What Happened to Captain S? May 24, 2011

Back in 2007 a group of people got together in New York and, heavily influenced by the tv shows of their youth such as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad, and Saved by the Bell, created a web series of their own to pay honor not only to those shows, but the games of their past, called The New Adventures of Captain S.  It was done by a production company called PBC-Productions.

A teenager named Chad Bellmont buys a used Sega Genesis game from an unknown gypsy during a tag sale.  When he plays the game for the first time, he’s imbued with the X-Code, the code that allows him to travel between our world and the world inside of video games.  With the help of his friends, and of a mysterious floating head, he has to stop a former friend who has been seduced by an evil entity who plans to take control of all video games and eventually our reality.

The series was cheesy but it had a great heart to it.  It was well written, fantastically acted, and the special effects were fitting of the series.  It brought me back to an earlier part of my life, which were the tv shows I watched as a kid, which really was the only good thing about my own childhood.

I will gladly turn on any of these episodes when I’m feeling bad.  If you must know, my favorite episodes are Episode 3, where Chad’s friend Becky discovers he’s a superhero and we learn Becky has a crush on him while Chad is blindly falling for the school babe Stacey Newfeld, and Episode 9, where Chad, Lunk and Stacey Newfeld have to survive a day of school, when all their classmates have been turned into zombies, and save Becky from the Game Genie.  Finally, and as you know, I make it a tradition to watch Captain S’s team-up with The Angry Video Game Nerd every Christmas.

The first season wrapped up and a second season was promised, coming very soon.  Sales of the DVD were going to fund a highly anticipated second season, which was promising to be bigger and better than the first.  A webcomic was even running which was going to bridge the gap between season one and season two.

Then, in one of the darkest days of my life, May 31st, 2009, this video hit the internet.

Specifics weren’t gone into why they had come to this conclusion, and it left a lot of people floored, but they assured the public it was no hoax.  I really don’t need to say anything further about the decline of the company since this announcement was posted, I already covered it a few months ago.  The webcomic ceased production before it came to its conclusion.  There was another series the company was working on, called Little Miss Gamer starring Lindsey “Z” Briggs, but new episodes of that series stopped being posted around March of 2010.  It seemed like real life was indeed catching up to them.  Being a fringe internet sensation was just not paying the bills and real life and real money was taking up their time, preventing all the principal team members from continuing with producing content.

I mentioned a few months ago that even though the company hadn’t posted a video since April of 2010, they had not yet posted any kind of announcement that the company was in fact shutting down, or if they had any interest in creating new content.

Well, it’s official, their goodbyes were posted on their official message boards this past week.  It was marked in a lenthy podcast interview with the two principal guys behind PBC Productions, Chad Williams, (who was the creator of the series, the voice of the Game Genie, and the face of the giant floating head) and Brett Vanderbrook (who played Chad Bellmont, better known as Captain S).

After a long time coming, someone who really wanted to know what was going to happen with the series got the means to ask.  Racketboy.com was auctioning off the chance to control an entire podcast and it was won by a guy who went by the name of Flake.  Flake’s choice was to get podcast host Dave Heineman to interview PBC-Productions and ask them just what happened with that second season of Captain S and what was in store from the company.

After listening to this full interview with the two principal guys who operate PBC, I have concluded the fact that this second season was never produced is truly a travesty.  Money was on the table, and the ideas for the second season were brilliant!  It just seems that the timeline for release was just impossible.  They do answer a lot of the questions about what was going to happen with the series, if old characters were going to return and what was going to happen to them, and what new characters were in store for us.  At least three villains were on paper, including a guy with the last name of Jaguar, a video game programmer who went mad, and the huge surprise was going to be the resurrection of the Game Genie.  There was even going to be a third group of characters who were not evil and yet not good which a character we thought was dead at the end of the first season was going to be a part of, who fittingly enough were going to be called “The Third Party” and they were led by the third defender of the X-Code, the Gypsy who sold the Genesis cartridge that turned Chad Bellmont into Captain S.

Alas, it seemed the schedule was just not right, and the money was not worthwhile for such a difficult production cycle.  The band, as it seems, has broken up since then, although they seem to still be on good terms with each other, some of them are no longer living in the same city, which would make their participation difficult if not impossible.

Farewell Captain S.  You will be missed.  Anyone want to go out for one last shake?