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Futuristic ‘Shipwreck’ spoofs Navy

Patrick Hrabe may very well be the only sailor in the fleet with his own private navy. It just happens to be in the future, in outer space and on the Internet.

Hrabe, 26, an electronics technician first class, is the creator of a Web cartoon series called “Hey, Shipwreck,” about a group of lovable sailors just trying to get through each watch while underway aboard a ship in the “Unified Space Navy.” (Any resemblance to the other U.S. Navy is purely deliberate).

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Watch ‘Shipwreck’

Even though it’s the distant future, things seem familiar: Sailors don’t understand why their ratings have been merged, the Navy always seems to be screwing up their pay, and junior-enlisted seamen still get told to go feed the shaft seals.

“The shaft seals are actually a series of interlocks and safety mechanisms that ensure the integrity surrounding the ship’s main propulsion shaft, and not nautical mammals. But I’ll go feed ’em if you want,” says a seaman recruit called Nub — which in the future still stands for “new underway buddy,” of course.

And there are other aspects that aren’t part of today’s Navy, but which are easy to imagine, such as the Unified Space Navy’s “swearing cessation program,” in which an ever-present computer censor inserts a bleep whenever any sailors bring out the blue material.

Those are the sorts of gags no Hollywood writer would know about, Hrabe said, which was what inspired him to create “Hey, Shipwreck” on a Hewlett-Packard computer he bought at Costco.

“I’m trying to make the series as accurate as possible,” he said. “The average viewers will not understand what’s being talked about at all. These submariners and Navy guys who watch it get this thing, and I’m trying to stick to that.”

Hrabe, who lives in eastern Washington with his wife and daughter, is now on recruiting duty in western Idaho, but he was a navigation electronics technician aboard the ballistic missile submarine Georgia from 2001 to 2006.

His “best accomplishment,” during that time, he said, was designing the official command crests for the Georgia, Naval Support Center Bangor, Wash., and Submarine Squadron 19.

And he had another project before “Shipwreck” — a one-panel, hand-drawn cartoon called “Major Morale.”

The eponymous major’s job is to make sure his shipmates maintain a positive attitude. In one cartoon, a hatch has blown off a missile tube and crushed some poor sailor, and Major Morale pops out from behind the tube to reassure him: “Hey, at least your pay isn’t messed up!”

This made Hrabe realize that there’s an audience of active-duty sailors who want entertainment that speaks their language, he said.

As a result, he said he gets “really good feedback from recruits all the way up to master chiefs and officers.”

On April 26, Hrabe got a letter from former Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Terry Scott, who wrote that he’d watched the first nine “Hey, Shipwreck” episodes and he was “still laughing.”

Submarine blogger Bubblehead is a big fan of Hrabe — he posts a YouTube link to each new edition of “Hey, Shipwreck” and called them “the best submarine-related viral videos I’ve ever seen.”

One viewer left a comment warning people who hadn’t yet seen the movies:

“Do not watch this if you have any liquid in your mouth (i.e., drinking coffee, water, beer). You WILL spray your computer ... .”

Enlisted spacemen

The premise of “Hey, Shipwreck” is that all the navies of earth have united in peace and are exploring outer space — which, of course, is right when they’re attacked by aliens.

But the story is told from the squids’ eye view, specifically from the perspective of two sailors standing a topside watch on a huge outer-space submarine.

Our hero, Thresher, is a disgruntled electronics technician second class who can’t wait to get out of the Navy. His shipmate, ET3 Diggit, is, as his name implies, an A.J. Squared Away-type who can’t get enough of life on the high seas — or, rather, space. They stand on deck and crack wise.

“You shoulda joined the Marines so you could fight lava monsters with a friggin’ samurai sword,” Thresher says.

“Yeah, and climb sheer cliffs with my bare hands? Man, I’d get all the chicks!” Diggit agrees.

“The Navy can make a computer that knows friggin’ anything, but I can’t order paper for the copy room,” Thresher says in one episode.

“Dude, common sense was secured a long time ago,” Diggit tells him in another.

Except for the music, which is composed by collaborator John Seguin, Hrabe makes “Hey, Shipwreck” himself. He comes up with the bits that will make up each edition, writes the dialogue, and then records it in a studio in his basement.

The vocals then go into a computer to get the effects that create the different characters. The supporting cast includes an archetypal hard-case chief; a prissy nuclear technician (“Why must my vast intellect curse me? My intellect is but a shackle — a shackle to my existence!”); and an evil alien cyborg assassin, who didn’t get any lines.

When the voice track is finished, Hrabe then begins animating the episodes with a program similar to the one used to make computer games, which produces video that looks similar to the Xbox game Halo.

Because of technical limitations, and because he’s doing it all himself, Hrabe has to put his characters in space suits with helmets, but he aspires for future episodes to take place inside the ship and for the characters to have animated human expressions.

If he can swing it, Hrabe said, he’d like to be able to make a living off “Hey, Shipwreck,” and the studio he founded to produce it, Tube Daze.

Hrabe’s ideal situation would be to release about an hour’s worth of “Hey, Shipwreck” episodes each year, financed by sponsors for his Web site, and also sell DVDs of the program with extras about how they’re made.

He’d also like to make USO-style tours to ships and shore bases to throw barbecues and screen “Hey, Shipwreck.”

“The main goal of my company is to improve morale and entertain sailors,” he said.