After finishing Liquid Dwarf, Rusty Dwarf, the four Steaks took a brief but well-deserved rest from their academic and musical endeavors. One evening, while relaxing in a Holborn House (aka Linn House) dorm room, they purposed that their next project should be rendered in the inherently pretentious (and, some might say, oxymoronic) medium of rock opera. Then, for some reason since lost to the vicissitudes of memory, someone brought up Buster Crabbe.

Buttsteak recalled a Readers' Digest Strange Stories and Amazing Facts article which detailed Buster Crabbe's mysterious disappearance during World War II. Ribeye objected that that couldn't possibly be right because he had seen Buster Crabbe make a guest appearance on the 1980s television series Buck Rogers, starring Gil Gerrard. Buttersteak buttressed the anti-disappearance view by remembering a Buster Crabbe guest appearance on the 1960s Batman TV series. The BCTRO story synopsis, conceived largely by Buttsteak, was an expert attempt at synthesizing a coherent narrative from the Steaks' wildly disparate recollections.

Although Buster Crabbe, The Rock Opera is a genuine group effort, it was constructed largely from contributions realized independently by the four Steaks. Unlike the songs on Liquid Dwarf, Rusty Dwarf, very few of the Crabbe tracks were co-written. Most of the album was recorded in Buttsteak's Regents' Park apartment, primarily on one marathon day during which Ribeye and Buttsteak consumed large quantities of Crispy Critters cereal and Berry Blue punch.

The music and the plot of Buster Crabbe revolve around the numbers 5 and 6. The BCTRO project has not yet been fully realized as originally conceived. Like Disneyland, it is incomplete, and will remain so, as long as some spark of human imagination survives in the world. Indeed, Buttsteak is currently in the process of remastering and repackaging the original BCTRO for a 10th anniversary release on CD.

---