's hull.

All these years later I got to thinking and wrote a short story about these characters, making up some additional details and imagining backstories for them. I imagined an adult version of the story, based on the original doodlings of two elementary school aged boys, something darker like you might find on the SyFy channel. I have attached the completed story for your enjoyment here today. Like so many other stories, it opens the gateway for more, leaving open ended questions and mysteries which may just in fact be worth exploring further. I hope you enjoy it!

T.D. 
​5/17/18

the_fall_of_the_star_rangers_by_td_smith.pdf
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