Ethlie Ann Vare was a member of the first writing team for Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, Kevin Sorbo’s second syndicated television series. Xenite.Org created the first Andromeda discussion forum on the Web using a very outdated Perl script.
One day prior to the show’s debut, we noticed some strange posts about creatures eating entrails and weird things on the board. The Administrators deleted the posts. Within hours we received email from Ashley Miller, another member of the writing team, asking what we were doing. Oops. Well, we did our best to mend the fences and provide the show with all the support we could.
In 2001 several members of the staff agreed to participate in a special project that was to be called Xenite.Org Today, which would have been “a celebration of online fandom”. We were going to feature interviews with writers, producers, and actors from shows like Xena: Warrior Princess, Andromeda, Sheena, and The Lost World. We were also going to interview fan fiction author Missy Good, Xena fan mistress Kym Masera Taborn, and profile several of our volunteers and moderators.
Alas! The project died before it could get past the first stage. Several people completed their contributions. Both Ashley and Ethlie sent in their interview replies. Michael Sinelnikoff (Summerlee on The Lost World) asked for a telephone interview and provided a huge selection of photographs from his private collection for us to pick from. Steven Sears and Robert Hewett Wolfe had also committed to participating, and Michael Sinelnikoff felt he had all but persuaded David Orth (Malone on The Lost World) to at least look at some interview questions.
It would have been a truly fantastic project. We had an editor and a graphics designer lined up. This was not going to be another Michael Martinez cookie-cutter site. It was going to have a fully professional polish and appearance. But at the last minute both the editor and the graphics designer had to drop out of the project for personal reasons. We were unable to find anyone else to step into their roles. Steve Sears was then faced with a writers’ union strike and trying to get 19 scripts filmed.
We could have made a half-hearted effort at producing the site without the professional graphics, but it seemed like that would be reneging on our promise to the writers, producers, and actors. So we reluctantly thanked everyone for their support and cancelled the project. Xenite.Org has never again attempted anything on that scale, although in 2005 Michael did spend two months writing and designing Hot Magic Nights: Houston’s West Side Salsa Scene. That feature section includes 20 articles with Houston-area dance teachers, performers, and students as well as some area club feature articles.
Much as we would like for this 10th Anniversary feature spread to surpass the Hot Magic Nights feature — much as we would like to finally produce the Xenite.Org Today glossy magazine feature — the best we can do is share the answers to questions that Ashley and Ethlie gave us. The Michael Sinelnikoff interview has probably been lost to posterity through a hard drive crash. Several searches through such archives as exist for Xenite.Org projects have produced no notes other than those for these two interviews.
The timeliness of the interviews is long since passed. The information is stale and perhaps even irrelevant. But given the time constraints we had to work within over the past few months, this seemed like the best “special treat” we could prepare for Xenite’s anniversary.