Buck Rogers

Lyrics

August, nineteen hundred and twenty-eight.
The new issue of *Amazing Stories* smells of cheap pulp and possibility.
Inked on the page, a man named Anthony Rogers, mining engineer.
He goes down a mine shaft in Pennsylvania.
He doesn't come back up.
Just a name in a story. Anthony.
A pocket of radioactive gas preserves him.
Five hundred years tick by like a forgotten clock.
He wakes up in the twenty-fifth century, a stranger.
Among flying belts and disintegrator rays.
The story's got legs, it's got rayguns.
But the name… the name is thin.
Anthony Rogers. It's a fine name for a banker, maybe.
Not for a man fighting Tiger Men on Mars.
Enter John F. Dille. A man who syndicates dreams for a living.
He reads the novella, smells the newsprint.
He buys the rights from Philip Nowlan.
"Kid," he says, "the story's gold. The name is lead."
"Anthony? Sounds like he should be writing poetry."
"We need something that sounds like… a fist. Or a coin hitting a bar."
So he renamed him. A simple transaction.
From Anthony to Buck.
Just like that. Buck Rogers.
A hero named for a deerskin, tanned and traded.
A character whose name is cash on the barrel.
A man worth exactly one dollar, flying past the moon.
Rewind the clock. 1748, the Ohio valley.
A trading post smells of pine resin and cured animal hide.
A stack of buckskins on the counter, stiff and heavy.
The unit of account. The standard of colonial trade.
"That'll be five bucks for the rifle," the man says.
The word for money was the word for a life taken in the forest.
And John F. Dille, in his office in 1929, he must have known.
Or maybe he just felt it in his American bones.
That the perfect hero for a future you have to sell
is a man whose name is already a price tag.
A walking, talking, raygun-shooting piece of legal tender.
Our man in the future. Our Buck.
From a Pennsylvania mine to the spaceships of the Han.
He wasn't born a hero.
He was syndicated.
He wasn't born Buck.
He was priced.