Stingray Sam

2009 serialized science fiction western musical

Rating: 14/20

Plot: The titular hero and his sidekick, The Quasar Kid, have to earn their freedom by saving the daughter of a carpenter from Fredward, the ruler of a wealthy planet.

It's just a tad over an hour, and that's with having to hear the theme song six times and get opening and closing credits for each installment. This is from the creative mind of Cory McAbee who made The American Astronaut, another musical space-western that I loved. Unfortunately, McAbee didn't have the money to make his Werewolf Hunters of the Midwest which I'm sure would be a blockbuster, so he made this instead. Like Astronaut this is inspired and playful with a cuddly lunacy. McAbee squeezes everything he can from every penny he's got to make these things which, if my math was correct, must have been around 25 pennies for this one. This doesn't have the set design of Astronaut, but there's enough quirkiness to last you a month or two and the songs are catchy and clever. The songs are once again played by the Billy Nayer Show which Wikipedia describes as being a "musical group of questionable genre." Each installment gets a song, and almost making up for the lack of nifty sets and the atmospherics that Astronaut had, there are these little animated sequences in each installment to give background for the story. Those, like the rest of this, are narrated by the recognizable voice of David Hyde Pierce. There's not a lot that is traditional about Cory McAbee--he doesn't look like a leading man, his stories are too weird to work for the mainstream, and he makes science ficion western musicals. But the guy is just bursting with ideas, and if I was a big-shot Hollywood producer, I'd give him all the pennies he needs to put his vision on the big screen.

Note: McAbee's daughter, Willa Vy McAbee, plays the daughter in this. She's also in McAbee's 2012 production, Crazy and Thief, with her brother. That movie doesn't seem to be available anywhere.