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I should some day check back through these blogs and see what my record is for writing entries without referencing the TV Tropes site. In any case, reset the count because today I have the Ascended Extra on my mind.
Now in purest terms, an Ascended Extra is one of the people in the background of a production. A “face in the crowd” that somehow for whatever reason ends up standing out from the crowd and coming to the forefront of the story. Examples would be Miles O’Brien, who didn’t even have a name when he first started appearing in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Felicity Smoak in Arrow was originally supposed to be a one-scene wonder just there for some hackety-hacking skills, and yet now she’s arguably the female lead. Frasier Crane was a background character in Cheers that became a regular and then the headliner of his own series.
The common thread is that these ascensions are unplanned, but due to the actor’s charisma or thematic necessities or what have you, they resonate enough with the showrunners and/or audience that forthcoming scripts are altered to bring them into the fold, and sometimes even the forefront.
What does this have to do with Zombie Ranch? Well, it’s not so much a cast member, it’s more that we literally have an Extras section in our archives where we dump all our filler comics after times that we’ve been on vacation or otherwise needed a break from the main story. Those filler comics are segregated because they’re not really meant as any sort of actual canon to the setting — but sometimes, the ideas in them keep harassing me.
Such it was with the idea of Grunt and Groan, which basically was Dawn saying, “I want to do a movie poster with a caveman and a zombie” and me shrugging and going, “Okay.” She was excited with the idea, which was good since one of our guest artists had unexpectedly canceled on us. Anyhow, the end result turned out to be so entertaining that when she wanted to revisit the idea with another bit of filler a few months later I agreed to help write dialogue for it.
I don’t remember at what point I decided Grunt and Groan would be an actual in-universe franchise, but it certainly fit with the sometimes ridiculous nature of the media saturated world we’d been portraying beyond the confines of the Z Ranch. Mars Adventure was but the tip of Gruntberg. I suppose I made that decision at least by the time we slapped it into the background on Uncle Chuck’s wall in Episode 9, but I feel this week’s comic truly confirms the ascension of Grunt and Groan beyond the filler comic ghetto and into main continuity.
I only wish I could have worked in the line about Groan being “twenty years past retirement.” Stupid zombie.