It's debatable if the Dozerfleet Databse can justify returning some of the content on Miraheze that it used to host on Fandom. However, some items deserve an honorable mention somewhere; and today's example here is just one of possibly more to come.
Before its cancellation, Stationery Voyagers was trying to be many things, and look for comparisons. A snooty professor in 2002 once claimed it wouldn't work, because no one would back a show where the main characters were living pens and pencils. That no TV show or movie could ever exist around such a premise.
However, that didn't stop other shows from existing around anthropomorphic inanimate objects. While Stationery Voyagers was a lot more like Heroes in space with gel pens and markers than it was like VeggieTales, it still begged comparison to one little short film that was produced around 2008, that made its way to the 2009 San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival.
A brainchild of the Walsh family, that film was dubbed Pencil Town.
Directed by Josh Walsh, this 14-minute short film was released by what at the time was known as Last Act Studios, not to be confused with the current Last Act Studio entity of today. While the fate of the Walsh family's Last Act Studios remains unknown, it was a thing in 2008 when their short was first released. Copies of Pencil Town may now be hard to come by. That being said, Josh himself appears to be faring quite well. He partnered in 2011 with the Erwin Brothers, and went on to produce works such as October Baby and Jesus Revolution.
It was produced by Josh's relatives Patrick and Cathy Walsh, with the most credited voice actor being Caleb Walsh. At the festival, the family claimed an estimated budget of $5,000 went into the short's prdocution. It was released direct-to-DVD in 2008, and became a semi-finalist feature at the 2009 San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival.
The plot was fairly simple and straightforward, and the animation style was very much like that of classic VeggieTales episodes of the late 1990s:
A town that is run and operated by various stationery beings and classroom objects finds itself at the mercy of a gang of chalk sticks. An overconfident pencil named Plus is the favorite officer of the Pencil Police Department, which seeks to put an end to the Chalky Chan Gang. Plus arrogantly sends himself alone into combat to confront the town's adversaries, and is quickly captured. His unassuming partner Minus must set things right before Plus meets his demise.
While it was clear that Stationery Voyagers was stylistically and genre-wise a very different animal from Pencil Town, there was some confusion of the two. On Monday, November 16th of 2009, around 7:25 PM EST, Roguewarrior1978 on the Dozerfleet Forum on Proboards asked if the two works were directly related or not. Of course, they weren't, and weren't even inspired by each other. However, Pencil Town was given mention on the wiki back then, as a proof of concept that the old professor at Lansing Community College was wrong.
Stationery Voyagers was intended to be a very melancholy serial drama riddled with real world social commentary, about space diplomats whose mission went horribly awry after they get hijacked by Earth politicians, and later have to deal with a satanic death cult whose members were humanoid bobcats, and who were gathering weaponry to destroy all of existence. This was after also trying to deal with the complexities of two other planets at war with each other, with the fate of their own in the balance, and the fate of Mantith (Earth) soon to be also in the balance. Where a band of devil-worshiping pirates had conquered one world, and another was an empire nearly at war with itself.
The mood, size, scope, and everything of Stationery Voyagers was leaps and bounds above and beyond anything Pencil Town was, or had ever set out to accomplish. After its cancellation, the creative energy that went into it began to be funneled instead into making The Gerosha Chronicles a worthy spiritual successor - with the angelogy of the fomer even being 90% directly imported into the latter!
Of note: the angels Levío and Cherinob were first introduced in Stationery Voyagers, before being imported into Gerosha canon. This went for the SV world interpretations of Michael, Gabriel, Maurice, Filforth, Cavalore, and Dolondri as well. Rickrod, sidekick to the Devil himself, was also originally given that name in SV canon. While Belay, Astrinah, Kritchobol, Riptchokal, and most of the other Biroots mentioned by name are Gerosha original names, the majority of prominent members of the Angelic Army were SV-envisioned first, with the notable exception of Soetera.
Stationery Voyagers also holds distinction for featuring mosquatlons as a creature in some of its season 3 subplots. This type of vampire is notable for being based more on mosquitoes than bats, even if the mosquatlons that featured in season 3 would have been brazen parodies / knockoffs of the vampires in the Underworld and Twilight films. (Though, Fredreick Powderkov was intended to be a parody of Napoleon Dynamite.)
In its heyday, the series even went so far as to predict 2020s woke insanity, nearly 20 years ahead of schedule! When the Voyagers arrive on Mantith with stories to tell, they are immediately surrounded by atheist activists, desperate to hear a narrative that will put an end to faith in God. Instead, the Voyagers speak of a creator, and of said creator assuming the form of a man named Minshus, who sacrificed himself for all the worlds. The atheists panic, and go ballistic.
But even when the Voyagers get a reprieve from most of the world after the Drismabons begin causing chaos across the six worlds, one particular group simply cannot stop obsessing over harassing them: the Crooked Rainbow. Woke activists obsessed with LGBTQPIZON politics, the Crooked Rainbow goes out of its way to find where the Voyagers were relocated to, and vandalizes their apartment just to send a message: "Promote our sexuality, or we will destroy you!" They even kidnap Oceanoe in "Choice After All," and poison him in an effort to turn him gay (it doesn't work.) Coincidentally, the most vandalized article on the wiki was the one about that very episode.
Pencil Town was nowhere near that level of ambitious. While complex moral debates, black vs. white vs. gray, etc. were moral themes in SV, Josh's film had a very basic pride-befor-a-fall narrative structure and moral framework.
The two works also took radically different approaches toward anthropomorphism. Pencil Town gave its characters large cartoon eyes, and arms. Stationery Voyagers developed an entire mythology around "phantomars," and periscope-like vision in the visor-caps characters wore, which essentially made them faceless, yet still able to bend their bodies to a limited degree, as well as tilt and lean at different camera angels to react to stimuli in the environment. Voice work would have further filled in the gaps, providing emotional conveyance by exploiting excitation transfer theory.
Neither Stationery Voyagers nor Pencil Town first pioneered stationery beings and the use of stationery anthropomorphism. The "Theater of Things" sketch on the Muppet Show episode "Sex and Violence" from March 19th of 1975 is arguably the world's first true example, pre-dating the earliest sketches for Stationery Voyagers by a full 25 years, and pre-dating Pencil Town by 33 years. Clearly, that old LCC professor was not a fan of Jim Henson.
