To be honest, we didn’t have much planned beyond the second season (and not all of that!)  These days, more producers think about plotting the whole life of a series ahead of time, but in most cases, you’re just happy to get on the air and praying you’ll get picked up one more time.

When you do television you are desperately looking for any idea.  So yes, we were hoping to come up with more stories featuring the original creature triumvirate, and we did do “Night of the Shriekers” and “A Little Paranoia Among Friends,” for example.  But we were open to other ideas.  One I like was the idea of being trapped with an AB in a cave in winter, in the snowy mountains above Perfection.  It’s freezing cold, so, without getting killed, you have to provoke the AB into firing its gasses to keep the place warm.  Ah the many untold stories.

The idea of 22 episodes being a “full” season has kind of gone away.  The TV business has changed a lot with the advent of cable and the internet.  Back in the day, by the way, a full season could be 30 episodes or more!  When we did the series, a 13 episode order was considered a major commitment from the network, and we were happy to get a “full” 13.

It probably would have been 13, a typical season.  But if Sy-Fy had wanted to reduce their risk, they might have ordered fewer.  (Back in the day, by the way, a TV season was 26 episodes or more.)

There were thirteen episodes of Tremors: The Series.  They are currently available (Feb. 2013) for instant viewing online via Amazon Instant Video.  I don’t think there is a PAL format DVD version available, but I’ve been wrong before, as fans often point out.

It seems strange, I suppose, but we didn’t set out for it to be that way.  We wanted it to have the same tone as the movies.  But on a series you have input from the network (SYFY) and you have different directors doing every episode. As newcomers to TV we didn’t have a lot of control over how things were shot and edited.

It’s been ten years!  OMG.  That said,  we don’t feel the town has changed a great deal.  It is so remote that mainstream tourism has never caught on.  Also, it’s a little scary going to Perfection, like going to see grizzly bears up close.  Not that many people really want to do it.  So, the locals make decent money, but a lot of times life is pretty quiet.  Of course, once in a while some strange critter appears created by MixMaster, but they’ve gotten pretty good at dealing with that.  Burt, Jodi, and Nancy would stay for sure.  Melvin probably got tired of trying to cash in and moved to more urban settings.  Tyler and Rosalita, we think, might eventually get tired of the limited setting and move on, too.  But then, there’s some mystery about Rosalita’s past, so she might not have the freedom she’d like.

As a rock, unfortunately.

I’m sorry to admit I don’t know.  If he had a first and middle name, it’s already escaped me.

It’s partly a function of the rush to get the special effects done (i.e., there isn’t always time to fine-tune the color of the FX shots).  It can also be exacerbated by colors displaying differently on different TVs.

Yes, we intended to increase the Tremors TV family by adding those characters.  Also, there was a plan to reveal that Rosalita had run a sort of scam  pretending to be a relative of Miquel’s, mentioned in another FAQ answer on this page.  But of course we didn’t have enough episodes to get to these ideas.

As noted elsewhere, the Chang’s market in the series is physically different from the one in the movies.  However, the reason Jodi maintains fold-down stairs in the store is that she never wants to be in the situation Val, Earl and Rhonda were in – with a Graboid coming through the floor and no easy way up.  She wouldn’t want to be trying to run to the outside stairs.

A three day course is about $800.00, depending on specifics.  If firearms training is involved, there is an additional charge for ammunition, which varies with the caliber.

No, it was not.  But it’s a really cool idea.  The SciFi network really liked “Ghost Dance” because it was a unique twist on the monster-of-the-week formula we were working with.  An idea like this would have been fun to run with had we made it to another season.

Okay, first of all, how do you notice these things???  Anyway, while I can’t say for sure what happened on this particular episode, for legal reasons movies and TV shows nearly always use fake license plates, fake phone numbers, fake addresses, etc.  In this case, they are probably fake Nevada plates.

There were a couple of things which drove the creation of the Ghost Dance “creature.”  One, due to time/budget limitations, we needed to come up with ideas which did not require the design, construction, and puppeteering of full-fledged monsters.  Two, we liked the idea of something that appears to be one thing (ghost) but actually has a scientific (or at least semi-scientific) explanation.  Working backward from those end-points, we came up with the glowing cloud idea.

This may set the record as the most complex faq question to date, and in truth isn’t really frequently asked.  That said, wow, I’m really surprised to learn that the formula on the chemical is real.  I assumed it was a number made up by the production design team.  That said, many compounds produced by living things become toxic to those same living things when used in concentrations heavier than found in nature, or when “tweaked” chemically to behave differently than in the natural environment.  That’s what the government hoped to achieve with their compound, but the mutated bacteria were no longer susceptible.

Honestly, we never figured that out. Probably something like $12.00 a person.

Shriekers are all about consuming food fast.  They don’t have time to be crunching bones for the marrow.

No, the Ghost Dance mine was a quick construction down in Mexico.  The Tremors 4 mine was Bronson Cave, within sight of the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles.  Bronson Cave has been used in many many movies over the years, including several of the great SciFi B movies that inspired Tremors (like It Conquered the World).  SS Wilson was excited to get to shoot there.  However, we needed a very low ceiling and narrow tunnels for our mine, so we ended up having to build a mine within a mine, since Bronson cave is huge inside.  We also dressed up its smaller entrance to look more mine-like instead of cave-like.

Umm, we never indicated an exact amount. It was “enough.”

He was in a bad car crash and decided to get out of racing.

Desert rat that he is, he often stays where they originally found him.  But there are hints that he spends time at Nancy’s place, too.

That’s a reference to United States government employee salary scales.  It means he’s got a medium-high ranking.