• Okay, let's get this out of the way upfront: Radio Adventures 1956 was produced prior to Maggie's transition. I would have much preferred to restage the entire thing, as we did with the original Radio Adventures run, but unfortunately that was not possible with this project. (A couple of the key players, whom I would not want to recast, are not available for this, and I have unfortunately lost the original source files.) I do have Maggie's blessing to leave up any projects containing her deadname (in her words, "I really did play a character named Matt for 35 years"), but I've still tried to change it wherever possible. I just couldn't manage that here, and I didn't want to lose this material (of which I am genuinely proud) if she was really okay with it being out there.

• Whereas the first Radio Adventures was meant to be a pastiche of a lot of different things, this season ended up being based largely on Space Patrol, a radio serial (also a TV series) from the mid-50s. I found some other things to crib from, of course, but Space Patrol definitely had most of what I was looking for, concentrated in one single entity. It somehow made the idea of jetting through space and meeting exotic aliens super boring and mundane. Everyone was a super-square that would make Adam West's Batman look like a hippie. I can't imagine how it was ever entertaining, but it was perfect for my needs.

• The meta-story of this season is that, in the final, pathetic days of the Golden Age of Radio, Slap Strongarm and the Orbit Cops was forced by its corporate owners to merge with The Radio Adventures of Matt and AAlgar. I realized that this setting — among the death throes of a dying industry — was much more suited to my personal aesthetic than the earlier season, which I'd set during the peak of radio's heyday.

• Slap Strongarm (played by Dave, in probably his best role for us) took a little while for me to find, as a character, but when he finally came together, I absolutely loved him.

• Nate as Cadet Gary, on the other hand, was a character I adored instantly — largely because of Nate's performance. Pairing Dottie, who was designed to be a kid sidekick that you didn't want to literally kick, with a character more like the traditional kid sidekick, ended up being a lot of fun. We even got to record the two of them in the same physical place once! Given that they live in different countries, thousands of miles apart, this was quite the event!

• Gary's tendency to pun and his weird goose-laugh are lifted almost directly from Space Patrol. Seriously, the show was terrible. (I even read a book about how not-terrible it was. This book, clearly written by a misguided baby boomer, was wrong.)

• The purple bats harassing Dottie and Gary are essentially "dickbats," which regularly appeared in Filmation's Star Trek animated series.

• It took me a few episodes to really get a feel for what this season of Radio Adventures was all about, but I'd really cracked it by the time we got to episode 5. That's why it's extra-long — I was so excited to have figured it all out that I wanted to make up for lost time and do a long episode to correct for the slight meandering that had preceded it.

• "Dr. Molengo" is a super-deep cut. When Vishal redesigned the logo and other visual elements for Sarcastic Voyage, he suggested this font for titles, which we regularly used. I always had trouble remembering the name, so I basically named a character after it as a mnemonic device. Three years later, I am pleased to report that it worked!

• The electronic cacophony in Dr. Molengo's lab is actually real electronic music created by musical pioneer Raymond Scott in the 1950s. Scott was a super-fascinating guy who was responsible for, among many other things, several melodies with which you are almost certainly familiar from their use in old Warner Brothers cartoons.

• About halfway through this story, I abandoned any hope of rehabilitating the AAlgar and Matt characters and just had everyone in-universe start referring to the fact that they were nowhere near as useful as their sidekick.

• Details of the alien invasion were largely ripped off from old Mars Attacks! cards.

• The theme music (composed by me in GarageBand) picks up a super-cool theremin most of the way through, thanks to the efforts of regular Voice Acting Player and musical wunderkind, Josef Ravenson.

• The ending, where Dottie is promoted to full agent, makes me tear up a little every time I hear it. Which is especially stupid when you consider that I wrote the thing in the first goddamn place.

• Dottie's adventures continue in the one-shot Agent Dottie, which jumps forward to the late 60s and imagines her as a cheesy Hanna Barbera-style cartoon.