Among the classic works that science fiction has given our culture are the black and white, serialized exploits of Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, and Captain Video. You know the format: main character fights bad guys in futuristic sci-fi adventures guaranteed to end in cliffhangers. A lot of science fiction fans wish we had something comparable in modern-day entertainment, and writer/director Chris Preksta is one of them. That is why he made The Mercury Men, a black and white sci-fi serial web series to be released in early 2010. Preksta promises the show will take the good aspects of those old serials (fun science fiction elements and weekly cliffhangers) and leave the bad behind (cheesy dialogue and transparent special effects), resulting in a sci-fi series that is reminiscent of the classics but that is up to twenty-first-century media standards. A few months ago (when we all thought the series would premiere a bit sooner than it has), I was able to grab a few minutes of Preksta's time to speak with him about The Mercury Men.

SFB: Hi, Chris. Thanks for speaking with us today.

Chris Preksta: No problem!

SFB: Just to begin with, can you tell us a little bit about what The Mercury Men is going to be about?

Chris Preksta: The Mercury Men story, you know, as people have been able to see from the first two trailers we’ve released – it’s a black and white sci-fi serial, kind of a throwback to the old sci-fi serials. And our story follows a character named Edward Boreman, who’s a government office worker, and I usually tell people, "If you’ve ever been to any government office or you’ve been to the DMV and you’ve needed something done, you’ve probably met somebody like Edward Boreman." He very classically will pass off any responsibility to anyone else. But our character Edward Boreman finds himself leaving one night and finds that his building has been overrun by these glowing creatures from the planet Mercury, that are overtaking his building for some, you know, nefarious deeds. And so he’s stuck there the entire night having to thwart this alien invasion.

SFB: You know, I think I have met a couple guys like Edward Boreman, now that you mention it.

Chris Preksta: Yeah.

SFB: You guys are obviously not financed by a major studio or anything like that. What has the process of making this series been like?

Chris Preksta: It’s been a little different than any of the other films we’ve made, the process has, in that the series is born form a concept short that we did in 2007. I was working on a feature project that was having a tough time gaining some traction, and so I was getting a little antsy. I wanted to do something, so we decided that I’d pull together some people, some resources for a quick twenty-four-hour shoot. I just wanted to shoot something fun. I said, “I wanna do something with ray guns,” so we pulled together some actors, a small crew, and in a twenty-four-hour period we shot a little short called “The Mercury Men.” It was, like, ten minutes long, black and white, ray guns, glowing men, a lot of the elements that you see in this new series. We took that around for about anywhere from six months to a year to different festivals. No big intentions; we weren’t planning on selling it. We didn’t have any greater goal with it other than to show it and have fun going to the festivals. And the response was really a lot better than we anticipated. We screened it at San Diego Comic Con last year [2008]. The response was fantastic.

So, going through that process I really felt like there might be something more there. I started really thinking there might be more to the characters – the character of Edward Boreman, the character of the Mercury Men – so we started developing it into something a bit larger. So, the story is a lot different than the story was for the short. The story is completely different, but a lot of the design and elements and whatnot carried over. As you said, we are self-financed. I own a production company called Mercury Men Pictures here in Pittsburgh. And so I produced it through my company. It was, you know, a lot of pulling favors to get people involved and whatnot, so it really is a passion project and a home-grown project. But it’s been a lot of fun.

It's up to this guy to help fend off an alien invasion. Good luck Earth.

SFB: It doesn’t really surprise me that you had a good reception because judging from the images and the trailers you’ve released on the series, it definitely doesn’t seem to lack anything due to the lack of a Universal or an MGM or somebody like that backing you –

Chris Preksta: Oh, thank you. That’s very, very kind of you to say.

SFB: Do you think that the freedom you had when making The Mercury Men may be counteracting the huge budget, where you’d be tied to all sorts of demands?

Chris Preksta: Umm, yes and know. I mean, our story isn’t so, so very radical that it would have alienated a production company. The only thing I know that we would have had a giant fight on our hands with would have been the black and white. Studios are very hesitant to make anything black and white. You know, most recently, the Frank Darabont movie The Mist -- that was originally supposed to be released black and white, and the studio just backpedaled on it, and it came out in color. And I, for one, think that film would have done better released black and white because it would’ve stood out a bit more. People would have noticed it being something different, but as it was, it looked like any other horror movie out there, so a lot of audiences just kind of passed it by.

So, I know the black and white would have been a big discusiion. And we even really discussed that for a long time: “Should we go black and white?”Because honestly black and white is a barrier to a lot of people. A lot of people see black and white, and they think it’s just gonna be old and stuffy and whatnot, so we really had to face that head-on and say, "You know, this just looks so much better in black and white." There’s still a lot of people that love black and white, and I personally am such a huge fan of black and white that it would’ve, in my eyes, been insincere of me to make it in color. So, that’s the only problem I would have seen with any, say, studio interaction.

A Mercury Man.

SFB: I think I’d count myself in the black-and-white lovers group. There’s something about it that, you know, it’s kinda unexplainable, but there’s something about it that just – when you put it with the right movie it just really helps it out a lot.

Chris Preksta: Yes, and I don’t think black and white works for every film. But I also think the opposite; I don’t think color works for every film. There’s a lot of stories that are better told black and white. There’s a great quote on the – one of my favorite films is a film called The Third Man. And they’ve got a little bit on there from Orson Welles who says anything that’s black and white is a better medium for actors because you’re not distracted by all these colorful things in the background. It really highlights the actor’s face. So, it really hones you in on what the actor’s doing, the actor’s actions.

SFB: Well if you’re a Third Man fan, I think you and I are gonna be good friends.

Chris Preksta: It’s a great film.

SFB: On the Mercury Men blog, you’ve discussed quite a few of your sources of inspiration, everything – speaking of The Third Man – everything from The Third Man to Star Wars. Obviously, as you mentioned, the basic format of The Mercury Men is based on old sci-fi serials of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. As far as the shows of that time period are concerned, what did you take from them, and what did you try to avoid?

Chris Preksta: The biggest thing that we took from them was the style of storytelling itself. What the serials get right is that they’re giving you these great stories in such short doses and the cliffhanger medium and all of that. And it’s sad that we don’t have a spot in modern entertainment for serialized entertainment in that form anymore. You know, we don’t have these short stories in front of films anymore. And they’re not on television, either. Television shows are, to a certain extent, serialized, but they’re still anywhere from a half hour to forty-five minutes to an hour’s worth of entertainment. We’re not getting these short doses. So, that was the big thing that I took – was to make sure that you had these great little nuggets where you were getting a cliffhanger. You know, one episode represents one area of this adventure, one leg of this adventure. So, in Mercury Men in particular, our story takes place over a twelve-hour period. It goes from seven p.m. to seven a.m. , and what’s nice is it doesn’t happen in real time, per se. Each episode is another little leg of Edward’s adventure taking on these Mercury Men throughout the night.

So, the serialized storytelling -- that was a big thing that we took. Obviously the black and white style, you know, the heavy shadows and whatnot that go along with it, and those were probably the two biggest things. And probably sci-fi in general. You know, sci-fi has really thrived in that serial environment.

The major things that we avoided, I guess, was the tone of the old serials. Because that tone worked for the ‘thirties, ‘forties, ‘fifties. When I say tone I mean the announcers, the cheesy dialogue, the over-the-top nature of it. Those were great, and they really worked well for their time, but what I see is when a lot of people are trying to redo serials, they naturally take that on as well -- all the time. So that was something that we left out because we still wanted this story to be told in a modern way. So from that, we probably learned that lesson most from Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is a throwback to the old serials but that doesn’t have the, you know, [in Golden Age announcer voice] “Next week on The Mercury Men.” It doesn’t have those kind of elements, which while I do love those elements, we just chose not to take them on for this project.

SFB: That sounds good because when you watch those old shows, they definitely have that charm that you can’t get away from, but then there’s the dialogue, for instance, where they’ll be like, “Let’s use our blaster guns to shoot this door,” or whatever –

Chris Preksta: Yes.

SFB: And, you know, people don’t talk like that.

Chris Preksta: Yes, exactly. So we tried to tell it in a more modern sense. I’ve been telling people that the biggest compass we can use in pointing our direction has been Raiders of the Lost Ark. That is -- above all other films, that's the one that we’re really drawing from. And I know you couldn’t tell just by looking at [The Mercury Men and Raiders of the Lost Ark] because they happen in far different time periods, different style, different genres and whatnot, but the way that they adapted the serialized storytelling was the biggest inspiration for us. I think we could easily say that there was a discussion about Raiders of the Lost Ark every single day during pre-production on through post-production.

Hero aerospace engineer Jack Yaeger.

SFB: I know this question looks way into the future, and you’re probably not thinking about this too much right now, but if The Mercury Men is well-received, do you guys have any plans to take it on to another, I guess, “season,” if that’s what you would call it?

Chris Preksta: Absolutely. I mean, while we were going through the story, there was a million different elements that came up. I just have this master giant notebook just chock-full of different ideas and storylines, and so we really had to whittle that down to a few for this first volume of episodes because it would be too much to pack them all in. It would have just been very, very cluttered, and, above all things, I like when a story is simply told, simply told well. So, that being said, we have all these other plans and other ideas that we are dying to get out there, so we’re really hoping that this first volume of episodes does well enough to warrant continuing it on. So we already have an outline for season two ready to go. We have a general idea for season three ready to go and all that. And a lot of those other story ideas -- we’ve been using those to fuel our “Digital Props” series, where we’ve been releasing some of that stuff to give a bit fuller of a story experience. So, while there’s going to be a lot of things that are either loosely discussed or just touched on – say a character’s name, or an organization’s name, or a planet – while we might just briefly touch on it this first season, or we might briefly discuss it in an episode, we’re going to discuss that more through Digital Props, and those things will also be further addressed in season two.

SFB: These “Digital Props,” as you guys call them, they’re one of the really unique things about The Mercury Men, offering these downloads like weapons blueprints, the Orbital Map, and even the Mercury Men trading cards with a stale stick of gum in JPEG form. What was the thought process behind this? It’s obviously a really good way to get more people interested in the project. Aside from just kind of expanding it beyond the episodes themselves, what gave you guys these ideas?

Chris Preksta: It’s a couple different things, actually. It’s, one – and I discussed this on the blog a little bit – but I said that one of the big inspirations, obviously, for The Mercury Men would be Star Wars. I mean, there’s very few science fiction things in the past twenty-five years that aren’t somehow inspired by Star Wars, so count us among them. But we often discuss this period that took place in-between Star Wars and the second film, Empire Strikes Back, and most people forget about this period of time, or a lot of people weren’t alive for this period of time. And what it was like was Lucas raised a lot of questions, he discussed a lot of characters and ideas and worlds and whatnot. Obi-Wan Kenobi, you know, when he was still Ben Kenobi, he sits Luke down and talks about his father and the Clone Wars and this history of the Jedi Knights. You never see one of those things again the rest of the film. He just mentions it, and then you move on to the rest of the story. But as a viewer, it raises a million questions in your head. You start picturing the Clone Wars and Anakin and Jedi, and you start wondering what all these things were like. And as a viewer it’s very engaging because you start filling in the blanks yourself. It gets your imagination going yourself.

We now live in a world in which Lucas has overturned every single possible rock in that universe. It’s come to the point where he’s had to start inventing new rocks just so he could overturn them. And so all those mysteries have been explained away. So what we were hoping to do with Mercury Men is we wanna get back to a world like that, where we can create some characters and backstory ideas, that while we know where they come from and where they’re going to lead, we want to intentionally leave a little mystery for viewers to kind of create their own and contribute their own ideas. And should we create a character, or whatnot, that we don’t fully explain where it’s going, it’s very likely that community discussions about that character – whether they take place on the blog or on Facebook or whatnot – but the viewers of Mercury Men, if they say, “Wow, I wonder if he’s from here,” or “I wonder if this place means this,” it’s very likely that we may even say, “Hey, we’re gonna take some of your ideas and start incorporating them into some of the stories.” So the Digital Props is really born out of that idea, that you can get some further ideas of other story elements from these items, being able to print them out.

A weapons blueprint Digital Prop, complete with coffee stain.

The second big thing that the Digital Props comes from is, once again, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and also I could probably count The Last Crusade in this. You know the scene where Indiana Jones is in the map room trying to find the Well of Souls? And he has the Staff of Ra, and he’s waiting for the sun, you know, and he’s trying to find which is the right spot to place the Staff of Ra. And he pulls out this little notebook with a rubber band around it and starts just jotting down notes. And as a viewer I can’t tell you how badly I wanted to rip that notebook out of his hands and just start leafing through it. You know, here’s an adventurer who must have countless maps and sketches and notes of his past adventures. You can say the same for the Grail diary in The Last Crusade. We get a couple of glimpses in that movie of other sketches and notes in that book, and they actually use some of them to decipher the mysteries of the Grail.

And so I love that idea of being able to actually take props and whatnot from the world and be able to just look at them online or print them out and actually physically own them, you know? So our secondary character, Jack Yaeger, the lead captain, the aerospace engineer you’ve seen in the trailers – he has a notebook similar to Indiana Jones’, with his own sketches and notes and whatnot. So we just wanted to provide viewers an opportunity to get that kind of sensation, where they could be incorporated a bit further into the story through these props.

SFB: I printed off the gum and tried it, by the way. It tasted very authentic.

Chris Preksta: [Laughs] It probably tasted just as stale as the original.

SFB: Yeah, exactly. Another web series you’ve worked on in the past was Captain Blasto, which was a comedy. Should we expect some comedic elements in The Mercury Men?

Chris Preksta:Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, this is less of a comedy than Captain Blasto, obviously. This is – you know, we go more for mystery and intrigue in this one, but I’d be hard-pressed to say there won’t be a comedic element in at least every episode.

SFB: I’d recommend to our readers to check Captain Blasto out, by the way, it’s very funny.

Chris Preksta: Oh, thank you.

SFB: Final question: What’s your favorite sci-fi series?

Chris Preksta: Oh, my favorite sci-fi series. That’s a good question ‘cause I don’t watch a great deal of science fiction on television. I’m more regulated to mostly film. But if I had to point to one sci-fi series that probably had the biggest impact on me, the biggest inspiration, I’m gonna go original series Johnny Quest cartoon. Original 1960 Johnny Quest. ‘Cause it’s got the James Bond elements, but it’s also a heavy sci-fi series.

SFB: Alright, well Chris, I’m really looking forward to series. Is there anything else you’d like to say about it?

Chris Preksta: I just hope you enjoy it! I really hope viewers enjoy it. We’ve got a lot more ideas for it, and, you know, the term I’ve used for it has been – we’ve called it a “knothole series” ‘cause we say there’s a much larger world we have written out there, and this first volume of episodes is gonna give you a peak through that fence, a peak through that knothole at the world there, and we’re really looking forward to going for the ride.

SFB: Alright, sounds great. Chris, thanks again for talking with us.

Chris Preksta:No problem. Glad to talk to you.

The Mercury Men trailer: