Apologies for the lack of actual updates lately. It’s a busy time of year for me at work, and I haven’t been writing as much. There will be more posted of A Year Without a Pandaskunk when I get around to cranking out some more parts. Until then, here’s a blog about the first pandaskunk story from 2012.
Title: The Gift of the Pandaskunk
Written: November 2012
Straightforward synopsis: The Backstreet Boys and a flying pandaskunk save Christmas and the world.
The story behind the story:
The Backstreet Boys gave us an early Christmas gift in 2012 with the song “It’s Christmas Time Again.” Not only is this song noteworthy for being the first one to feature Kevin since he returned to the group, but it’s also an incredibly catchy bop. I love this song so much, I still listen to it year-round. It’s always Christmas time again in my heart!
The day the music video for “It’s Christmas Time Again” was released, I happened to be home sick, so I was able to watch it and spend the rest of the day talking with people on Twitter about how weird and trippy it was. What a strange video for a Christmas song. Sure, it has snow, Santa, elves, mistletoe, and gingerbread, but it also has the Boys blasting into space in a rocket, sailing the high seas on a tugboat, and taking a voyage in a submarine. Of course, the thing everyone kept commenting on the most was the random flying panda with the long, fluffy, skunk-like tail, which quickly became known as a “pandaskunk.”
@rokofages75 Pandaskunk you mean! Haha This has @nickcarter written all over it!
— #FinishThisFight (@rachel2821) November 15, 2012
What did any of that have to do with Christmas? Under the influence of cold medicine, I decided to write with a short story that would attempt to answer that question. It started as a straightforward parody of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, which has always been my favorite of the old Rankin-Bass Christmas specials. I came up with a rather disturbing origin story for the flying pandaskunk, which was that he was a panda-skunk hybrid created when the wife of Flower the skunk from Bambi was accidentally artificially inseminated with panda sperm that was supposed to have been delivered to the San Diego Zoo as part of their panda breeding program. Flower reacts to his “freak” of a son in much the same way as Rudolph’s dad Donner acts like a huge dick in the original.
I set the beginning of the story at Disneyland to incorporate the performance the Boys had done there in early November, the first time they sang “It’s Christmas Time Again” live. Brian became the “misfit” of the group, much like Hermey the elf in Rudolph. This was during a period in the fandom when people were being very hard on Brian, criticizing him for the vocal issues he was clearly struggling with but had yet to address publicly, mocking his family, and blaming him for everything. I don’t necessarily agree with everything Brian says or does, especially when it comes to politics, but as a Brian girl, I will defend and stand by my man till the day I die. He didn’t deserve the flak he got for not yet feeling comfortable enough to talk openly about a condition that was outside his control. That being said, although I love Leighanne and Baylee, some things the Littrells have done over the years have made me shake my head along with anyone else. It was all too easy to poke fun at them and Wylee… mostly Wylee.
My favorite Christmas character is the Bumble, the abominable snowman from Rudolph, but I had trouble figuring out how to spoof him in my story. Since it was set at Disneyland, I was originally going to use the yeti in the Matterhorn ride, but as Disney had just bought Lucasfilms, I decided to use Chewbacca from Star Wars instead. This helped to explain how and why the Boys went to outer space. It also led to the inclusion of other Star Wars characters and references, mainly from the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special, which I’ve still never watched in its entirety, but was able to find on YouTube. All the stuff about “Life Day” is from that special, which, from what I’ve seen of it, is every bit as strange and terrible as everyone says it is.
My next job was figuring out what could fill in for the misfit toys, which led me to come up with the Planet of Misfit Fans. Admittedly, making fun of some of the more infamous people from our fandom may have been mean-spirited, but most of them were asking for it with their own weird, inappropriate, or downright creepy behavior. A writer’s favorite form of revenge is basing characters on real people, and at least a couple of the ones I portrayed as misfit fans had personally wronged my friends or me. I won’t call out anyone by name, but let’s just say there was a lot of fact woven into the fiction of Part V.
After following Rudolph fairly closely for the first seven parts, the story takes an abrupt turn in Part VIII and turns into an Armageddon parody. Since it was 2012, I knew I wanted to work in the impending Mayan apocalypse, so I had to come up with some kind of global catastrophe. I love Armageddon, and since the Boys were already going to space, it only made sense to have that be an asteroid the size of Texas on a collision course with Earth. Besides being an entertaining movie, Armageddon is also extremely easy to spoof.
Once I started writing it, this strange, silly, little story came together incredibly quickly and quite well, if I do say so myself. I wrote it over the course of a weekend while doped up on cold medicine, which I think may have made me more creative. It was really fun to write, a nice change of pace from my usual, serious dramas. I never intended to turn it into a series, or I wouldn’t have killed the pandaskunk at the end. I should have known I would eventually want to write a sequel… but more on that in a couple of weeks.
I love my pandaskunk series, but the best thing to have come from the whole pandaskunk phenomenon is the acknowledgment it’s gotten me from the Boys. In 2013, my friend Lynsey and I went to a BSB show in Las Vegas with Rose, who lives there. We made shirts for the occasion with the pandaskunk on them that said, “And when the pandaskunk flies down, down, down, you know the Boys are back in town, town, town. That’s when it’s Backstreet time again!” This was during the IAWLT tour, when VIP was still semi-affordable, so we did silver. We had the idea that if we were the last ones in line for the meet-and-greet and photo, we could get away with having just the three of us in the group photo and maybe even get a little more time with the boys, so we went to the back of the incredibly long line. This was the most packed soundcheck party I had ever been to, and we waited in line so long, we missed the opening acts (which was not a huge loss). But in the end, our plan worked – since we had on matching shirts, they let us have our own group photo, and we actually got to have a brief conversation with the Boys instead of the usual quick “Hi, how are you?” and hug while the bodyguards shout at you to turn around, smile for your photo, and move along. Kevin noticed our shirts and laughed when we mentioned the pandaskunk. “Ah, yes, the mystical pandaskunk!” he played along and pointed it out to the others. We asked who came up with it for the music video, and they said it was just the guy who did the video treatment, not any one of them. That was the most I had ever talked to a Backstreet Boy, up until that point, and it was all thanks to the pandaskunk.
Fast forward a year to the 2014 cruise. I went with Rose, Lynsey, and Laureen, and we wore the same pandaskunk shirts to the sail away party. The sail away party was held inside that year, and the four of us got a prime position along the railing of one of the balconies. The row of bright red shirts must have made us stand out because Brian noticed us, pointed to our shirts, and waved at us.
Ever since then, we have dubbed ourselves “The Pandaskunk Girls” and designed new pandaskunk shirts for each tour. We have hot pink ones from the Vegas residency, which also got us noticed and acknowledged by Brian, and aqua ones for the DNA tour. We even dressed up as pandaskunks for Halloween on the 2013 cruise.
We’ll keep rocking that damn pandaskunk for as long as we can; it’s become like our signature and a way for the Boys to remember us. So thank you, o creator of the “It’s Christmas Time Again” music video, for all you and your mystical pandaskunk have given me. I wish I knew your name so I could credit you, but I cannot find any credits for the video, which is weird. Whoever you are, know that I am eternally grateful for your strange and magical vision. You made the flying pandaskunk both a symbol of Christmas and of my love for the Backstreet Boys. My world will never be the same.