Episode 18, Hardrive co-executive producer – Jeff Kline writer – Eddie Cuzelan
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Out in New Tronic City, General Thornton and the
army are trying to tackle a giant mutant insect. BG and Rusty are on they way.
BG: ETA 60 seconds.
Thornton: That’ll be 59 seconds too late.
Just then, a
new giant robot shows up.
Hardrive: I am Hardrive. Bear witness to my first campaign. (destroys monster) So ends campaign number 1.
BG arrives in time to see Hardrive leaving, and is surprised.
Slate: It’s American-made, not Legion – at least 5-10 years ahead of its time.
Meanwhile, Rusty is whining because he wants his own rocket ship. Dr. Slate points out that he can already fly.
Rusty: BG can fly and he has a rocket ship.
Slate: Well, how about it I make you a nucleoprotonic surge protector?
Rusty: (disgruntled) That’s all you ever make for me – boring stuff! (flips through sketchpad) Well, if you won’t make a rocket ship, how about a turbo snowmobile? Or an invisible submarine? Or a cybernetic rescue dog?
- At this point, Jenny shows up with some guy.
Jenny: Dr. D asked me to flaunt the newest member of team Quark.
Dwayne and the new guy have a bit of a grim stare-off,
pleasing Jenny.
Dwayne: It’s been a long time, Griffin.
Griffin: It sure has.
Jenny: Hiss – catfight!
Dwayne: (happy) Hey, Griff! (they have a manly embrace; Jenny is disgusted) This is Griff, my wingman!
Jenny: Monkey don’t do warm and fuzzy! (leaves)
Mr. Griffin mentions that he is now an engineer for Special Projects.
Rusty: Ooh! I have
a special project for you!
Griffin: I see you
have a more serious problem.
Rusty: I do?
Griffin: This glove
has not been properly broken in! (goes off to play catch with Rusty
[Something about Morgan tornado, and ‘Unh! My lumbago!]
While Griffin and Rusty go off to play, Dwayne explains to Slate who Griffin is..
Dwayne: We’ve known each other since the first day of flight training, but he quit the day BG was manufactured. Believed machines needed pilots. Too bad he can’t ever know that’s how things turned out.
Much later, at a café somewhere in New Tronic City, Griffin and Dwayne reminesce.
Griffin: Hey, remember our commanding officer Sayles?
Dwayne: ‘Tough as nails’ Sayles! He reamed me out for wearing that dress.
Grifiin: Said it was a hazing stunt – I got four month in KP!
Dwayne: They almost threw you out of the service for that one!
Grifiin: (serious) Imagine – could’ve saved me the trouble.
Dwayne: Been a few years – people change.
Before Griffin can really say anything, Dwayne gets a Code III alert. I think Griffin says something snippy about him being a mechanic for BG, and then Dwayne is off. Griffin is staring at an old photo and drinking some coffee before leaving as well. A bit later, BG and Rusty are flying in the Legion towards a mall in New Tronic City infested with the mutant bugs.
Rusty: I never get to drive! It’s no darn fair!
BG: This is no time to pout, son. (spies bugs) Targets confirmed – big, fat, radioactive ones. (departs Legion) Attention, mutant shoppers. I’m having a red, white and blue special on bug repellant. In fact, I’m giving it away. (fires guns) A pair of piping hot sidewinders should make all sales final. (prepares to fire missiles)
Hardrive: (shows up out of nowhere - again) I am Hardrive. Bear witness to my second campaign. (destroys bugs)
Rusty: Oooh, he’s good.
BG: He’s a ball hog.
Hardrive: So ends
campaign number 2.
BG: Second and
final, fancy pants, unless your hardware happens to be registered with the US
military.
Hardrive: Then
consider this a professional courtesy. (leaves)
Later at Quark, Rusty is poking around, looking for Griffin’s lab, which is Room 188680. When Rusty busts in, it is obvious Griffin is trying to hide something, but Rusty is too excited to notice. Griffin has a surprise for him.
Grifiin: (unveils a miniature rocket ship) The Legend Junior!
Rusty: It’s so cool! Does it have gadgets and gizmos and weapons and a CD player?
Griffin (semi-sinisterly) It’s full of surprises.
Later at the sea headquarters of
Hardrive, someone makes entry 120 and steps out of the robot. That person is
Griffin!
- Sometime later, BG is flying around looking for the source of the mutant insects while Dr Slate feeds him info from her lab at Quark.
Slate: The insects appear to be a mutant strain of rhinoceros beetle. The first ones were likely scouts.
BG: They’re thrifty, resourceful, and cannot tell a lie?
Slate: So it’s likely there is a queen and a nest of eggs somewhere.
BG: Too many eggs are bad for the cholesterol count.
Slate is able to pinpoint the
eggs’ location in some desert northeast of New Tronic City
BG: I’m off to crown a queen.
Rusty, still in Slate’s lab, decides to follow BG in his new ship, but ends up crashing into several things.
Rusty: (sheepish) It was in reverse.
He wisely leaves before Slate can
get a chance to question him, but she already has an idea of who’s behind it,
so she heads off to Griffin’s lab, where she begins to chew him out about
interfering with her project. Griffin
sort of talks his way out of it before beating a retreat.
Griffin: (leaving) Call me Griff! Now, I’ve got to get a move on before old man Donovan sics his monkey on me!
After he’s left, Slate notices
that he’s tracking BG’s movements and from that and some blueprints deduces he
is associated with Hardrive. Also that
there’s a bomb in Rusty’s rocket ship.
Speaking of which, Rusty is flying past the New Tronic mall.
Rusty: Hey, everybody, get a load of my wheels!
BG is still headed
to the desert in the Legend, when he sees Hardrive approaching on the monitor.
BG: I feel another campaign coming on. (Hardrive attacks Legend) Always in my line of fire.
Hardrive: I am Hardrive. Bear witness to my third campaign.
BG: Rain check on that one, curly. There’s a lot of lives at stake if I don’t scramble some eggs.
Meanwhile,
Rusty is arriving at the desert site as well in the Legend Junior.
Rusty: Approaching target (nervously) Approaching awful darned fast! (crashes into canyon not far from where Hardrive and BG are fighting) Aw, it’s all dinged. (spies BG) Yoohoo! Legend Junior to Legend One – looky what I got!
BG: (to Hardrive) What part of ‘I don’t have time for this’ don’t you understand?
I think at this
point Hardrive finally puts BG under a pile of rubble.
Hardrive: So ends the final campaign.
BG: (emerges from rubble) You don’t know how right you are.
Rusty: (kicking immobile ship) Crummy little hunk of junk. I’m sorry, rocket – I didn’t mean it! (notices big, nasty insect) Ugh, you must be the queen.
Hardrive: I am fighting proof of man’s superiorty over machine.
BG: (knocks Hardrive down) Why the grudge, fella? Who programmed you?
I think this is where Dr. Slate gets on the wire
and tells Dwayne about Griffin and the Legend Junior.
BG: Time to see what you’ve got under the hood, chief (finds Griffin inside the robot, but gets distracted by the arrival of the queen and her entourage) Hail to the queen! (fires some missles and guns) That’s right – plenty of loving for everyone. (but it doesn’t look like there’s enough ammo to take them all out.) We’ll have to candygram the whole mountain.
Slate mentions that Rusty’s ship contains a
thermite bomb that might be useful. BG takes the ship
Rusty: Wait – my rocket!
Hardrive takes this moment to attack BG, yammering about how the campaign will end and that pilot-driven machines are superior because of the human factor that robots don’t have – spontenaity, the ability to make decisions…
Dwayne: Nobody tells a lieutenant of the US military how to dress.
Hardrive: The willingness to fight dirty when the situation dictates it…
BG: Hardrive, behind you!
Hardrive: A robot might fall for that – (gets attacked from behind by the queen; BG fights it off and places Griff out of harm’s way.)
Dwayne: Now stay put before you really get hurt, Griff.
Rusty: My rocket!
BG: Open wide, ugly. (tosses Legend Junior into queen’s mouth)
The queen and eggs are destroyed and the canyon/mountain walls collapse. BG and Rusty fly off with Griffin.
BG: And that, boy robot, is history in the making.
Rusty: Hardrive was a person inside a pretend robot. That oughta teach him to take on real robots like us, right BG?
Dwayne: (sober) Yeah, Rusty.
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At the army detainment facility, Griffin is talking
to Dwayne with those glass wall phone hookups.
Dwayne: They say with good behavior you could be out in ten.
Griffin: You know, I expected you to quit the BGY project when I did, but… the BG saved my life, even when I was trying to destroy him. No human would have done that.
Dwayne: You’d be surprised, Griff.