Wednesday, July 2, 2008

FANFICCER'S FRIEND: COWBOY BONES

Since July is traditionally a month in which we celebrate the TV Western, I figured to do the same with this new feature of the Fanficcer's Friend.

First off, I should recap what Fanficcer's Friend is all about. With this feature I offer up a picture from a theatrically released movie, which should be only in the movie universe, but one that has actors we'd recognize from TV shows. From there, I leave it up to those out there who enjoy writing fan fiction to come up with a story to go with the picture.

By the way, if anybody out there has been so inspired to use any of the pictures I've posted since the beginning of this year for their fan fiction, please send it along. I'd love to see what you came up with!

I didn't have anybody specifically in mind for this month's feature, but I happened to stumble across a picture of DeForest Kelley in my web surfing earlier this week. It was of him as a killer named Toby Jack Saunders in "Apache Uprising". (And NO! I was not googling my first name!)
From there I found a fun little blog that housed several pictures from his Western roles. Best of all, many of them were from the same period in Kelley's career, so that there was not much variation in his appearance due to age.

And with these pictures of Cowboy De, I only snared the ones which had fellow actors with established TV Western credits. What I have in mind is that here we'd have scenes from a never filmed Toobworld adventure in which Dr. Leonard H. "Bones" McCoy of 'Star Trek' found himself once again catapulted back through Time, perhaps via the Guardian At The Edge Of Forever, to the days of the wild, wild West.
Until he could be rescued by his friends from the Future, McCoy would have had to blend in with his surroundings in the old West. And during that time, he could have encountered several TV Western characters.

The situation would be quite similar to that Spock found himself in when he was transported back in Time to Seattle of the 1870s. (This happened in a tie-in novel by Barbara Hambly, "Ishmael".) Spock met many of the characters from the TV series 'Here Come The Brides'; and in a segment set in Frisco, he also met characters from 'Maverick', 'Bonanza', and a few other Westerns. (Only in their case, none of them were actually named, unlike the residents of Bridal Veil Mountain.)
One of those encountered by Leonard McCoy back in the 1870s might have been 'Whispering Smith', as eponymously played by Audie Murphy. These are two pictures of Murphy with Kelley from "Gunfight At Commanche Creek". But it could be that Dr. McCoy was able to get Whispering Smith out of a dicey situation in a Denver saloon, and then the two of them rode off together.

And where did they ride to? Perhaps to Silver City in the Arizona Territories, where they would find Marshall Simon Fry... as played by Henry Fonda in the TV series 'The Deputy'.
From the looks of things in this picture of DeForest Kelley, Henry Fonda, and Dorothy Malone in "Warlock", this could be an epilogue shot if I've ever seen one. It looks like Simon Fry is about to ride off into the sunset with his bride and McCoy is returning something that he recovered for the Marshal, something that would not have significance until sometime in the Future. Soon after this, Kirk and Spock would probably show up, having tracked down the Doctor through the Guardian and bring him back to his proper place in Time.

Maybe by his intervention Dr. McCoy was able to prevent the murder of Simon Fry and therefore kept a key event in the Future from being altered.

If this had been the Tooniverse, we could have tied it in to 'Futurama' and claimed that Simon Fry was the ancestor to Phillip J. Fry!

Just sayin', is all.......

So for all of you fanficcers out there, I hope you'll find some kind of inspiration in these pictures to write up a story about Dr. Leonard McCoy and his Wild West adventures!
By the way, I've cropped these pictures just to get the meat of the situation in these scenes of DeForest Kelley. If you'd like to see them in all their glory,
click here.

BCnU!
Toby OB

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