Hello and welcome to this not-actually-an-episode of Fusion Patrol. I’m Eugene, and I’m all alone here today.

Have you noticed that Fusion Patrol episode numbers just keep getting higher and higher? Here we are at over 750 episodes. Our first episode dropped in April of 2010. That’s over 15 years. That’s like 30 to 60 times longer than many of the TV series that we’ve discussed here on the podcast.

Some people would say our discussions are sometimes 30 to 60 times longer than the episodes too. But that’s a different story.

15 years is a long time. And a lot has changed in the world and also in podcasting itself.

Listening to what I just said, I realize this might sound like an announcement of something drastic, like the end of the podcast.

It is not that. Far from it.

I do the podcast for fun, and I have been very fortunate to have a series of great co-hosts who are also doing this for fun. The podcast is still fun for me, so it goes on. But 15 years ago, I was, shock and dismay, younger and also more naive. Podcasting was newer and represented this new non-corporate frontier for creative outlets.

And, you know, hindsight’s a wonderful thing. And I can look back and I can see that I was deliriously optimistic in my estimation of the potential audience. Let me give you my thinking.

• At that time, podcasting represented a vast potential audience devoid of the financial restrictions of commercial TV or radio.
• I would have worldwide access to people who are, well, let’s just say it, nerds, people who were technically savvy enough to understand and do the podcast thing. These were my people, so to speak.
• The idea behind Fusion Patrol was based on local meetings in Phoenix of TARDIS and the United Federation of Phoenix, both of which were and still are longstanding local fan clubs that during the 1990s spent a lot of time watching TV shows and then over pizza later on talking about them. But even in the nascent podcast space of the early 2010s, Doctor Who and Star Trek were overrepresented. And therefore, the idea of generally avoiding these shows and concentrating on other, less common shows came about.
• My thought was that better to be a big splash in a small pond rather than a small splash in a big pond. We’ll come back to that pond later on.
• But of course, this was also the heyday of old nostalgia programmings getting DVD release. Shows that had been rarely seen in decades were beginning to show up, and programs from international markets were becoming available. So it was fertile ground, I thought.

But we are coming to the point of this little dissertation. Slowly, but we’re getting there.

Anyway, I was thinking at the time that Fusion Patrol was going to inhabit a niche uncovered by other podcasts, and in retrospect, we have. I have seen so many other podcasts come and go that have tried to muscle into our milieu.

In our current structure, we are doing an episode each from three different series and a movie every month. And we’ve still lapped other podcasts. Podcasts dedicated to shows like Blake Seven, Cold Jack the Night Stalker, Crime Traveler and others have come, and sometimes they even got there before we started, and then we still beat them to the finish, and sometimes they never even made it to the finish.

We at Fusion Patrol are reliable, or as my dad used to say, “Glovers are just damn stubborn.”

I do still keep an eye out for these other podcasts because I genuinely like hearing other considered viewpoints. I’ve seen a lot of them come and go, and there’s one seemingly universal constant. There just aren’t enough listeners to justify the expense of the effort. I’ve always assumed that, like me, they expected, and when I say like me, I mean originally, they expected that the audience would prove sufficient to ultimately turn some form of a profit.

And I’m not going to lie, you know, when I started out, I really did kind of think, my gosh, There are so many thousands of us in the world that there must be something. And I thought, well, we’ll just build an audience and we’ll see what kind of revenue opportunities make sense.

But the sad reality is this is a small pond. There may be billions of potential people, but there aren’t billions of listeners.

So as you’ve guessed by now, this is actually about money. So let’s just talk brass tacks.

You are probably sick to death of the Patreon/Buy Me a Coffee spiel baked into the end credits. Or if you’re not sick to death, you’ve probably become so inured to it that you just don’t hear it anymore or you skip the end credits. Well, you know, whatever. It’s fine, and whereas you may be sick of it, do you know what I am? I’m embarrassed by it.

I am embarrassed to have to ask. And even in this most cursory fashion, every time I hear it, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, and I am embarrassed by it.

Nonetheless, let me say, if you are already a Patreon donor, or you’re someone who has donated to us through Buy Me A Coffee, whether one time or repeatedly, we can do this one of two ways. We can go With A Really Big Thank You. Or we can go with the effusive sort of thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

What the hell? We could go with both. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I honestly cannot express how much I appreciate it. I can only liken it to when you’re on a stage and you actually feel the applause from the audience. It is so much more than just money.

But I also get that you, many of you, most of you can’t support every podcast you listen to. I support some podcasts on Patreon, but I have to be very selective about it. And I try to send it where I think it will have the most impact with small podcasts.

Fusion Patrol had been running for five years before we even got a Patreon account. Over 200 episodes had been published. And I didn’t like the idea of asking then. I still don’t like it now. But at the time, I quipped, with your support, we could continue for another 200 episodes. And here we are, 500 episodes later.

In actual dollars, cold, hard, physical cash that I never see because it’s not cash, it’s electronic. But, you know, it’s money. The podcast costs me annually about 750 US dollars or sixty three dollars a month. And I’ve recently been notified of an eight percent increase on some of the hosting costs that’s coming in October. And those costs don’t include like the DVDs and Blu-rays that I purchased to discuss on the show.

So, if it’s financially within your means, and you find Fusion Patrol of value, I’m asking you, as sincerely and humbly as I can, if you would consider becoming a Patreon donor.

And if you’re one of those people who has a problem with Patreon, and there are plenty of legitimate reasons why you might, you can also donate either one time or monthly by way of Buy Me a Coffee.

But wait, there’s more. If you’ve listened this far, I imagine you’re a regular listener. So I would like to put a couple of other ideas out there.

We know, and when I say “we,” I mean the podcast industry, that for any population of listeners, there will only be a small percentage who can or will financially support a podcast. It’s a fact of life. We are a small podcast. This is a small pond. The revenue pool cannot be big.

It does depend on which shows we’re reviewing at the moment. But generally, generally, we get in the order of about a thousand listens a month, which is not a lot. However, 95% of those are considered impactful, which which just means that the listener listened to at least 75% of the podcast before they gave up. So that’s actually quite good. That means that the people who are listening are listening to the podcast all the way, more or less all the way through.

Now, if we had 2,000 listens a month that were 95% impact, that would make the pond bigger. And no, I’m not asking you to listen to each episode twice because that would actually defeat the purpose. But what you could do is to help spread the word. You could review the podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You could share it with others. You could boost episodes that you like on social media or forums or wherever you get your nerd flag out.

And then finally, I’m going to throw this last one out to you because maybe you’ve got a great idea.

I consider Fusion Patrol to have the premiere back catalog of episodes on shows like this, right? Name me any other podcast that has all of Blake 7, Space 1999, Sapphire and Steel, Man from Atlantis, Battlestar Galactica, Doomwatch, Crime Traveler, The Night Stalker, The Fantastic Journey, Firefly, The Omega Factor, The Prisoner, Star Cops, Moonbase 3, so many other shows that we have done in their entirety. And they are all out there.

That’s a hell of a back catalog we’ve got out there. And it should be relatively evergreen because is there really that much of a difference between a review of a 50 year old show reviewed today or 10 years ago?

But the fact is, virtually no one listens to the old shows. That’s obviously largely due to the way podcasts syndicate and the way search engines searchicate and the fact that the podcast aggregators like Apple Podcasts will only list the last 300 episodes at absolute most.

So my question to you is this, can you think of anything that I can do to make them seen And more importantly, seen by the right people in the right context. Because when we’re looking at specific old shows, it’s no longer really about Fusion Patrol, the eclectic podcast on old sci-fi. But it’s something more like Fusion Patrol presents Space 1999 or some such. And I’d like to find a way to make those more seen, more listened to, because there’s somebody out there right now that’s probably thinking, hey, I should do a podcast on Doomwatch. It’s like been there, done that guy. But anyway, it’s a thought. And if you’ve got anything, let us know.

Anyway, thank you, everyone. Patrons, non-patrons, just listeners, thank you for making it this far listening to the podcast, for making it all the way through this plea for help. You will probably be hearing increased number of mentions of Patreon in the upcoming episodes through the rest of 2025 at least, but hopefully they won’t be too intrusive. But if you can help, it’s greatly appreciated.

Thanks again.