MR. NGO | BRAWN NEVER DIES | FROM INDIA WITH LOVE | YOU ONLY PHIL TWICE

Mr. Ngo

Q. How do you pronounce the title?
A. "Mr. No."  It's a play on "Dr. No."  Geez people, wasn't the "Ngo Fear" joke a big enough hint?

Q. Why is Spqqky trying to destroy the U.S. toy industry?
A. Didn't he explain it well enough himself?  Heck, the guy put up a Shockaract on eBay weeks before BotCon 2000, is there anything he WOULDN'T do?

Q. Where did Spqqky get all those tank drones from?
A. Beast Machines: The Lost Episodes, Episode 10/13.  They were sent to Earth by Megatron to destroy Phil Bond.  Heck, if it weren't for four certain Autobots, they would have succeeded!

Q. What's the deal with "Tommy?"
A. Well, in case you didn't pick up on the BROAD hints, Tommy is Agent Ngo (again, pronounced "No").  Tommy, Bergstorm, and Fritz are real people that I'm in Track with at UW Eau Claire.  Tommy never shows up for practice, so this is a sort of roundabout way of explaining why.  I've never actually shown the fic to him, though.

Q. Why is Agent Ngo singing "Secret Asian Man?"  Isn't it "Secret Agent Man?"
A. Uh, 'cuz he's and Asian-American?  Subtle, people, very subtle.

Q. Who's Chris Deschane?
A. A guy I went to High School with.  He opted to join the armed forces instead of go off to college.  I've always wondered why he never heard from him after that...

Q. What's the deal with Sideswipe, Sunstreaker, Jazz, Perceptor, the Afro/timer, and the Magenta vortex?
A. One thing at a time.  The Autobots are Skidders, from the Transformers World's Worst storyline, Lost Worlds.  Since a new fic hasn't been added to that storyline since -- oh -- about April, I thought I'd let everyone know how their favorite Skidders were doing.  As for the Afro, it belonged to Alternate Universe Soundwave.  As for the Magenta Vortex... any time anything bad happened in Sliders, the vortex/einstien/rosen-bridge was magenta-colored.  Go figure.

Q. What the @#$& is the deal with Andy Kaufman?
A. Okay, I'll admit it now.  The bit where Phil Bond is in the Agency is based loosely off of a dream I once had where I was Phil Bond, and Chris Deschane came into my room at "The Agency" looking for porn.  We got orders to evacuate the president, so that's where the underground tunnel to the Oval Office comes in.  Then I encounter another Phil Bond, and since it's not possible for two Phils to exist in the same space/time, I had a mental breakdown.  That's when the technician with us, who looked exactly like Andy Kaufman, starting babbling incoherently and disappeared.  Then the dream frayed at the edges and melted away.  It was just a movie being played by Andy/Jim Carrey.  Everything that happened in the fic with him is almost verbatim what happened in the dream.  Truth.  I'm so ashamed...

Brawn Never Dies

Q. What's the deal with the title?
A. Aside from being a play on the James Bond film "Tomorrow Never Dies", the title specifically refers to people who refuse to believe that Brawn died in Transformers: The Movie where the Decepticons boarded the Autobot shuttle and made everyone inside go 'splodey.  There's contention as to the death of Brawn because he only got shot in the shoulder, but died anyway.  That, and his tech specs specifically name him as being immune to the type of weapon that Megatron uses.  Meh.

Q. So Brawn is alive?
A. No.  Yes.  Maybe.  It's probably the most debated aspect of the Transformers mythos aside from RIRFIB FIRRIB.  Brawn didn't have a coffin in the G1 Season 3 episode Dark Awakening, which also happens to be the first post-mortem appearance of Optimus Prime.  As for Brawn, however, there's a perfectly fantastic tale about his Death/Not-Death written by Transformers World's Worst collaborator, David Willis [ http://www.itswalky.com/transformers/fanfic/brawn.html ].

Q. What's RIRFIB FIRRIB?
A. Rumble is Red Frenzy is Blue, Frenzy is Red Rumble is Blue.  The toys and comic book claim the former, and the TV show claims the latter.  Everyone has their preference.

Q. So obviously FIRRIB is correct, right?
A. We're not going to get into that now.  Nor ever.

Q. Who is Renaud?  And what's the deal with those evil moderators?
A. Renaud Lefebvre is the proprietor of Bigbot.com and Bigbot.net.  He is infamous in the fandom for the way he runs his message board, etc. etc.  Our Renaud is a fictional character based on the exaggeration of these claims and in no way is meant to represent the real man.  But we do think it's really funny.  We don't take this stuff seriously.  Do you?

Q. Why did Renaud claim to have past dealings with Phil Bond?
A. Why indeed?  Maybe it's because Phil really is a secret agent who's had his memory wiped in order to protect The Agency, so he doesn't remember.  Or maybe he's not the real Phil Bond.  Anyone who's read "You Only Phil Twice" knows the answer to that.

Q. What's with Phil's new outfit?
A. It was from a picture that Dave "Machina" Reynolds drew of Phil to look more like Solid Snake.  We just kind of ran with it.  It seemed to be a good outfit for an excursion to the sub-arctic tundra that is Quebec, Canada.

Q. What's up with Herb Kohl?
A. Herb Kohl is a U.S. Senator representing Wisconsin.  In the previous story, Mr. Ngo, he was used to "bait" Phil to test his prowess as a secret agent, Willy Wonka style.  It just seemed logical, in that illogical sort of way, to continue his influence in the ongoing Phil Bond saga.

Q. Speaking of which... Chaunkah Hebrew?  Do you WANT to get sued?
A. Hey!  It was a holiday story!  And making Christmas episodes is so cliché.  Besides, we had already used Herb Kohl, so it only made sense to bring in our other Senator.  You should have seen the ads for Feingold's campaigns in 1992.  Come on, it was worth it for that "grain of salt" joke wasn't it?  ...wasn't it?

From India With Love

Q. Who is Daler Mendhi?
A. He's a Punjabi artist turned Pop star from India.  He first came to our attention on April Fool's Day 2001 when a music video of his from a song called "Tunak Tunak Tun" was joking passed off as the title sequence to the upcoming Robots in Diguise series.  A good time was had by all.

Q. Okay.  So... WHY Daler Mendhi?
A. Come on, have you SEEN these videos?  There's something about that pudgy man in a turban that seems to get all of the women in his videos hot and bothered.  Who better to be a "Bond" villain than this guy?

Q. Why is everyone so surprised to see PrimeX?
A. PrimeX was a lackey of Spqqky in Mr. Ngo, and perhaps Phil's greatest personal foe.  He was whisked away in a magenta vortex, along with all the tank drone toys, when the Skidders from TFWW showed up in a conveniently plot-driven moment.  In Sliders, the inspiration for the spoof Skidders, whenever a magenta vortex swallowed something whole it was meant to show plot-wise how incredibly dangerous the situation was.  No one ever returned from a magenta vortex.  But when the Sliders changed wormholes, suddenly every episode was a magenta vortex episode, which I guess is more artistic irony than an oversight.  PrimeX actually found his way home, which is a no-no in any cross-dimensional story.

Q. Jeremiah Isthar?
A. It occurred to me that Chris might not appreciate me using his name, so this allows him to become his own character rather than a terribly unfunny in-joke.  I don't think it's working.

Q. Come on... a hooker?
A. This is actually a funny story.  It had been intended to include the pickup of the hooker for quite a while when the REAL Phil Bond had a very similar experience that was actually better than the written one.  So it was changed to reflect the real world situation a little more closely.  Still, the fiction came first, not the actual event.  Yet another case of life imitating art.  Well, if you can call it art...

Q. Why does Liz hate Angelina Jolie so much?
A. Do you have to even ask?  She's trying to steal her man!

Q. What did PrimeX do to Liz's Scorponok toy?
A. He enhanced its "hug" mode, making it a lethal killing machine.  Of course, it missed Phil, its originally intended target, and hit Mendhi instead.  Ouch.

You Only Phil Twice

Q. Wasn't the real Phil Kevin Spacey in From India With Love?
A. Yes.  But if James Bond isn't the same actor from movie to movie, why should Phil Bond be consistent from story to story?

Q. Wouldn't it have been funnier if the real Phil Bond was someone that could have never been mistaken for our Phil?
A. Probably.

Q. So what's Edward Norton's story?
A. Phil defected to CAINE, the Canadian version of The Agency, where he supposedly met and befriended Renaud (from "Brawn Never Dies"), and later betrayed CAINE in favor of furthering his burgeoning acting career.

Q. Who's Nick Dudycha?
A. Nick Dudycha (pronouced "Dude-ick-a", hence the joke) is someone I know from track who I promised would be a Bond villain in the next story.  I sort of kept that promise.  And yes, people really made fun of his name like that.

Q. William Shatner?  Leonard Nimoy?  What the hell?
A. Well, Shatner's story is more or less self-explanatory as to the nature of the Agency, but the character of Leonard Nimoy was both a "Return of the King" gag and a play on Spock's role in wanting to "reunify" Vulcans with their cousins the Romulans -- in this case, AABEL and CAINE respectively.

Q. Ben Folds?
A. Did you never see those Priceline commercials?

Q. Was there a point to any of this?
A. Yeah.  It's time to wipe away the old storyline in favor of a newer, better one.  One that makes more sense.  One that's not riddled with in-jokes.  And the beginning of the end of that starts with Robots in Disguise: The Lost OAV!  The results of that series will forever alter the course of Phil's life, and everyone living in his universe...