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Preston of the Spaceways
A Retrospective
Prolong changed the face of holographic entertainment. The prolong process was introduced to the Star Kingdom of Manticore in 1826 P.D., a little more than a year after Preston of the Spaceways: the original series made its debut. Prolong enabled the original fans of the show to grow up with it, remix it, adapt it, star in adaptations of it, and love the work of those those who built upon theirs. By the time Preston had made his way into the popular culture, into holovids and advice columns, and into every form of media entertainment our star kingdom consumes, he had become our show. Every generation has put its stamp on him, not only once but again and again as we continue to debate his icon among ourselves and its meaning to our own lives and ideals.
Preston of the Spaceways is, in short, an icon, and it is little wonder that most of the adaptations and continuing serials have made certain to maintain the famous name.
The History
The original Preston of the Spaceways was an HD space opera adventure serial about the eponymous swashbuckling space captain who pursued space pirates with wild fighting among the stars.
Since that original 10-year run, Preston of the Spaceways has gone on to a much more social-issues-oriented 5-year continuing series, and three additional continuing series interspersed with the 1852 reboot series (wherein Preston acquired a first name and an HMN backstory) and the 1857 series, Preston and the Spaceways, which tossed out almost all previous canon and kept merely the captain, the fan-favorite first officer Amanda Zingli, and the daring stunts. In the 1857 version, even the pirates had been traded out for raiding Peeps. It proved generally unpopular and was fabulously overshadowed by the 1860 holovid.
Preston was adapted to other media including the orginal novelization in 1836, coinciding with the end of the series; an ensuing 25-book children’s series from 1841–1844 P.D.; several brief comic runs prior to the longer 8-year run from 1851–1859; and several holovid adaptations with varying degrees of success.
Preston himself was typically cast as a fair-haired, barrel-chested, deep-voiced officer type with a classic profile. In the last and most successful adaptation, the 1860 holovid directed and produced by Abraham Winters, the classically beautiful Emily Alexander took on the role, playing Preston as a woman for the first time. With the exception of her gender, she fulfilled the traditional requirements of an actor playing Preston, down to her melodic voice, gentlewomanly demeanor, and iron will. In short, she played Preston as Preston had never been played, shaking up an icon long enough to make people take another look—and it worked.
The Idea
Abraham Winters gave out several interviews before making the holovid and first spoke on the chosen title and its somewhat archaic verbiage. “The idea behind Preston of the Spaceways: The Holovid was to shake up people’s expectations and make them realize we were doing something different. On Old Earth, adaptations would be called ‘The Movie’ when it was the iconic adaptation, and that’s really what we’re trying to do here: the iconic adaptation.”
He had big shoes to fill. The Cardones holovid in 1847 had been a spectacular and much-loved success. Winters on the other hand had been an eight-year-old fan when the original series debuted and he recruited his peers to elevate his holovid to another level.
Emily Alexander was the piece he had hoped to get but had not expected. He asked her to play Officer Zingli, the second-most beloved character in the history of Preston and the Spaceways. She declined. Later, the two were reported to be closeted in talks with her agent and a deal was struck, though initially neither revealed the details.
It wasn’t until production was finally underway that Emily commented, “There is no reason at all that Preston of the Spaceways has to be a man.”
Several members of the production team and its public relations sought to downplay the implications, including the spokesperson for Central Casting, but the public ran away with the idea, and everywhere you turned the summer before the ‘vid’s release, people were talking about Emily Alexander, the beloved actress, playing Preston of the Spaceways.
“It gives us another woman to look up to,” said Winters just before the movie’s release. “I don’t see how that could possibly be a bad thing.”
The Script
“There were so many issues we could have tackled with this movie,” screenwriter Valerie Halloway says. “There was slavery. There was prejudice between commoners and the well-born. There was the prejudice the genetically-modified underwent. There was Basilisk and the termini. There was this fragile state in the Silesian Confederacy where we could have seriously stepped on some toes or by playing it very, very carefully, maybe we could have done something amazing in tying Preston of the Spaceways into real history. It’s been done before and even pretty well. I mean, look at the continuing series. In 1847, I think, they had this great episode tying things in with real historic events, and that series did great things with it.”
In the end, however, they had to choose and the vision for what would and would not be included in the script came down to Winters and his promise to fans to create a faithful adaptation that honored the weight of canon behind it. Historical tie-ins had to go. The original series was all about the adventure and the characters, and Winters refused to diverge from that mark.
Nevertheless, Halloway was given a rather free hand in general and had an office on-site where she spent time with the initial cast and crew as they did pre-production set design and character development. The final script would not be complete until three weeks into production and scenes were being edited on the fly in the last days before shooting.
“We had these awesome sources,” Halloway shares, “and all this great material, and we had to throw out most of it. He [Winters] kept wandering into my office, eating all these really delicious-looking crumpets that I couldn’t have because I didn’t share his Sphinxian metabolism, and telling me, ‘We’re not writing an epic, Halloway. Write something fun, something faithful.’ I’m sitting there like, ‘Screw that, Winters, with your scones and your pastries and your chocolate cookies. We’re not writing anything. I’m writing an epic.” [laughs] “So yeah. That’s how we ended up with a ‘vid that was 5 hours long.”
The Character
The final script dealt heavily with the various backstories that had been written for Preston over the years.
“We skipped the name. Fans know Preston as ‘Preston,’ not ‘Marcus Preston’ or ‘Anthony Preston’ or ‘Preston Manuelos.’ It’s Preston. I had Emily in my office—and let me just stop and mention,” Halloway stops and says earnestly, “Emily is this amazing person. She’s amazing to work with. She really got this character and how iconic this character is. She’s played Elizabeth I. She’s played Stephanie Harrington. She’s played all these iconic historical characters, and she brought that sensibility to this script. She played Preston like she was her second-cousin’s great-grandmother and really gave the role that respect.” That said, Halloway shakes her head. “So I had Emily in my office, and she’s sitting there going over these scenes, and I ask her, ‘Are you okay being called Preston—just Preston?’ And she’s all for it. I think it’s safe to say that Emily had as much a hand in making Preston as I did.”
The Preston that arrived on screen at last was a capable, adventurous, lovable daughter of merchants with a playful, self-sacrificing streak. Her mother was a former naval officer and she had learned anti-piracy techniques since childhood. More importantly perhaps, the ‘vid focused squarely on Preston’s relationships with her family and crew, with her brother backing her up as head of engineering—nicknamed Tech to preserve anonymity on the rest of her name—and frequent messages going to and from home. Zingli was shown to have a close almost sibling-like friendship with the captain, and other crew members had clearly been taken under wing as Preston took time out when possible to encourage and teach them the tricks of their trade.
“We didn’t want to show Preston in a vaccuum,” Emily Alexander said in a pre-release interview. “It’s too easy to show significant historical figures as if they somehow existed as a law unto themselves, but they didn’t. They had families who raised them with the strength and courage to succeed and friends and comrades who made their accomplishments possible. We felt it was important in this ‘vid to show that Preston was a hero because she inspired her crew to do the impossible.”
The Adventure
Catch fans reminiscing about this holovid and, chances are, you will hear about the impeller ring scene. In the original series, there were several times that Preston put undersized and underarmored pinnaces to unorthodox use, including sending them out to shoot up a pirate ship’s impeller rings with its lasers.
Halloway reminds us that, “Traditionally, Preston was this adventurous, risk-taking, swashbuckling guy who just happened to be a captain. He’s going to pull some crazy stunts.”
Though in reality such a move would likely prove suicidal, there is something to be said for how much this maneuver is established in Preston’s history with viewers. It appeared in both the original and the longest comics run and was omitted from only two previous holovid adaptations.
“There weren’t many things I made a requirement in the script,” Winters admitted in an interview shortly after the release of the ‘vid. “The impeller ring scene was one of them. The names were a big deal. If there was an already-established character we could use, I wanted to use them. The big bombastic space scenes were something I required.” Scientific realism required some creative writing, but, “Preston of the Spaceways has always been about the adventure. I didn’t want to change that.”
“We really gave special effects a run for their money,” Halloway reminisces with a laugh. “Not to mention the script advisors. I had these great guys who built navy ships and merchant ships and this awesome lady who’s in charge of teaching tactics to some of those kids up in Saganami, and I told them what we wanted to do, and they said, ‘You can’t do that—not if you want this to be real.’ I went to them with these baked concoctions I wrangled out of Winters and promised them Emily’s signature on their own personal copy of the ‘vid if they could find a way to make this scene happen and be realistic, and one by one they all caved. It was Emily really. Every last one of them would do it for Emily.”
The Story
Several ‘official’ summaries have been used for marketing purposes over the decades since the holovid was made, but the original summary has been reproduced below:
The spaceways bridge the star systems and form the lifeblood of interstellar trade. Pirates plague those spaceways, preying on whom they will. But there is a family born to tread these stars and Preston has decided to stake her claim: No more.
Later, many critics expressed that there was too much hyperbole and not enough real drama in the summary, but fans latched onto the implications of a larger familial role and some sort of catalyzing event that launched this new harder stance made by Preston.
That catalyzing event was the opening scene of the movie, in which a merchant family is taken prisoner by a slaver. Preston’s family is not involved, but Zingli’s is. The story is, however, far from the simple revenge tale it could have been. It was, in Halloway’s words, “epic” and adventurous fun as Preston and her crew put the fear of God into an entire sector of space, in the process freeing several dozen slaves before they could be sold and ending the piracy threat in the region.
In the course of the story, Preston and Zingli’s friendship takes primary focus, followed by some genuinely humorous moments with Preston’s brother concerning their upbringing. Messages from family are an ongoing theme with each act opening or closing with a message sent by Preston or received from family.
The many parts that go into successful anti-piracy operations were put squarely on display, and teamwork plays a surprisingly large role for a Preston film. Several subplots develop secondary members of the cast and Preston gives plenty of swashbuckling orders while doing rather few captain-in-pinnace maneuvers herself. Tech’s jabs at her ‘sedateness’ as she ages manage to both imply that this was not always the case and also homage the more frequent harebrained schemes Preston has gotten up to in previous iterations of the story.
The Legacy
Perhaps the primary reason this adaptation was so utterly beloved by the fans was indeed because of Emily Alexander. She was famous long before Winters asked her to play the first officer of Preston of the Spaceways, but she made very few holovids afterward.
After her holocar accident in 1865 P.D., which paralyzed all of her body but one arm and her head, a new edition of the holovid was released where fellow cast and crew reminisced about Alexander and the many things she brought to the set and to the film. The ‘vid was dedicated to her and gifted to her on her birthday, amid many tears.
“I love you all,” Alexander told them. “I loved making this ‘vid with you and I wish every one of you the best.”
Few believe anyone could follow up on such a production or her portrayal of Preston and what little talk there has been of a series revival died down quickly.
To the youngest generation of Preston fans, Emily is our Preston. She brought us a Preston who cared about others and got her hands dirty in the trenches beside them. She brought us a Preston that never flinched in the face of impossible odds. She brought us a Preston that was capable of doing the impossible and made us believe that we could do it too. From all of us fans everywhere: We love you, Emily.