My Buck Rogers story takes a certain amount of personal setup and going back in time. Unlike any other project I’ve ever been involved with, Buck Rogers was neither a personal creation nor something I did for a company. I was born with Buck Rogers. To his credit, Buck Rogers opened some doors for me, but without blowing the analogy of a pay toilet out of proportion, nothing in life is free. Doors don’t open for free. There’s always a cost. But we’ll get there.
Buck Rogers is nearly forgotten now, but in the 1980s, it had been a TV show on NBC for three seasons. It starred Gil Gerard and Erin Gray (I’ve since come to know both of them, and they’re great folks), but it was time for what would today be called a reboot.
But that’s not the real story here.
Buck Rogers is literally in my DNA. My grandfather was the “originator” of Buck Rogers, syndicated it and owned the rights. That’s why you see John F. Dille Company on every panel. Guess what the “F” stands for? Then it would say National News Service or National Newspaper Syndicate. I have zero interest in getting into some debate over who created what. I wasn’t there. I wouldn’t be born for twenty-five years. I can tell you what I think happened and leave it at that. A couple paragraphs and we’re out.
Phillip Francis Nowlan wrote a story called “Armageddon 2419” for Amazing Stories magazine. The cover of that issue has a guy in a jet pack on it. The “amazing” thing is that it had nothing to do with Buck Rogers—it was an illustration for another story. “Armageddon 2419” was a Rip Van Winkle story about a guy named Anthony Rogers who fell asleep in 2019 and woke up five hundred years later. It was set on Earth and involved various techno-tribal organizations rising up against their Han overlords in America. It had ray guns and backpacks, but what’s most significant is what wasn’t there. Buck Rogers has been known as a space hero, but Anthony Rogers never leaves Earth. There are no space ships, no bubble helmets, no Warlords of Mars, Venusians, or anything else space-related.
Somewhere in the transition from short story to comic strip, Anthony Rogers became Buck Rogers. There are various theories on where the name “Buck” came from. Some say he was named for my grandfather’s dog.
After sophomore year of college, my summer job was to read through nearly fifty years of Buck Rogers and synopsize it. I sat in a dark, musty basement at the bottom of the Gotham City–esque building—20 North Wacker, Civic Opera Building, home of National Newspaper Syndicate—with a single light bulb hanging down. I’m not sure why I didn’t haul the boxes up to the office, but it was kind of cool being deep underground and reading that stuff. Bingeing comic strips is kind of a hypnotic experience.
I developed a theory about what was my grandfather’s. It is utterly scientifically indefensible, but the ways in which brains work are partially genetic—I think. There were certain ideas, inventions that seemed like something I’d think of. Just unique fingerprinty things. I guessed those were my grandfather’s. By all accounts, my grandfather (JFD) was hands-on. Nowlan would die in 1939 of cirrhosis of the liver. My grandfather had hired Phillip Francis Nowlan to write it, but Nowlan missed deadlines and couldn’t quite wrap his head around it.
While he syndicated numerous other comic strips and columns, Buck Rogers was his toy. He had very specific ideas about what he wanted it to be. If you read it, it’s shockingly modern given that it comes from January 7, 1929. Women were emphasized (though there was to be no social message), and everything was supposed to be scientifically possible or probable. This wasn’t fantasy, it was science fiction. While this seems obvious to us, remember, this was 1929. It went on to be a hit.
There are a couple of amusing family stories from the period. One was that JFD had the second-highest income in Chicago in 1936. He loved cars and had a sixteen-cylinder Black Cadillac. One day, as he was fishing his car out of the parking garage, the attendant said, “Mr. Dille, take a look at this.” He led JFD over to a car that was identical to his own. My grandfather probably said something like, “Yeah, that’s my car,” but however you would have said that in 1936.
Then the attendant showed him the back windows. The glass was two inches thick, bulletproof. The car belonged to the real richest guy in Chicago: Al Capone. After that, JFD kept the car in Evanston. You don’t want to look like the guy who ordered the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, particularly if you don’t have bulletproof glass.
The other celebrity story was that William Randolph Hearst (who also owned a Newspaper Syndicate) invited him out to San Simeon (a.k.a. Hearst Castle, a.k.a. Xanadu of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane fame). He went. Eventually, Hearst got to the point.
“I want to buy Buck Rogers.”
My grandfather responded, “Anything else? That’s my pet project.”
“You realize I’m going to have to compete with you.”
“At least you tried to buy it before you stole it.”
Hearst hired Alex Raymond, and soon thereafter Flash Gordon was born. And, in fairness, Flash Gordon was different. It was science fantasy. Flash showed up on Robin Hood planets and was not bound by the known laws of physics.
JFD died in 1957, a couple months before I turned two years old. I have one, quite possibly manufactured, memory of him sitting in our living room. The only thing that makes me believe it was a real memory is I remember him in an “up” shot from the floor. He seemed like a grumpy old guy, but it was a big deal that he’d come over to the house. And in fairness, all old people seem kind of grumpy when you’re two.
My first conscious memory of Buck Rogers was sitting on the floor in the den. I was probably around five years old, and the den was the room that had our only TV. It was Saturday morning, and I was probably playing with toy soldiers on the floor. WGN in Chicago ran old movies and serials opposite the network’s Saturday morning fare.
Anyway, an old black-and-white serial came on. Spaceships zipped awkwardly across the screen with sparks trailing out of them, loud music played, and all of a sudden the room came alive with relatives telling me that this was Buck Rogers and that my grandfather had created it. The show looked old and goofy and fake to me, even at that age. I wasn’t that interested. Maybe I suspected Buck Rogers would be a frenemy for the next several decades.
Buck Rogers was present in my house and at my dad’s office at the Lyric Opera Building. There were big wooden rocket ships that I couldn’t play with and old metal rocket guns that I also couldn’t play with. I still have them, framed, and I don’t play with them. There was a Buck Rogers solar system map, a standup in the Murphy Anderson style. With this kind of stuff imprinted in my brain at that age, it’s not a big surprise that I had an intuitive knowledge of transmedia and franchises decades later.
Buck Rogers certainly didn’t play a huge role in my early childhood; it was just kind of there. But it was responsible for a life-changing moment in 1966. We went to New York on a business/pleasure trip. We stayed at the New York Hilton. A couple years earlier, we’d been there and the place was surrounded by teenage girls, as the Beatles were allegedly staying there.
In summer 1966, the family traveled to New York City. ABC was interested in doing Buck Rogers as a TV show. My mother and sister went shopping, so Dad took me along on the meeting. I was eleven. A guy named Mr. Siegel was our executive. Two decades later I would know exactly what a network executive was, but then I could only guess. He had some elaborate theory that if Twiggy and Yellow Submarine went, Buck Rogers would go. I’ve puzzled over the logic of that ever since, but it kind of makes sense. You look at Twiggy on the cover of David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs album and she looks like Wilma Deering, and the Yellow Submarine kind of looks like a Buck Rogers ship, but it doesn’t matter what I think. The world was in the surreal, psychedelic Batman phase, and the network was very close to Madison Avenue circa Don Draper. In fact, Tom Griffin and Joe Bacal were probably young ad executives in that period, but we wouldn’t meet for a couple decades. Anyway, the sixties Twiggy/Yellow Submarine Batman show never happened, but what did happen was that when they wanted to park me somewhere so they could have real meetings, they sent me in to watch two of the new shows for that season: The Green Hornet and The Time Tunnel.
It had never occurred to me that you could watch a TV show on a big screen like a movie. It was the coolest thing that ever happened to me. They ran the pilots for both shows. A kid in a screening room watching the kickoff shows for the best night ever on television. If there are ten experiences that set my life in a direction, that was one of them. I wanted to get back into that room, though I had no idea how.
The other notable thing about that trip was that they were selling the James Bond paperbacks in the store in the lobby. I bought them one at a time. Still have them. I’m not sure I read them then—I was pretty dyslexic, and it would have been a fight—but I’d seen Goldfinger and Thunderball, so I’d been hooked on Bond from about age eight.
My next memory of Buck Rogers is coming back from Boy Scout camp and seeing years of comic strips and promotional materials and toys laid out on an enormous oriental rug in our living room. Dad was assembling the book that would eventually be called The Collected Works of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, behind which he did a national book tour and appeared on What’s My Line? and The Johnny Carson Show. There’s some debate on the Internet whether he appeared on “ROBERT C. DILLE 01-14-1970” or “ROBERT C. DILLE 01-21-1970,” but if I had to guess I’d say it was the latter, because it seems he was bumped one time. In any case, Alan King was the host. I remember watching it and having a sensation for the first time that I still have every time I see somebody I know on a major television show. It felt fake, like somebody had made a fake version of the show. I think that same thing when I see myself on videos.
The book did well, apparently, because it was reprinted numerous times in numerous formats. Dad signed one for me, but I can’t find it. I’m hoping it’s sitting in the same “Lost Ark” storage box that has the The Secret of Cybertron and The Scepter of Seven Souls. I’d also love to see the show. It may or may not exist. A friend of mine who is a Johnny Carson aficionado says that a lot of the episodes where he wasn’t host just don’t exist anymore.
Ray Bradbury wrote the book’s introduction. He was a hardcore fan. In fact, if there was a moment I realized that “fans” existed, it was when I read his intro. Until then, I never knew that adults still thought about things that excited them when they were kids. I think I just figured that when people got done being kids, they forgot all about their childhoods and moved on. Of course, I’d heard of “nostalgia,” but fandom didn’t exist back then the way it does now.
My dad and Ray Bradbury became good friends. I was a huge fan. I’m not sure any book has influenced me more than The Illustrated Man. I wouldn’t meet him then, but years later, while Dad and I were driving from LA to Chicago in a convertible Mustang, we had drinks and dinner with him and his wife, and I began to realize that while I couldn’t aspire to being Ray Bradbury, it was possible to be a writer. I was a junior in college at the time, and Ray was extremely encouraging early in my career.
One object that did have a profound impact on me was a Warren Paper Company ad that featured comic panels of Buck Rogers alongside the real-world inventions inspired by the comic strip. It presented me with an idea that I’ve been processing ever since: the relationship between science fiction and real invention. Fascinating thing to think about. I’m quite sure that the iPhone wouldn’t exist in its current form without the tricorder, and I believe that smart watches were implanted in the human consciousness by Dick Tracy.
Dad did several “special feature” reprints and tinkered with doing a sequel. I remember coming home from college once and he was creating his own alphabet that could be electronically scanned. I remember thinking for the first time that despite having a great life and inheriting the Newspaper Syndicate, Dad probably would have been just as happy or happier if he’d been an inventor or an architect or a historian or something. After he sold the syndicate, there was talk that he’d want to be a professor. He didn’t live long enough to realize those dreams. It’s easy to overanalyze these things, but I can’t escape the notion that I’m living a version of the alternate life he would have liked to live. That’s not to say he didn’t seem to love his life. He did. It was just too short. It’s weird to think, as I write this, that I’ve lived longer than he did.
Finals week of my senior year of college coincided with the release and explosion of Star Wars. Not long after, Universal Studios optioned Buck Rogers. The proposed show coincided perfectly with my graduation from college and the “what am I doing to do with the rest of my life” phase. When the show was announced, I had this fantasy that I could go down to LA and work on the show as a gopher and write episodes and jumpstart my life.
We made the deal. A production team was announced. It was headed by Andy Fenady with David Gerrold (who’s on my Facebook page to this day). I went down somewhere in late summer or autumn of 1978 and had lunch with David Gerrold. Except for Gerrold, I couldn’t get anybody on the show to look at my ideas. Gerrold, who wrote “Trouble with Tribbles” for Star Trek and a great book about franchises called The World of Star Trek, along with a number of other novels and TV shows, is still writing away. Great guy. But his team was scrapped, and Glenn Larson and his team had no interest whatsoever in having the grandson of the creator and son of the licensor anywhere near the set. For whatever reason, I couldn’t understand why.
At the time, they were in what looked like converted trailers just off the Universal lot on Lankershim. It wasn’t far from the Egg Company where I’d have an office later at Lucasfilm (or from the adobe where the peace treaty that made California a state was signed). I think this was David Gerrold’s first story editing job. He gave me a copy of the bible and a pilot outline for a script called “Rustom’s Raiders.” Fenady seemed to have a western bent to him. At lunch at the Universal Commissary, David Gerrold gave me his interpretation of Star Wars, which was, “It’s Wizard of Oz with hardware.” Now I’m quite sure that Gerrold had far more complex thoughts about Star Wars than that, but remember, he was talking to some noob son of the licensor. And by that, I don’t mean that he was in any way patronizing or condescending, but he was considering his audience and was probably giving me more credit than I deserved at the time.
So I went home and wrote up some premises. One was called “Atgame’s End,” and though I don’t remember the exact story, I’m guessing it was a riff on “The Most Dangerous Game” but set on another planet. Except my real way into that story probably didn’t come from “The Most Dangerous Game,” but from an Avengers episode where Steed and Peel receive mysterious invitations to a party on some island, after which murder ensued. He sent back notes. I reacted to them. Sent them back. Then nothing.
The show was on hiatus. The current staff was gone. The show was in limbo. Calendar pages flip, seasons change, and Buck Rogers came back with Leslie Stevens and Glen Larson producing it. At the time, they were also doing Battlestar Galactica.
Dad and I went down and had lunch with Leslie Stevens. He spent much of the lunch talking about Battlestar Galactica and how Apollo and company are really the ancient astronauts. He talked about the helmets being vaguely reminiscent of Ancient Egyptian effigies (think King Tut’s headdress). I thought of it as a space Aeneid. Sounded more interesting than Buck Rogers.
I got a tour of the set and met Erin Gray and Gil Gerard for the first time. Forget the fact that “Wilma Deering” was weapons-grade beautiful, Erin is now a great businessperson. Gil is a hoot. Exactly what you want him to be. I got to know him and Erin in 2008 or 2009, when we were shooting a streaming Buck Rogers retro homage in upstate New York. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen slam his fist on a table to make a point and make the cup jump off the saucer without spilling anything. This usually only happens in cartoons.
My only other involvement in Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was when I snuck onto the lot (you could do that in those days) and slipped some premises to Glen Larson’s extremely attractive assistant. She called a couple weeks later and said he liked them.
Nothing happened. The closest I came to working on Buck Rogers was working on Battle Beyond the Stars for Roger Corman. But this long-winded story is all prequel for the first time I actually got to work on Buck Rogers with TSR. And that falls well into the mid-eighties. Conventional wisdom would dictate that the whole Buck Rogers experience at TSR was a disaster, but conventional wisdom should sometimes be challenged.
Somewhere in 1986, we started developing Buck Rogers at TSR for a bunch of complicated reasons that are a subject all their own. My concept was that it was kind of G.I. Joe meets Transformers, and I even had a take for Hasbro like this. Nobody bit, however, and maybe that should have been a warning. But as it was about games, the important thing wasn’t the characters as much as the world. And I loved the world. Our solar system five hundred years from now. Colonized, using real planets in our solar system. Robotic and genetically engineered creatures. Pure strain humans. Spaceships. Interplanetary intrigue. No speed-of-light travel. Everything had to be plausible. That was the first rule of Buck Rogers. Not actual, but scientifically defensible. It would all grow up to be Buck Rogers XXVC, which spawned board games, role-playing games, computer games, novels, comics, and more.
The TSR I walked into for Buck Rogers was completely different than the TSR I’d known in Los Angeles. Gary was gone, and unlike before, I didn’t have the cushion of DDEC. It was a company on shaky financial ground, and there was a kind of corporate culture I’d never experienced before. There was a lot of history, not all of it good, and there wasn’t the money or forcing production function of Sunbow, Ruby-Spears, or Lucasfilm. The company was built around Dungeons & Dragons, and aside from some trips to Top Secret, Star Frontiers, Gamma World, Boot Hill, and some other things, it was mostly a company designed to do medieval sword and sorcery. It seemed like nobody wanted to do Buck Rogers, and they sure as hell didn’t want to do it with some guy from LA who wrote cartoons.
The first meeting we had with the team was one of the toughest meetings I’ve ever been in on any project. At one point I said, “Look, if you don’t want to do this project, I don’t want to force you.” People left the room. They actually did. I was simultaneously amazed and relieved. I thought it would lessen some of the tension. It didn’t. That project never got easy. Long afterward, Warren Spector and I, who’d gone several rounds over a rule in the board game, agreed it was one of the better projects we’d done in that period.
I’m quite sure that no small part of the difficulty was me. I was young and had never worked in board game culture, and what I was to TSR back in the Gary days didn’t lend me much credibility now. In other words, as usual, I was a noob again.
At that point, the TSR Buck Rogers team felt like anything but a team, and that felt strange to me. Unlike all of the other teams I’d played on, where the creatives thought of themselves as freelancers who’d temporarily found themselves at a corporation (and always had their outside projects—in fact, outside projects were encouraged), the TSR folks were actual long-term employees of a real company.
It was a period of a lot of soul-searching. Was I just a bad leader? Wasn’t I the exact same guy at the exact same time who was running the Sunbow shows? Context matters. And that gets to the frenemy part of Buck Rogers. With every other project I work on, I’m there as Flint Dille—writer or game designer or whatever title. I’m there because people want me there. With Buck Rogers, I’m there because I was born with it. It’s as if all of the other dues I’ve paid don’t count. It is a weird feeling.
Ironically, there is no project I’ve ever worked longer and harder on than Buck Rogers over the years and harvested less. I don’t remember ever directly making money on Buck Rogers (indirectly, maybe) except when Joey Thompson and I received a commission for the Sega Planet of Zoom game in 1982, but somehow the dues are never considered paid. And this goes far beyond TSR. To this day, people who know me and know me well routinely either pitch me new takes on Buck Rogers or look at me incredulously, wondering why there isn’t a movie or a TV show coming out.