Far Out There Character Soundtracks: Intro

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I’m a big ol’ dorky nerd. This is well established. But while Far Out There contains numerous demonstrations of my geeky interest in science fiction and anime, my ravenous appetite for music trivia is less well represented. I mean, sure, there was that whole series of Voting Incentives dedicated to the discography of a recurring background joke (insert link), but ASIDE from that. It wasn’t supposed to be that way, though!

Originally, I had mad plans for character’s soundtracks to be a part of the overall Far Out There multimedia experience. Not, like, newly recorded original songs or anything (what do you think this is, Homestuck?) but little mixtapes of songs that capture the musical tastes of the various characters. Back in the day, all the Fan DigiDestined characters had their own unauthorized soundtracks (that is, Geocities pages with the track listings written out) patterned after the old Digimon Character Song singles, so this just seemed like a natural outgrowth of that. It was a little anachronistic, obviously, to have these characters from The Distant Future listening to music from our time, but again, it’s not like I could just go and make brand new songs. Also, I was a little hamstrung by some of the characters not seeming like the sorts who would listen to music in the first place (Cap’n Crosby and Megaweapon immediately come to mind), to say nothing of characters who seem like they’d listen to stuff I have no interest in (Disonar and Kevin both seem like prime candidates). Still, I was able to work out enough musical tastes for enough important cast members to assemble a decent library of Far Out There character soundtracks.

Initially, the idea was to slap them all on CDs, draw up some nifty-looking character art for the covers, and give them out as bonus goodies along with sales of other, more official Far Out There merchandise. I mean, I can’t very well sell collections of other people’s music… unless somebody decided to set up an Artist Alley in that one shady street market  near the Greyhound station. That was the thing, I figured I’d just bring a box full of the things to Artist Alley with me and give ‘em out on the downlow to people who bought other Far Out There stuff… except nobody ever bought Far Out There stuff. My Artist Alley experiences were almost entirely Conventional Wisdom related, so it never seemed worth the effort to even bother making CDs (let alone figure out a way of giving them out).

I still found a way to get some use out of all the character playlists I’d made, though, thanks to the magic of The Internet. Streaming online radio was getting really big, and Pandora had an especially nifty ability to customize your own stations, so I set about making a bunch of Far Out There-themed ones. For a time, it worked pretty well. I managed to find a ton of songs I’d never heard before, which is always fun, and I thought the stations fit the characters pretty well. Buuuuuut there were a couple of problems. For one thing, Far Out There’s audience, while small, is impressively global, while Pandora was exclusively a US deal. What good does it do to make a nifty Far Out There channel if most of Far Out There’s readers can’t listen to the thing? 

The more foundational problem was that these Pandora channels seemed to require a lot of maintenance. You couldn’t directly tell Pandora “play these songs”, just “play songs LIKE these songs,” then thumbs up or thumbs down whatever it played to control if you’d hear it again. That’s fine if you’re gonna spend a lot of time listening to Pandora stations anyway, but then my own listening habits started to change. As I get older, the “I wanna find new stuff!” impulses of my youth fade in favor of just wanting what I want, so the inability to tell Pandora to play specifically I want has became very unappealing. I’ve got more songs on iTunes than I could listen to in a year, so why put up with some algorithm’s randomization when I could just listen to EXACTLY what I feel like listening to?  That, and Pandora (which, incidentally, I keep trying to write as “Patreon”) never really seemed to like sharing computer time with other programs, so listening while I was working on stuff stopped being a thing… and I kind of work all the time. Long story short (too late), I never listen to Pandora anymore, so the themed Far Out There stations are no longer a going concern.  Those stations still exist, but I haven’t messed with any of them in years, and given all the ways licensing rights can change and all the new stuff that’s come out since then, I can’t imagine any of the stations sound ANYTHING like they’re supposed to any more.

But I still had those original playlists on iTunes, and continued to tinker and finesse them like the big ol’ dork I am. Organizing songs into playlists –thinking too hard about what to put where and which songs segue best into which– is one of the great simple pleasures in my life. It’s my happy place. I’m gonna be doing it anyway, so why NOT keep fine-tuning the Far Out There soundtracks while I’m at it? They’re pretty much constantly on my phone, and I still think they sound pretty good. Anyone who’s gone on a roadtrip with me has been forced to listen to one or two of them at some point, but I wanna inflict my wacky musical interests on more people. And you know what I recently realized? Everything in the world is on YouTube now! I can more or less recreate the soundtracks as video playlists, and link to everything here! For Far Out There fans, it'd be a window into the inner workings of the characters, and for Conventional Wisdom fans who couldn't give less of a crap about that other comic I draw, at least they'd be exposed to some new music.  A win/win, right?  So that’s what I set about doing, compiling the playlists and writing down some ramblings about what I think about the specific songs and why such-and-such character would listen to it.  I could be that obnoxious guy at the indie record store who wants you to read his review blog AND that obnoxious kid in Artist Alley who won’t shut up about his OCs at the same time! HORRAY FOR THE INTERNET! 

Buuuuuuuut then the same thing that happens whenever I write a blog these days happened again: it got way too long. Like, waaaaaaaaay too long for something so silly and indulgent. Even worse, I suppose, all this other comic stuff started to pile up at the same time, so I could never find time to actually FINISH the thing, let alone edit it down to something more readable. But then, as all that OTHER stuff started to get too big to finish in a timely manner as well, I had a sudden epiphany: of all the perpetually unfinished projects stuck in the pipeline, this should actually be the EASIEST thing in the world to edit down. Not by making it shorter, but by breaking it down into its obvious smaller parts. It’s already divided up into sections of a few paragraphs per playlist, so how hard would it be to just post those as separate blogs? Those bite-sized chunks would be a LOT easier to edit than one massive epic, which might actually mean I could get them out on a regular basis. Can you imagine it? Patreon content coming out on a regular, scheduled basis? THE MIND BOGGLES! 

So that’s what we’ve got to look forward to in the immediate future. I’ll post a modest-sized blog post rambling about a single Far Out There character’s musical picks, with a link to the YouTube playlist at the end.  Apologies in advance for any awkward, clunky bits if and when I leave in some reference to something that USED to be a paragraph earlier before I broke everything up. Also, as long as I’m apologizing, sorry to readers abroad if YouTube has any of these videos region-locked. If there’s a way for me to check for that from here, I don’t know what it is. Still, and I cannot stress this enough, IT’S ACTUAL CONTENT ACTUALLY COMING OUT ON PATREON IN ON AN ACTUAL REGULAR BASIS! Can you even handle this? ...well, okay, it'll only be "regular" as far as the normal Far Out There and Conventional Wisdom schedules permit.  Getting those comics finished obviously takes priority to silly bonus blogs like this.  But still, ACTUAL PATREON CONTENT!