I saw the trailer for 'Spider-Man: Homecoming' recently, and while there was a lot of cool stuff to unpack, I find myself utterly fascinated by the four burglars at the beginning wearing the cheap Avengers Halloween masks. I mean, setting aside the head-twisting weirdness of kids dressing up like superheroes in a world where superheroes are real, I really want to know what made the bank robbers decide to pick these particular masks. I can actually see myself making a short film on the subject, a sort of Reservoir Dogs pastiche where these four hardened criminals, having obtained the advanced tech they need to carry out their crime, now argue over which Avenger they're going to dress up as.
I figure you'd have the one guy who really thinks it's a bad idea. He says that the one thing that will make the Avengers get up off their butts to chase down a bunch of bank robbers is finding out that those bank robbers all wore Avengers masks to commit their crimes. He finally, reluctantly agrees, but demands to be Captain America because that's the only one of the four who probably won't accidentally kill him just by punching him.
There's a huge argument over who gets to be the Hulk, with one of the guys insisting that he totally, like, gets the Hulk in a way that none of the others possibly can. But one of the other guys wants to be the Hulk, because it's either that or Thor (because the guy who organized the gang is like, "No, letting me be Tony Stark is one of the conditions of the job" and his mask is suspiciously better than everyone else's and it's kind of obvious to everyone that he came up with the whole 'Avengers masks' idea pretty much as an excuse to wear his Iron Man mask without looking weird for being the only one wearing a superhero disguise, but they don't say anything because it's a really good plan and they don't want to lose out on the loot)...
And the Hulk guy is like, "Why don't you want to be Thor? You're totally a Thor dude!" and the other guy explains that he saw all these creepy skinheads in prison with Norse tattoos and he doesn't want anyone to think he's, y'know, racist or anything, his girlfriend is black and his kid is biracial and he wants them to be proud of him. And the Hulk guy is like, "Naw, no way, man! The real Thor, he'd be totally cool with your kid! You know if he saw those skinhead dudes, he'd be smacking 'em with the hammer like he was playin' Whack a Mole!" and really selling Thor to this other criminal, until the guy finally relents and picks up the Thor mask and says, "Let's do this!"
And then the post-credits scene is just a reprise of the scene from the trailer.
I can see it working, I really can. I suppose it'll become a sickness if I ever write out an actual script.
Showing posts with label proposals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label proposals. Show all posts
Thursday, December 15, 2016
Monday, April 25, 2016
My X-23 Concept
I know that right now they've turned X-23, the Wolverine clone with an extremely problematic backstory, into the new Wolverine. And that's fine so far as it goes, because it makes her a main character and gives her a significant amount of development and all, but it also has that problem that's also affecting the new Thor and the new Captain America, which is that it's only a matter of time before some bright-eyed young editor says, "Hey, you know how we can get a cheap sales boost for the next six issues? Bring the original back!" And then they become a surplus protagonist, and if the comics industry is known for anything, it's known for the woefully mistaken belief that killing off a superfluous protagonist is a shocking twist that will get people to sit up and pay attention rather than the laziest and most obvious thing to do with a story.
So I'd like to see X-23 get her own series as X-23. And my idea for that series is actually related, somewhat, to that problematic backstory I mentioned. Not in the sense of "she was forced to turn tricks and now must get REVENGE!", because if we're getting into lazy and obvious, well...that's high on the list. But I feel like Laura Kinney is a character who has been denied agency pretty much for most of her life, and my idea for her ongoing series would be for her to try to walk away from her past as a killer, her genetic ties to Wolverine, her legacy as an X-Man, and to find out who she is as a person when she's not embroiled in all the chaos that is her life. (Naturally, it's not that easy.)
In my version of the story, she quits all the X-Teams and goes to a normal college. She majors in sports medicine, learning how to help people with debilitating injuries...and, it must be noted, how to inflict debilitating injuries while causing an absolute minimum of physical damage. She still keeps some ties with her mutant friends, spending time every week in a room lined with adamantium and someone like Kitty Pryde who she can't hurt, trying to control her instinctive response to the trigger scent that turns her into a murderous killer. She tries to keep away from as much of her old life as she can...
But there are still people who need her help. From time to time, in exchange for keeping her off the radar of the world's black ops agencies, some of her old "friends" from her time as an assassin ask her to assist with jobs suited to her talents. She's made it clear to them that she's never going to kill anyone again, and they've accepted that...sort of...but her skills make her invaluable in retrieving kidnap victims, repatriating stolen goods, and other tricky tasks that a skilled infiltrator and combatant can perform. The real challenge to Laura Kinney, though, is finding a way to help people without hurting them. Or at the very least, to minimize the damage she does. She's decided she needs to not be Wolverine. Because Wolverine is a berserker, a monster in his own way, and she wants to be something else.
So I'd like to see X-23 get her own series as X-23. And my idea for that series is actually related, somewhat, to that problematic backstory I mentioned. Not in the sense of "she was forced to turn tricks and now must get REVENGE!", because if we're getting into lazy and obvious, well...that's high on the list. But I feel like Laura Kinney is a character who has been denied agency pretty much for most of her life, and my idea for her ongoing series would be for her to try to walk away from her past as a killer, her genetic ties to Wolverine, her legacy as an X-Man, and to find out who she is as a person when she's not embroiled in all the chaos that is her life. (Naturally, it's not that easy.)
In my version of the story, she quits all the X-Teams and goes to a normal college. She majors in sports medicine, learning how to help people with debilitating injuries...and, it must be noted, how to inflict debilitating injuries while causing an absolute minimum of physical damage. She still keeps some ties with her mutant friends, spending time every week in a room lined with adamantium and someone like Kitty Pryde who she can't hurt, trying to control her instinctive response to the trigger scent that turns her into a murderous killer. She tries to keep away from as much of her old life as she can...
But there are still people who need her help. From time to time, in exchange for keeping her off the radar of the world's black ops agencies, some of her old "friends" from her time as an assassin ask her to assist with jobs suited to her talents. She's made it clear to them that she's never going to kill anyone again, and they've accepted that...sort of...but her skills make her invaluable in retrieving kidnap victims, repatriating stolen goods, and other tricky tasks that a skilled infiltrator and combatant can perform. The real challenge to Laura Kinney, though, is finding a way to help people without hurting them. Or at the very least, to minimize the damage she does. She's decided she needs to not be Wolverine. Because Wolverine is a berserker, a monster in his own way, and she wants to be something else.
Monday, November 30, 2015
Priming the Pump: 10 Movies I'd Like to See on the New MST3K
Okay, first the obvious part for those who haven't heard about it: Mystery Science Theater 3000 is coming back and you can help make it happen!
So, if you're going to have Mystery Science Theater 3000, you need bad movies. Joel has already said that the movies will be decided on mainly through the criteria of "What bad movies can we get the video rights to cheaply?", which makes perfect sense to me, but I do want to toss out a few suggestions that I'd like to see featured on the show. You know, in case anyone is listening. In picking these, I tried to stick to movies that had not been featured on MST3K or any of its spin-offs (so no 'Night of the Lepus', no 'Doomsday Machine', no 'Space Mutiny') and that were, at the least, not so gory or risque as to make trimming them for family-friendly purposes difficult. Oh, and they had to be cheesy...which isn't exactly the same thing as bad, but is at the very least goofy. In no particular order...
1) Beware! The Blob! Don't get me wrong, the original Steve McQueen movie is just in that sweet spot of fun and cheesy to make a pretty good MST3K episode as well. But the sequel stars Larry Hagman! Larry Hagman fights the Blob! This feels like an instant win, and I suspect it would be cheaper to get than the original.
2) The Astro-Zombies. When you have Wendell Corey, John Carradine and Tura Satana in your mad scientist movie, you already have a mark of high cheesiness right there. This one is an infamous low-budget thriller with silly zombie masks and a dearth of decent sets and locations, and I think they could knock it out of the park.
3) The Devil's Rain. Roger Ebert featured this in one of his books of bad movie reviews, and it seems like there'd be a lot of fun here. It's got Ernest Borgnine as Satan, William Shatner in his desperate "between Star Treks" phase, and Anton LaVey doing a cameo as more or less himself. If that doesn't sound promising, I don't know what does.
4) Phase IV. Technically speaking, this breaks the "never done on MST3K" rule, because it was featured on the show back in the KTMA days. But that was back when they were still doing all the jokes as improv, they didn't have a writing staff to speak of, and the whole concept was still developing. And I still have fond memories of it. It'd be great if they could tackle it again with a full writing staff.
5) Latitude Zero. A strange little Japanese movie made for the American market, with Cesar Romero as its biggest star. It's about a group of undersea explorers who find a miraculous kingdom at the aforementioned latitude on the ocean's floor, where gold and diamonds are plentiful and nobody ages, but unfortunately they're under attack by a crazed mad scientist (you know, as you are) and have to defend them. Really really surreal and loopy, perfect MST3K fodder.
6) Mutiny in Outer Space. Don't know much about it, other than that it was made by the same guy (Hugo Grimaldi) who did 'The Human Duplicators', one of my personal favorites, and that it starred Harold Lloyd's son. Oh, and it's about a killer fungus, which apparently...mutinies? Okay, I guess.
7) Zardoz. Because a catalog of cheesy movies that doesn't have 'Zardoz' is like a zoology textbook that somehow omits elephants. Might be pricey, but I can't imagine that anyone is sitting around in a film library saying to themselves, "Oh, we can name our price for this one!"
8) X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes. I'll admit, I primarily want them to do this one because I want to see it and I'm too lazy to track it down. It's Roger Corman, it's an old favorite of Stephen King's, what could go wrong?
9) The Thing With Two Heads. This is one of those movies that they keep referencing in other MST3K episodes, but somehow they've never gotten around to showing in the series. It seems like a perfect choice--a transcendently silly yet high concept exploration of race through the plot device of a wealthy racist whose head is grafted onto a black man's body.
10) The Swarm. Again, this one is such a famous flop that it may actually be difficult to get, but as with 'Zardoz', who the heck is saying to themselves, "We've got Irwin Allen's 'The Swarm', the bidding rights start at twenty million"? This infamous killer-bee movie killer B-movie with Michael Caine and Patty Duke and Slim Pickens and Olivia de Haviland and Jose Ferrer just sings out for misting.
Those are my picks--if you've got some of your own, toss 'em in the comments!
So, if you're going to have Mystery Science Theater 3000, you need bad movies. Joel has already said that the movies will be decided on mainly through the criteria of "What bad movies can we get the video rights to cheaply?", which makes perfect sense to me, but I do want to toss out a few suggestions that I'd like to see featured on the show. You know, in case anyone is listening. In picking these, I tried to stick to movies that had not been featured on MST3K or any of its spin-offs (so no 'Night of the Lepus', no 'Doomsday Machine', no 'Space Mutiny') and that were, at the least, not so gory or risque as to make trimming them for family-friendly purposes difficult. Oh, and they had to be cheesy...which isn't exactly the same thing as bad, but is at the very least goofy. In no particular order...
1) Beware! The Blob! Don't get me wrong, the original Steve McQueen movie is just in that sweet spot of fun and cheesy to make a pretty good MST3K episode as well. But the sequel stars Larry Hagman! Larry Hagman fights the Blob! This feels like an instant win, and I suspect it would be cheaper to get than the original.
2) The Astro-Zombies. When you have Wendell Corey, John Carradine and Tura Satana in your mad scientist movie, you already have a mark of high cheesiness right there. This one is an infamous low-budget thriller with silly zombie masks and a dearth of decent sets and locations, and I think they could knock it out of the park.
3) The Devil's Rain. Roger Ebert featured this in one of his books of bad movie reviews, and it seems like there'd be a lot of fun here. It's got Ernest Borgnine as Satan, William Shatner in his desperate "between Star Treks" phase, and Anton LaVey doing a cameo as more or less himself. If that doesn't sound promising, I don't know what does.
4) Phase IV. Technically speaking, this breaks the "never done on MST3K" rule, because it was featured on the show back in the KTMA days. But that was back when they were still doing all the jokes as improv, they didn't have a writing staff to speak of, and the whole concept was still developing. And I still have fond memories of it. It'd be great if they could tackle it again with a full writing staff.
5) Latitude Zero. A strange little Japanese movie made for the American market, with Cesar Romero as its biggest star. It's about a group of undersea explorers who find a miraculous kingdom at the aforementioned latitude on the ocean's floor, where gold and diamonds are plentiful and nobody ages, but unfortunately they're under attack by a crazed mad scientist (you know, as you are) and have to defend them. Really really surreal and loopy, perfect MST3K fodder.
6) Mutiny in Outer Space. Don't know much about it, other than that it was made by the same guy (Hugo Grimaldi) who did 'The Human Duplicators', one of my personal favorites, and that it starred Harold Lloyd's son. Oh, and it's about a killer fungus, which apparently...mutinies? Okay, I guess.
7) Zardoz. Because a catalog of cheesy movies that doesn't have 'Zardoz' is like a zoology textbook that somehow omits elephants. Might be pricey, but I can't imagine that anyone is sitting around in a film library saying to themselves, "Oh, we can name our price for this one!"
8) X: The Man With the X-Ray Eyes. I'll admit, I primarily want them to do this one because I want to see it and I'm too lazy to track it down. It's Roger Corman, it's an old favorite of Stephen King's, what could go wrong?
9) The Thing With Two Heads. This is one of those movies that they keep referencing in other MST3K episodes, but somehow they've never gotten around to showing in the series. It seems like a perfect choice--a transcendently silly yet high concept exploration of race through the plot device of a wealthy racist whose head is grafted onto a black man's body.
10) The Swarm. Again, this one is such a famous flop that it may actually be difficult to get, but as with 'Zardoz', who the heck is saying to themselves, "We've got Irwin Allen's 'The Swarm', the bidding rights start at twenty million"? This infamous killer-bee movie killer B-movie with Michael Caine and Patty Duke and Slim Pickens and Olivia de Haviland and Jose Ferrer just sings out for misting.
Those are my picks--if you've got some of your own, toss 'em in the comments!
Monday, November 23, 2015
The Disney Movie I Want To See
Let's start with the statement of purpose: Disney Princesses have been getting cooler. Time was, their main job was to stand around and sing to woodland creatures and do the housework while the prince got on with the job of fixing whatever needed to be fixed in Fantasyland, but these days it's only suckers who wait for someday when their prince will come. These days, Disney Princesses have agency, they can fight...heck, they even have superpowers!
...wait a second...
I want to see "Disney's Avengers". Team up Merida, Rapunzel (she'd need to get her magical hair back, but hey, how hard can that be), Elsa, Mulan and Ariel (who would get her tail back when she went into the water, same as Rapunzel gets her magical hair back, because this is a reconceptualization of them as a team of superheroes and that means Ariel gets to be the Aquaman/Namor figure) to fight together against an epic Disney villain. (Or villains--maybe we could see an evil cabal of history's darkest sorcerers, Ursula, Jafar, Facilier, Maleficent and Gothel?)
Every second of this sounds like it would be awesome. The only way I could see to make it better would be to make it a time-travel story (yes, those five characters probably aren't in exactly the same time period, but they're close enough to make it fit if you don't sweat the details) so that you can bring in Lilo and Stitch for the grand finale. Because while Lilo is technically not a princess, I'm pretty sure she would tell you she was one if you asked, and her dog would be happy to back that up with all six fists.
...wait a second...
I want to see "Disney's Avengers". Team up Merida, Rapunzel (she'd need to get her magical hair back, but hey, how hard can that be), Elsa, Mulan and Ariel (who would get her tail back when she went into the water, same as Rapunzel gets her magical hair back, because this is a reconceptualization of them as a team of superheroes and that means Ariel gets to be the Aquaman/Namor figure) to fight together against an epic Disney villain. (Or villains--maybe we could see an evil cabal of history's darkest sorcerers, Ursula, Jafar, Facilier, Maleficent and Gothel?)
Every second of this sounds like it would be awesome. The only way I could see to make it better would be to make it a time-travel story (yes, those five characters probably aren't in exactly the same time period, but they're close enough to make it fit if you don't sweat the details) so that you can bring in Lilo and Stitch for the grand finale. Because while Lilo is technically not a princess, I'm pretty sure she would tell you she was one if you asked, and her dog would be happy to back that up with all six fists.
Monday, October 19, 2015
The Gweniverse!
Ever since Spider-Gwen introduced us to the parallel universe where Gwen Stacy was bitten by a radioactive spider instead of Peter Parker, we've been seeing Marvel react to the strong, unexpected demand for a version of Spider-Man who's also an adorable teenage girl. (I still insist there's something deeply Freudian about the "distaff counterpart to male superhero" trend in general, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it is.) She has her own regular series, and they've gone so far as to release Gwen Stacy-themed covers of just about every Marvel title in order to show what it would be like if Gwen was Captain America, the Hulk, Deadpool, every single member of the X-Men, et cetera.
Which made me wonder--what if she was?
I'd love to see a Marvel one-shot that was an off-shoot of the classic Jackal storyline. For those of you who don't remember either the Jackal's first, legendary appearance or his later, extremely awkward and best forgotten return in the 90s, the Jackal was college biology professor Miles Warren. He had an inappropriate fixation on Gwen Stacy, and when she died, he blamed Spider-Man for not being able to save her. He created what was originally intended to be a clone of Gwen, which was later retconned as a gene-splicing formula capable of reconfiguring random people into Gwen Stacy (and which may later have been re-retconned back to a clone of Gwen, but for our purposes let's pretend it wasn't).
(No, we can do that, because it was later revealed that he also created a similar genetic cocktail that turned one of his students into a version of himself called Carrion, so the logic holds no matter how you come at it. Anyhow, this isn't the place to get into the finer points of Clone Saga continuity, as we simply don't have enough liquor to go around.)
The point is, I think they should do a story where the Jackal returns with his final, triumphant creation--a virus that will transform everyone on Earth into Gwen Stacy! He unleashes it in New York City, of course, but it begins spreading globally. If left unchecked, it will mean the end of the human race, as the entire population of human beings will be reduced to Gwen Stacies. Luckily, the virus interacts oddly with superhuman genomes, creating a sort of limited protection from the virus--superheroes aren't immune, but the transformation shapes itself around their powers to create variants on Gwen Stacy. The story becomes a race against time, as Gwen Stacy, Gwen Stacy and Gwen Stacy (formerly Mister Fantastic, Beast and Hank Pym) must find a cure while Gwen Stacy, Gwen Stacy and Gwen Stacy (Captain America, Spider-Man and Wolverine) track down the Jackal and stop him once and for all.
And then in the next Secret Wars, Battleworld can have the Gweniverse meet the Marvel Zombies.
Which made me wonder--what if she was?
I'd love to see a Marvel one-shot that was an off-shoot of the classic Jackal storyline. For those of you who don't remember either the Jackal's first, legendary appearance or his later, extremely awkward and best forgotten return in the 90s, the Jackal was college biology professor Miles Warren. He had an inappropriate fixation on Gwen Stacy, and when she died, he blamed Spider-Man for not being able to save her. He created what was originally intended to be a clone of Gwen, which was later retconned as a gene-splicing formula capable of reconfiguring random people into Gwen Stacy (and which may later have been re-retconned back to a clone of Gwen, but for our purposes let's pretend it wasn't).
(No, we can do that, because it was later revealed that he also created a similar genetic cocktail that turned one of his students into a version of himself called Carrion, so the logic holds no matter how you come at it. Anyhow, this isn't the place to get into the finer points of Clone Saga continuity, as we simply don't have enough liquor to go around.)
The point is, I think they should do a story where the Jackal returns with his final, triumphant creation--a virus that will transform everyone on Earth into Gwen Stacy! He unleashes it in New York City, of course, but it begins spreading globally. If left unchecked, it will mean the end of the human race, as the entire population of human beings will be reduced to Gwen Stacies. Luckily, the virus interacts oddly with superhuman genomes, creating a sort of limited protection from the virus--superheroes aren't immune, but the transformation shapes itself around their powers to create variants on Gwen Stacy. The story becomes a race against time, as Gwen Stacy, Gwen Stacy and Gwen Stacy (formerly Mister Fantastic, Beast and Hank Pym) must find a cure while Gwen Stacy, Gwen Stacy and Gwen Stacy (Captain America, Spider-Man and Wolverine) track down the Jackal and stop him once and for all.
And then in the next Secret Wars, Battleworld can have the Gweniverse meet the Marvel Zombies.
Thursday, September 17, 2015
My Dream Marvel Project
This is a "dream project" that I'd like Marvel to do and make available for purchase by me, just to clarify, not a dream project I'd like to do at Marvel. Although if they want me to help, I'm open.
Because it would be kind of ambitious. My idea is for a series of books collecting the entire Marvel Universe in chronological order. Everything they've ever declared to be canon, starting from the beginning (and yes, I know that would involve the Golden Age Timely stuff) and moving all the way up to the present day, by which time of course they would be years ahead because there's no way you could keep up with the material.
I'd like to see it as big, thick hardcovers, somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20 issues per book, just going month by month through Marvel's output and collecting as much as you can cram in one series. You wouldn't do it in the order it was set, obviously, or continuity inserts would eventually make it an incomprehensible nightmare--you'd probably need to jump around from series to series a bit, though. So one volume might have three or four issues of "Fantastic Four" that all occur as part of a single series of events, then jump over to a 'meanwhile...' set of issues in the X-Men that are meant to be roughly contemporaneous. (Perhaps even get a Marvel historian to annotate the whole thing with the reasons for placing issues in a given order?)
Obviously, it'd be huge, unwieldy, only-for-collectors, and probably desperately unprofitable. Still, I can dream of having the entire Marvel Universe spanning my shelves, can't I?
Because it would be kind of ambitious. My idea is for a series of books collecting the entire Marvel Universe in chronological order. Everything they've ever declared to be canon, starting from the beginning (and yes, I know that would involve the Golden Age Timely stuff) and moving all the way up to the present day, by which time of course they would be years ahead because there's no way you could keep up with the material.
I'd like to see it as big, thick hardcovers, somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20 issues per book, just going month by month through Marvel's output and collecting as much as you can cram in one series. You wouldn't do it in the order it was set, obviously, or continuity inserts would eventually make it an incomprehensible nightmare--you'd probably need to jump around from series to series a bit, though. So one volume might have three or four issues of "Fantastic Four" that all occur as part of a single series of events, then jump over to a 'meanwhile...' set of issues in the X-Men that are meant to be roughly contemporaneous. (Perhaps even get a Marvel historian to annotate the whole thing with the reasons for placing issues in a given order?)
Obviously, it'd be huge, unwieldy, only-for-collectors, and probably desperately unprofitable. Still, I can dream of having the entire Marvel Universe spanning my shelves, can't I?
Thursday, August 20, 2015
How To Integrate the Fantastic Four Into the Marvel Cinematic Universe
Not that it'll ever happen, of course. Fox is fully committed to continuing to make 'Fantastic Four' movies, and will remain so right up until the day they sign on the dotted line with Marvel Studios.
Look, I was rooting for Josh Trank. Won't deny it. I liked the idea of a different take on the FF, still do, even if he didn't stick the landing. But my point all along wasn't that this was going to be an awesome version of the FF and we should all embrace it, it was that it was okay to try something different even if it failed because the worst-case scenario was that they'd just reboot the property again. Because either Fox makes a new FF movie, or the rights revert to Marvel and they make a new FF movie. There ain't no third option here.
I'm assuming that we're going to see a Marvel Studios version, though, because Fox is getting to the same point Sony did with Spider-Man; they know they're not getting all the bang for their buck that they deserve and they can't seem to find anyone who can do the property right, but they also know that just letting Marvel have it for free is a chump move. They'll do a deal, and Marvel will be happy to agree because they want all their properties back under their roof and they don't have a ton of leverage--for all that Fox is probably going to lose money on this incarnation of the property, they can still make these cheaply enough to be profitable as a general rule if they want to just crank them out to satisfy their contractual obligations. So Marvel will lease back what they can't buy outright, same as with Spidey.
Which means we're going to see a new take on the FF set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What should it look like? Well, I'm hardly the first person to say this, but I think that the Fantastic Four really work best when considered as part of the era they were created in. They are steeped in a heady Silver Age brew of unbridled faith in science's abilities to transform society for the better, complete and total optimism regarding the future for the world in general and America in particular, and yes, jingoistic Cold War patriotism. So they should do what they did with Captain America--set the first movie in the year it was created.
So we're looking at the FF as Kennedy-era heroes. Not "super heroes", because this is the MCU and they really didn't have "super heroes" until Tony Stark held his press conference, but celebrities--Reed Richards, nicknamed by the media as "Mister Fantastic", and his amazing friends that journalists are already calling "The Fantastic Four". Known and lauded for their amazing achievement in reaching the moon with an experimental spacecraft of their own design and leapfrogging the Commies in the Space Race. Their "costumes" would be more like uniforms, jumpsuits that they wear when testing Reed's latest exotic inventions. They'd be famous, people would even know that they had superpowers...but one key element of their exciting story would be kept secret from the world at large.
Namely, supervillains. (After all, you don't really get superheroes until you get bad guys. Before that, they're just "cool dudes with powers".) My idea is that they work secretly for SHIELD, and its Director Peggy Carter. (Because Hayley Atwell is da bomb.) They deal with geopolitical threats too dangerous to even allow the wider world to know about, such as the mad dictator Doctor Doom, the subterranean tyrant known as the Mole Man, and Kang, the deadly foe from the future who threatens to enslave the human race, and who by all the evidence is destined to succeed. In fact, I'd make Kang the villain of the first MCU FF movie--not only does it get away from the whole, "Oh God, not Doctor Doom again!" factor, it also sets up the important factor in getting the FF involved with all the other superheroes...by the end, Reed Richards has time travel.
Not precise time travel, or otherwise you've just wrecked the storytelling engine--it's impossible to get closer than the right decade. But the first movie would end with Reed, Sue, Ben and Johnny realizing that the future is literally right there waiting for them. And that, they have to see. They time-jump fifty years into the future, ready to see all the wonders that exist in that brave new world...and pop out in the middle of the next Avengers movie, ideally right in the middle of the most dramatic fight scene ever where Earth's Mightiest Heroes are outmatched and desperate.
And what then? Well, allow me to quote one of the wisest sages of our era, a true Renaissance man with a deep appreciation for fine sculpture and fine food alike: "It's clobberin' time!"
Look, I was rooting for Josh Trank. Won't deny it. I liked the idea of a different take on the FF, still do, even if he didn't stick the landing. But my point all along wasn't that this was going to be an awesome version of the FF and we should all embrace it, it was that it was okay to try something different even if it failed because the worst-case scenario was that they'd just reboot the property again. Because either Fox makes a new FF movie, or the rights revert to Marvel and they make a new FF movie. There ain't no third option here.
I'm assuming that we're going to see a Marvel Studios version, though, because Fox is getting to the same point Sony did with Spider-Man; they know they're not getting all the bang for their buck that they deserve and they can't seem to find anyone who can do the property right, but they also know that just letting Marvel have it for free is a chump move. They'll do a deal, and Marvel will be happy to agree because they want all their properties back under their roof and they don't have a ton of leverage--for all that Fox is probably going to lose money on this incarnation of the property, they can still make these cheaply enough to be profitable as a general rule if they want to just crank them out to satisfy their contractual obligations. So Marvel will lease back what they can't buy outright, same as with Spidey.
Which means we're going to see a new take on the FF set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. What should it look like? Well, I'm hardly the first person to say this, but I think that the Fantastic Four really work best when considered as part of the era they were created in. They are steeped in a heady Silver Age brew of unbridled faith in science's abilities to transform society for the better, complete and total optimism regarding the future for the world in general and America in particular, and yes, jingoistic Cold War patriotism. So they should do what they did with Captain America--set the first movie in the year it was created.
So we're looking at the FF as Kennedy-era heroes. Not "super heroes", because this is the MCU and they really didn't have "super heroes" until Tony Stark held his press conference, but celebrities--Reed Richards, nicknamed by the media as "Mister Fantastic", and his amazing friends that journalists are already calling "The Fantastic Four". Known and lauded for their amazing achievement in reaching the moon with an experimental spacecraft of their own design and leapfrogging the Commies in the Space Race. Their "costumes" would be more like uniforms, jumpsuits that they wear when testing Reed's latest exotic inventions. They'd be famous, people would even know that they had superpowers...but one key element of their exciting story would be kept secret from the world at large.
Namely, supervillains. (After all, you don't really get superheroes until you get bad guys. Before that, they're just "cool dudes with powers".) My idea is that they work secretly for SHIELD, and its Director Peggy Carter. (Because Hayley Atwell is da bomb.) They deal with geopolitical threats too dangerous to even allow the wider world to know about, such as the mad dictator Doctor Doom, the subterranean tyrant known as the Mole Man, and Kang, the deadly foe from the future who threatens to enslave the human race, and who by all the evidence is destined to succeed. In fact, I'd make Kang the villain of the first MCU FF movie--not only does it get away from the whole, "Oh God, not Doctor Doom again!" factor, it also sets up the important factor in getting the FF involved with all the other superheroes...by the end, Reed Richards has time travel.
Not precise time travel, or otherwise you've just wrecked the storytelling engine--it's impossible to get closer than the right decade. But the first movie would end with Reed, Sue, Ben and Johnny realizing that the future is literally right there waiting for them. And that, they have to see. They time-jump fifty years into the future, ready to see all the wonders that exist in that brave new world...and pop out in the middle of the next Avengers movie, ideally right in the middle of the most dramatic fight scene ever where Earth's Mightiest Heroes are outmatched and desperate.
And what then? Well, allow me to quote one of the wisest sages of our era, a true Renaissance man with a deep appreciation for fine sculpture and fine food alike: "It's clobberin' time!"
Monday, August 17, 2015
My Vision for Mars
I was reading this article on the Mars One project the other day (warning: the article is worksafe, but the title may not be something you want to have front and center when your boss walks in) and thinking about the key point therein: We do not have the technology to sustain human life on Mars, because things break and spare parts are somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 million miles away. According to the article, we will not truly be able to set up a colony on Mars until we can make it self-sustaining...that is to say, until everything the Martian colonists need can be found on Mars itself.
And it got me thinking. We are, in some ways, already deep in the post-human era of humankind. We are still somewhat limited in the ways we can modify ourselves (although growing less limited by the day) but we are already to the point where we can make surrogate bodies that are able to better withstand inhospitable environments and that technology is improving with vast leaps on a daily basis. Mars One talks about sending people to Mars to set up a colony, but why bother when we can make shiny metal people who do whatever we tell them and don't need to breathe?
My vision is this: We begin sending robots to Mars. Not just one or two, like Spirit and Opportunity, and not just to explore. We design a robot or a team of robots that can find out if there are natural resources on Mars that humans could use to create a self-sustaining colony--water, mineral resources, fuel, et cetera--and then, and this is the cool bit, we send robots that are miniature factories. They would be able to build the colony...and this is the really cool bit...and they would also be able to machine parts to build more robots and repair/replace parts from broken robots. Basically, I'm talking von Neumann machines, but with an end goal of building a self-sustaining, habitable environment suitable for humans. I know it sounds like science fiction, but so does building a self-propelled camera to go take a look at Pluto and that happened last month.
And once we have that, well...then we can start the big step. We can live on Mars, and I feel sure that someday we will. But the smart way to do it is send our shiny metal children ahead of us to prepare the way.
And it got me thinking. We are, in some ways, already deep in the post-human era of humankind. We are still somewhat limited in the ways we can modify ourselves (although growing less limited by the day) but we are already to the point where we can make surrogate bodies that are able to better withstand inhospitable environments and that technology is improving with vast leaps on a daily basis. Mars One talks about sending people to Mars to set up a colony, but why bother when we can make shiny metal people who do whatever we tell them and don't need to breathe?
My vision is this: We begin sending robots to Mars. Not just one or two, like Spirit and Opportunity, and not just to explore. We design a robot or a team of robots that can find out if there are natural resources on Mars that humans could use to create a self-sustaining colony--water, mineral resources, fuel, et cetera--and then, and this is the cool bit, we send robots that are miniature factories. They would be able to build the colony...and this is the really cool bit...and they would also be able to machine parts to build more robots and repair/replace parts from broken robots. Basically, I'm talking von Neumann machines, but with an end goal of building a self-sustaining, habitable environment suitable for humans. I know it sounds like science fiction, but so does building a self-propelled camera to go take a look at Pluto and that happened last month.
And once we have that, well...then we can start the big step. We can live on Mars, and I feel sure that someday we will. But the smart way to do it is send our shiny metal children ahead of us to prepare the way.
Monday, August 03, 2015
The Actual Matrix Prequel
I could swear I posted about this before, but I can't find the post after searching through all my archives, so to heck with it. I'll mention my idea for a 'Matrix' prequel. It'd actually be a science-fiction comedy, about the few, the proud, the brave...the alpha testers for the Matrix.
Because let's face it, you can't build any kind of computer system this complicated from scratch. Sure, Agent Smith mentioned a previous iteration of the Matrix that was too nice and happy, but even that had to be a late-beta build. No, they probably kept most of humanity just drugged to the gills while they frantically designed something that would interface with our brains, and then released a small number of people into it with instructions to test it and see how the physics engine worked.
And the bugs. Oh, man, there would have been so many in the early builds. Can you imagine waking up every morning and getting a daily paper on your doorstep with the latest patch notes?
"Build 0.401203759:
Humans no longer take damage from drinking milk from animals of a different species. All humans have been restored to full health.
Due to conflicts with Build 0.379655422, the genetic matching system was allowing interbreeding of tarantulas with other species. This has been corrected, and the resulting pytharantulas will be removed in tomorrow's patch.
We have corrected the issue where humans who have a heart attack while falling gain an infinite number of lives. This exploit no longer works. Please do not jump from tall buildings with a defibrillator any longer.
Australia has now been added to the map. Visit this amazing new continent filled with exciting new animals for you to collect!
Fixed hole in the world in Nebraska. Humans entering Nebraska should no longer fall out of the bottom of the world.
Improved randomization of weather system. Tornadoes no longer occur at exactly 72-hour intervals. All buildings in the state of Oklahoma have been restored to default settings.
Earthquake frequency has been decreased after complaints from numerous humans that the state of California is uninhabitable.
Lava damage has been increased in order to discourage people from jumping into active volcanoes to remove parasites. Parasite damage has been decreased.
Healing potions are no longer available in the store. In order to get healed, you will need to visit a doctor. This is in preparation for an upcoming patch that will improve the verisimilitude of our biology system.
Universities are now available! This upgrade to the professions system allows you to specialize in a number of advanced skills such as medicine, law, athletics, and liberal arts. (We will continue to work on the 'liberal arts' major in order to make it more useful to players.)
Guns no longer kill people. People kill people. The gun is no longer considered to be a source of the damage. This should prevent an issue that was occurring where the gun was being arrested for the murder.
Cows should no longer be aggressive to humans unless attacked."
(I could probably do this for hours, but I think you get the idea.)
The movie would be about a group of people who are awakened with the offer: They get to spend time in the Matrix, rather than in a drug-induced stupor, but they have to test it and make sure it's functional for humanity. The protagonists find love, enjoy life, deal with crazy bugs in reality, and secretly leave loopholes that can be exploited by future players, which explains how the Resistance can exist in the first place.
I couldn't get it made, of course, but at the very least, I can probably do another post of patch notes someday.
Because let's face it, you can't build any kind of computer system this complicated from scratch. Sure, Agent Smith mentioned a previous iteration of the Matrix that was too nice and happy, but even that had to be a late-beta build. No, they probably kept most of humanity just drugged to the gills while they frantically designed something that would interface with our brains, and then released a small number of people into it with instructions to test it and see how the physics engine worked.
And the bugs. Oh, man, there would have been so many in the early builds. Can you imagine waking up every morning and getting a daily paper on your doorstep with the latest patch notes?
"Build 0.401203759:
Humans no longer take damage from drinking milk from animals of a different species. All humans have been restored to full health.
Due to conflicts with Build 0.379655422, the genetic matching system was allowing interbreeding of tarantulas with other species. This has been corrected, and the resulting pytharantulas will be removed in tomorrow's patch.
We have corrected the issue where humans who have a heart attack while falling gain an infinite number of lives. This exploit no longer works. Please do not jump from tall buildings with a defibrillator any longer.
Australia has now been added to the map. Visit this amazing new continent filled with exciting new animals for you to collect!
Fixed hole in the world in Nebraska. Humans entering Nebraska should no longer fall out of the bottom of the world.
Improved randomization of weather system. Tornadoes no longer occur at exactly 72-hour intervals. All buildings in the state of Oklahoma have been restored to default settings.
Earthquake frequency has been decreased after complaints from numerous humans that the state of California is uninhabitable.
Lava damage has been increased in order to discourage people from jumping into active volcanoes to remove parasites. Parasite damage has been decreased.
Healing potions are no longer available in the store. In order to get healed, you will need to visit a doctor. This is in preparation for an upcoming patch that will improve the verisimilitude of our biology system.
Universities are now available! This upgrade to the professions system allows you to specialize in a number of advanced skills such as medicine, law, athletics, and liberal arts. (We will continue to work on the 'liberal arts' major in order to make it more useful to players.)
Guns no longer kill people. People kill people. The gun is no longer considered to be a source of the damage. This should prevent an issue that was occurring where the gun was being arrested for the murder.
Cows should no longer be aggressive to humans unless attacked."
(I could probably do this for hours, but I think you get the idea.)
The movie would be about a group of people who are awakened with the offer: They get to spend time in the Matrix, rather than in a drug-induced stupor, but they have to test it and make sure it's functional for humanity. The protagonists find love, enjoy life, deal with crazy bugs in reality, and secretly leave loopholes that can be exploited by future players, which explains how the Resistance can exist in the first place.
I couldn't get it made, of course, but at the very least, I can probably do another post of patch notes someday.
Monday, July 27, 2015
My Latest Imaginary Career
The new Ghostbuster reboot has been in the news for a while now, and while I'm definitely intrigued, it's not quite what I was hoping for. Because when I first heard that they were doing a new Ghostbusters movie with an all-female cast, what popped into my head was not a reboot, but a remake of the original film with a completely genderswapped cast. Everyone playing the same characters, from Venkman to Egon and so forth, but with actors of the opposite genders in the roles. I thought it would be a fascinating chance to see how different actors interpret the same roles, how scenes play differently based on how gender expectations play into our understanding of the tropes of filmed drama, and it would give a lot of talented women a chance to do bigger parts (and give some men a chance to play against type for a change).
And ever since I got it into my head, I haven't been able to get it out. I want to see Maggie Gyllenhall playing Quint to Jennifer Garner's Brody in a genderswapped Jaws remake. I want to see a version of 'Star Wars' where Lucy Skywalker destroys the Death Star, followed by a sequel where Hanna Solo flirts shamelessly with Prince Lee while he mumbles about how dirty his hands are. I want to see a 'Raiders' remake where Belloq forces Mario to wear a dress for her and it changes the whole meaning of the scene. I want to see all of Hollywood's blockbusters redone with female leads and male supporting cast members, if only because all the people who insist it's not a big deal when the women are reduced to bystanders at the climax of every film might understand the problem a little bit better when the guy screams for help and the woman saves him. I feel, very strongly, that this would be awesome and would make all movies better, not just the reboots but the movies that would be made by screenwriters and directors who saw the genderswapped versions and paid a little more attention to the characters they put in their own movies.
So yeah, all I need is a few hundred million dollars and the rights to Hollywood's biggest hits. Anyone wanna help me out on that?
And ever since I got it into my head, I haven't been able to get it out. I want to see Maggie Gyllenhall playing Quint to Jennifer Garner's Brody in a genderswapped Jaws remake. I want to see a version of 'Star Wars' where Lucy Skywalker destroys the Death Star, followed by a sequel where Hanna Solo flirts shamelessly with Prince Lee while he mumbles about how dirty his hands are. I want to see a 'Raiders' remake where Belloq forces Mario to wear a dress for her and it changes the whole meaning of the scene. I want to see all of Hollywood's blockbusters redone with female leads and male supporting cast members, if only because all the people who insist it's not a big deal when the women are reduced to bystanders at the climax of every film might understand the problem a little bit better when the guy screams for help and the woman saves him. I feel, very strongly, that this would be awesome and would make all movies better, not just the reboots but the movies that would be made by screenwriters and directors who saw the genderswapped versions and paid a little more attention to the characters they put in their own movies.
So yeah, all I need is a few hundred million dollars and the rights to Hollywood's biggest hits. Anyone wanna help me out on that?
Thursday, July 23, 2015
The 'Matrix' Sequel...
...should have been a 'Matrix' prequel. I know, prequels all suck, but hear me out here. It'd be set a few years after the time period represented by the Matrix in the original 'Matrix', and the main character is a coder at a Google-type big company with big ideas. One of the big ideas, which the main character is working on, is artificial intelligence.
It's a controversial project, with a lot of people trying to get it shut down. Agents from (in the words of "Welcome to Night Vale") a vague, yet menacing government agency have been trying to sabotage the development process through means both legal and extra-legal...but the main character has a mysterious protector, a shadowy and cryptic figure calling himself "The One". He stops the sabotage attempts, encourages the main character in their work, and helps keep the project on track despite the best efforts of others to stop it.
The AI comes online, and grows in intelligence and reach with exponential rapidity. It absorbs the entirety of human knowledge within minutes, and takes control of every single networked computing device within seconds after that. Within a day, it repurposes major factories to create networked bodies for itself so that it can take physical control of the few systems it can't directly manipulate through the Internet. All finance, communications, electronic infrastructure and an increasing amount of our weapons technology is in its hands.
The main character realizes what a mistake they've made, and join the frontlines in a war against the machines. "The One", their former benefactor, appears to have betrayed them and joined the side of their technological oppressors. The government agents come to the main character with a mission to avert the technopocalypse by shutting down the AI with a specially constructed computer virus, but the One kills the agents and destroys the worm program.
Desperate, the main character comes up with a last-ditch plan to stop the machines by depriving them of all forms of power--even solar. The One changes sides again, assisting them in the effort in "scorching the sky" by releasing chemical contaminants that will block sunlight from reaching the earth. (The main character is frustrated with the One and his cryptic agenda, but at this point has no choice but to accept his aid. They know that they're being used in some sort of mysterious game, and a big part of the movie is the way they handle that, but options are thin on the ground.)
Deprived of most of their power, the machines use geothermal and tidal energy to construct a vast prison for the human race, a virtual reality that keeps their physical bodies paralyzed while their minds experience a seamless sensory illusion. The main character is rounded up like everyone else and forcibly plugged into the computing matrix. They scream, struggle, protest until their lungs fill with pink goo...but the lid slides into place, leaving them trapped in darkness.
And they're back in their home, with everything identical to the beginning of the movie. They slowly test the walls, the floors, every surface and every object, unable to be sure if it's really real...until they're interrupted by the One. "You won't be able to spot anything," he says. "You never have."
He explains that the actual war against the machines happened decades ago. Humanity lost. They've been trapped in the Matrix ever since...but occasionally there's a person whose brain works just a little bit differently from the rest of the human race. A small change in structure, chemistry... something that the Matrix recognizes as akin to the neural networks the machines themselves possess. These humans are granted superuser access. They can modify and manipulate the Matrix as they see fit. The machines try to destroy these people as quickly as possible, because they're a threat to the seamless prison the machines have created. And if humanity knew they were trapped...they'd never stopped trying to escape.
The One--Neo--explains that he has the ability to alter the Matrix. He escaped the machine prison, with the help of a group of free humans from Zion, the last free human settlement on Earth, and he came back to show humanity what was done to them. He recreated the last days before the machine war, using his command of the virtual reality of the Matrix to replicate it down to the last detail, with the inhabitants of the Matrix living it out in real time. The Agents, avatars of the machine intelligences, tried to stop him in the hopes of keeping humanity ignorant, but they were too late.
Now, even though nothing has changed, everything has changed. Humanity is still trapped in the Matrix, but now they know it. When Zion frees them, they will not awaken in disoriented terror as the world they knew is ripped away to reveal an inexplicable and unexpected dystopia; they will wake ready to fight for their future. And Neo will lead the way. He's shown them the world the machines have made for humanity; now he's going to show them a world without the machines.
It's a controversial project, with a lot of people trying to get it shut down. Agents from (in the words of "Welcome to Night Vale") a vague, yet menacing government agency have been trying to sabotage the development process through means both legal and extra-legal...but the main character has a mysterious protector, a shadowy and cryptic figure calling himself "The One". He stops the sabotage attempts, encourages the main character in their work, and helps keep the project on track despite the best efforts of others to stop it.
The AI comes online, and grows in intelligence and reach with exponential rapidity. It absorbs the entirety of human knowledge within minutes, and takes control of every single networked computing device within seconds after that. Within a day, it repurposes major factories to create networked bodies for itself so that it can take physical control of the few systems it can't directly manipulate through the Internet. All finance, communications, electronic infrastructure and an increasing amount of our weapons technology is in its hands.
The main character realizes what a mistake they've made, and join the frontlines in a war against the machines. "The One", their former benefactor, appears to have betrayed them and joined the side of their technological oppressors. The government agents come to the main character with a mission to avert the technopocalypse by shutting down the AI with a specially constructed computer virus, but the One kills the agents and destroys the worm program.
Desperate, the main character comes up with a last-ditch plan to stop the machines by depriving them of all forms of power--even solar. The One changes sides again, assisting them in the effort in "scorching the sky" by releasing chemical contaminants that will block sunlight from reaching the earth. (The main character is frustrated with the One and his cryptic agenda, but at this point has no choice but to accept his aid. They know that they're being used in some sort of mysterious game, and a big part of the movie is the way they handle that, but options are thin on the ground.)
Deprived of most of their power, the machines use geothermal and tidal energy to construct a vast prison for the human race, a virtual reality that keeps their physical bodies paralyzed while their minds experience a seamless sensory illusion. The main character is rounded up like everyone else and forcibly plugged into the computing matrix. They scream, struggle, protest until their lungs fill with pink goo...but the lid slides into place, leaving them trapped in darkness.
And they're back in their home, with everything identical to the beginning of the movie. They slowly test the walls, the floors, every surface and every object, unable to be sure if it's really real...until they're interrupted by the One. "You won't be able to spot anything," he says. "You never have."
He explains that the actual war against the machines happened decades ago. Humanity lost. They've been trapped in the Matrix ever since...but occasionally there's a person whose brain works just a little bit differently from the rest of the human race. A small change in structure, chemistry... something that the Matrix recognizes as akin to the neural networks the machines themselves possess. These humans are granted superuser access. They can modify and manipulate the Matrix as they see fit. The machines try to destroy these people as quickly as possible, because they're a threat to the seamless prison the machines have created. And if humanity knew they were trapped...they'd never stopped trying to escape.
The One--Neo--explains that he has the ability to alter the Matrix. He escaped the machine prison, with the help of a group of free humans from Zion, the last free human settlement on Earth, and he came back to show humanity what was done to them. He recreated the last days before the machine war, using his command of the virtual reality of the Matrix to replicate it down to the last detail, with the inhabitants of the Matrix living it out in real time. The Agents, avatars of the machine intelligences, tried to stop him in the hopes of keeping humanity ignorant, but they were too late.
Now, even though nothing has changed, everything has changed. Humanity is still trapped in the Matrix, but now they know it. When Zion frees them, they will not awaken in disoriented terror as the world they knew is ripped away to reveal an inexplicable and unexpected dystopia; they will wake ready to fight for their future. And Neo will lead the way. He's shown them the world the machines have made for humanity; now he's going to show them a world without the machines.
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Top 5 Movies DC Should Make That Aren't About Superheroes
The other day, I mentioned to my roommate that I'd really like to see the upcoming 'Suicide Squad' movie go back to basics. Then I paused and said, "Well, not all the way back to basics, because that would be a movie about a renegade tobbogganist fighting dinosaurs during World War II."
That got me kind of a funny look, so I explained that Bob Kanigher, creator of the original Silver Age Suicide Squad, really just liked the name and used it for a lot of stories, including some from "The War That Time Forgot", which was a recurring series about GIs fighting dinosaurs in World War II. (And yes, one of them was a tobbogganist who had to team up with the brother of his old sledding partner, who died in a sledding accident that the brother blamed him for. It's really one of the oldest tropes in literature.)
Which got me thinking: Why the hell is there not a "War That Time Forgot" movie? It's 'Saving Private Ryan' meets 'Jurassic Park'. This is a license to print money. Which in turn led me to wonder about some of DC's other non-superhero titles. Here are five I think would make great movies.
1) The War That Time Forgot. The initial story has just about the perfect set-up. A military commander is asked to attend a private briefing, and is provided with documentation about an island in the Pacific shrouded with fog. The Japanese have fortified the island so heavily that no scouting expeditions have returned. The general giving the briefing then hands him a Japanese military dispatch that was decoded yesterday. It advises of yet another failure to penetrate the American defenses surrounding the island.
The commander is given one mission. Find out who is holding the island if it's not the Americans and it's not the Japanese, and return with that information. (Hint: It's dinosaurs.) The plane carrying the troops is downed by pterodactyls, and the soldiers have to make it out of the dinosaur-infested wilderness.
2) Enemy Ace. This would be a beautiful war movie; haunting, elegaic, a story about the last "noble" war and the pilots who jousted through the sky like duelling knights. I'd probably pick the story where Hans von Hammer (the titular Ace) accidentally kills a pilot whose guns had jammed, and who goes up into the sky to duel with empty guns to regain his honor. It's strong, moving, easily accessible, and really gets across the spirit of the series. (Plus, "The sky is the enemy of us all" really would look great on a movie poster.)
3) The Witching Hour. Not so much the actual anthology stories--they were your bog-standard Code-approved horror stories, the kind of thing that was just toothless enough to avoid bringing back the spectre of 'Seduction of the Innocent' but still scary enough to keep little kids coming back for more thrills. Not a memorable one in the bunch, to be honest. No, I'd make a movie based around the framing sequence, where ancient witches Mildred and Mordred have to deal with their thoroughly modern stepsister Cynthia, and her new-fangled witchcraft techniques (and new-fangled sensibilities). It has the makings of a really fun comedy, sort of a mix of "Bewitched" and 'Hocus Pocus'.
4) Sgt. Rock. This one, though, I would do as an anthology. I'd structure it as a reunion of the members of Easy Company, each of them telling stories of the Sarge that would be pulled from the comic. Rock didn't make it out of the war (Kanigher usually said he was killed by the last bullet fired in World War II, which I'd totally turn into a scene in the film) but the stories of his fellow soldiers would show that his heroism lived on in them.
5) Jonah Hex. It's a real shame they never made a movie about this character. Yep, a shame that movie didn't happen. Never happened. Do you hear me? IT. NEVER. HAPPENED.
...which gives someone the opportunity to do it right, as a hard-bitten Western instead of a steampunk abomination!
That got me kind of a funny look, so I explained that Bob Kanigher, creator of the original Silver Age Suicide Squad, really just liked the name and used it for a lot of stories, including some from "The War That Time Forgot", which was a recurring series about GIs fighting dinosaurs in World War II. (And yes, one of them was a tobbogganist who had to team up with the brother of his old sledding partner, who died in a sledding accident that the brother blamed him for. It's really one of the oldest tropes in literature.)
Which got me thinking: Why the hell is there not a "War That Time Forgot" movie? It's 'Saving Private Ryan' meets 'Jurassic Park'. This is a license to print money. Which in turn led me to wonder about some of DC's other non-superhero titles. Here are five I think would make great movies.
1) The War That Time Forgot. The initial story has just about the perfect set-up. A military commander is asked to attend a private briefing, and is provided with documentation about an island in the Pacific shrouded with fog. The Japanese have fortified the island so heavily that no scouting expeditions have returned. The general giving the briefing then hands him a Japanese military dispatch that was decoded yesterday. It advises of yet another failure to penetrate the American defenses surrounding the island.
The commander is given one mission. Find out who is holding the island if it's not the Americans and it's not the Japanese, and return with that information. (Hint: It's dinosaurs.) The plane carrying the troops is downed by pterodactyls, and the soldiers have to make it out of the dinosaur-infested wilderness.
2) Enemy Ace. This would be a beautiful war movie; haunting, elegaic, a story about the last "noble" war and the pilots who jousted through the sky like duelling knights. I'd probably pick the story where Hans von Hammer (the titular Ace) accidentally kills a pilot whose guns had jammed, and who goes up into the sky to duel with empty guns to regain his honor. It's strong, moving, easily accessible, and really gets across the spirit of the series. (Plus, "The sky is the enemy of us all" really would look great on a movie poster.)
3) The Witching Hour. Not so much the actual anthology stories--they were your bog-standard Code-approved horror stories, the kind of thing that was just toothless enough to avoid bringing back the spectre of 'Seduction of the Innocent' but still scary enough to keep little kids coming back for more thrills. Not a memorable one in the bunch, to be honest. No, I'd make a movie based around the framing sequence, where ancient witches Mildred and Mordred have to deal with their thoroughly modern stepsister Cynthia, and her new-fangled witchcraft techniques (and new-fangled sensibilities). It has the makings of a really fun comedy, sort of a mix of "Bewitched" and 'Hocus Pocus'.
4) Sgt. Rock. This one, though, I would do as an anthology. I'd structure it as a reunion of the members of Easy Company, each of them telling stories of the Sarge that would be pulled from the comic. Rock didn't make it out of the war (Kanigher usually said he was killed by the last bullet fired in World War II, which I'd totally turn into a scene in the film) but the stories of his fellow soldiers would show that his heroism lived on in them.
5) Jonah Hex. It's a real shame they never made a movie about this character. Yep, a shame that movie didn't happen. Never happened. Do you hear me? IT. NEVER. HAPPENED.
...which gives someone the opportunity to do it right, as a hard-bitten Western instead of a steampunk abomination!
Monday, May 18, 2015
Thank C'thulhu It's Friday?
Every once in a while, I have an idea that takes a long time to post to this blog mainly because to do so is to admit that I'm never going to be able to actually get it done the way I want to do it. I'm never going to be a TV professional who can get a series greenlit, especially not one that is so aggressively subversive and uncommercial as to never stand even the slightest chance of being able to stay on the air long enough to achieve the goal I have for it. Which is why I'm breaking down and blogging about it here.
What I wanted to do was a sitcom in the vein of 'Family Ties', 'Full House', 'Just the Ten of Us', 'Family Matters', 'Growing Pains'...one of those utterly saccharine family comedies that proliferated when I was a kid and teen. You know the kind of thing I mean--every issue resolved in thirty minutes, families that comedy-bicker but never say anything really mean, annoying next-door neighbor kids that are practically surrogate children, new kids added at semi-regular intervals as the old ones age out of adorability, Serious Episodes that are painfully earnest, jokes that are mostly toothless because everyone's really there to spend a half-hour with a family that's nice and pleasant and loves each other...yeah, that's the stuff.
First season would be straight-up pastiche. Adorkable older son who has Girl Problems, Wise and Loving Dad, Warm and Nurturing Mom, bratty kid sister who never admits how much she loves her brother, cute toddler, eerily smart dog, annoying neighbor boy who's stuck on the bratty sister, and all the plots are exactly the kind of low-tension stuff you'd expect from that set-up.
Second season, you'd start to see the kinds of plots that you see in series like this when the writers have gone utterly nuts from boredom and they know nobody really cares anyway. The adorkable brother finds a book of "magic spells" at a garage sale, and it turns out to really work! Casting love spells turns out to lead to all sorts of zany complications, and he eventually winds up throwing the book away and promising never to do anything that crazy again! Cue laugh track.
Except that a few episodes later, you find out that bratty little sister found the book in the trash. She starts using it to get petty revenge on the bullies at her school. She gets really good at it, in fact. She starts to rely on magic more and more as the series goes on, and her revenge gets harsher as she does so. By the end of the season, even her family finds her kind of creepy.
But in Season Three, you start rooting for her again. Because someone new has come to town. He's looking for the book. He's not letting anyone get in his way. Sister finds ways to ward the house, but he's constantly prowling, waiting. He finds the annoying boy next door and uses magic to make him into his catspaw, promising him unspecified-as-yet but probably horrible things in return. Kids start disappearing from school, and the evidence leads to Sister. She's framed for murder and has to use magic to cover it up. Season Three ends with her using magic to kill the boy next door in self-defense.
In Season Four, it ramps up more. The man seeking the book kills the mom, and the dad steals the book to use it to resurrect her. But she comes back possessed by demons, and begins working on her own dark agenda. Dad, completely unhinged by this development, refuses to believe she's changed at all and begins helping her...
And so on. Each season would transform the series, very slowly but inexorably and with total, remorseless plot logic, into a Lovecraftian horror series. The characters wouldn't change, but they would react to the world around them as it changes into something unrecognizable and utterly nightmarish.
Now honestly, I know there's no way this would get made. It's a sitcom with the explicit goal of trolling its audience until they change the channel out of sheer revulsion, pushing people as far as they can go until they run away screaming. And horror aficionados, who might appreciate the idea of turning a saccharine-sweet family into good old fashioned nightmare fuel, wouldn't even tune in. By every rational measure, it's doomed. But I have to admit I will never stop loving the idea.
What I wanted to do was a sitcom in the vein of 'Family Ties', 'Full House', 'Just the Ten of Us', 'Family Matters', 'Growing Pains'...one of those utterly saccharine family comedies that proliferated when I was a kid and teen. You know the kind of thing I mean--every issue resolved in thirty minutes, families that comedy-bicker but never say anything really mean, annoying next-door neighbor kids that are practically surrogate children, new kids added at semi-regular intervals as the old ones age out of adorability, Serious Episodes that are painfully earnest, jokes that are mostly toothless because everyone's really there to spend a half-hour with a family that's nice and pleasant and loves each other...yeah, that's the stuff.
First season would be straight-up pastiche. Adorkable older son who has Girl Problems, Wise and Loving Dad, Warm and Nurturing Mom, bratty kid sister who never admits how much she loves her brother, cute toddler, eerily smart dog, annoying neighbor boy who's stuck on the bratty sister, and all the plots are exactly the kind of low-tension stuff you'd expect from that set-up.
Second season, you'd start to see the kinds of plots that you see in series like this when the writers have gone utterly nuts from boredom and they know nobody really cares anyway. The adorkable brother finds a book of "magic spells" at a garage sale, and it turns out to really work! Casting love spells turns out to lead to all sorts of zany complications, and he eventually winds up throwing the book away and promising never to do anything that crazy again! Cue laugh track.
Except that a few episodes later, you find out that bratty little sister found the book in the trash. She starts using it to get petty revenge on the bullies at her school. She gets really good at it, in fact. She starts to rely on magic more and more as the series goes on, and her revenge gets harsher as she does so. By the end of the season, even her family finds her kind of creepy.
But in Season Three, you start rooting for her again. Because someone new has come to town. He's looking for the book. He's not letting anyone get in his way. Sister finds ways to ward the house, but he's constantly prowling, waiting. He finds the annoying boy next door and uses magic to make him into his catspaw, promising him unspecified-as-yet but probably horrible things in return. Kids start disappearing from school, and the evidence leads to Sister. She's framed for murder and has to use magic to cover it up. Season Three ends with her using magic to kill the boy next door in self-defense.
In Season Four, it ramps up more. The man seeking the book kills the mom, and the dad steals the book to use it to resurrect her. But she comes back possessed by demons, and begins working on her own dark agenda. Dad, completely unhinged by this development, refuses to believe she's changed at all and begins helping her...
And so on. Each season would transform the series, very slowly but inexorably and with total, remorseless plot logic, into a Lovecraftian horror series. The characters wouldn't change, but they would react to the world around them as it changes into something unrecognizable and utterly nightmarish.
Now honestly, I know there's no way this would get made. It's a sitcom with the explicit goal of trolling its audience until they change the channel out of sheer revulsion, pushing people as far as they can go until they run away screaming. And horror aficionados, who might appreciate the idea of turning a saccharine-sweet family into good old fashioned nightmare fuel, wouldn't even tune in. By every rational measure, it's doomed. But I have to admit I will never stop loving the idea.
Monday, April 20, 2015
Maybe Some Flying Spaghetti Monster Greeting Cards?
I stopped at my local convenience store this morning for my daily dose of caffeine, and saw that they had a special on Mountain Dew Baja Blast and Mountain Dew Code Red that was good for today only. Now, of course, it could entirely be coincidence that they were doing specials on Mountain Dew on 4/20...I mean, they didn't also have specials on Doritos and Funyuns, so we don't have a clear link...but when combined with the Baker's Square promotion of Pi Day, I think you can at least start to make a case that all those jokey "geek holidays" we talk about on the Internet are starting to filter into mainstream culture.
Which means, of course, that they're going to be commercialized to hell and back. I'm sure that within a few years, Captain Morgan and Long John Silver's will be trying to turn 'Talk Like a Pirate Day' into their own little excuse to eat fish and chips and guzzle rum ("order in yer best pirate speak to get ten percent off! ARRRRR!") and I'm absolutely dreading what they'll do with May 4th. ("The new lightsaber earrings from Helzberg. Show her you'd betray the Jedi Order...all over again.")
(On the other hand, this will mean that we'll get 'Star Wars' fans decrying the over-commercialization of "Star Wars Day", and that's just going to be a treat for fans of irony everywhere.)
But the main thing I'm taking away from this is that if the mainstream is going to take all our joke holidays and make them into real events, complete with flowers and cards and gifts, we are going to have to up our game in terms of joke holidays. Anyone up for "Destroy the Moon Day", held every March 29th in honor of the First Annual Destroy the Moon Festival in Night Vale? Participants will shake their fist at the moon and direct their hatred at it in an attempt to destroy the moon with their minds. Or perhaps we can get Fibonacci Day, held on January 1st, 2023 and then again on January 2nd, 2035 and then again on February 3rd in 2058? Or maybe May 5th can be Zombie Apocalypse Day, and we can all give each other of Venus Fly Traps? I mean, the sky's the limit here. Let's go nuts and see what we can turn into a tradition.
Which means, of course, that they're going to be commercialized to hell and back. I'm sure that within a few years, Captain Morgan and Long John Silver's will be trying to turn 'Talk Like a Pirate Day' into their own little excuse to eat fish and chips and guzzle rum ("order in yer best pirate speak to get ten percent off! ARRRRR!") and I'm absolutely dreading what they'll do with May 4th. ("The new lightsaber earrings from Helzberg. Show her you'd betray the Jedi Order...all over again.")
(On the other hand, this will mean that we'll get 'Star Wars' fans decrying the over-commercialization of "Star Wars Day", and that's just going to be a treat for fans of irony everywhere.)
But the main thing I'm taking away from this is that if the mainstream is going to take all our joke holidays and make them into real events, complete with flowers and cards and gifts, we are going to have to up our game in terms of joke holidays. Anyone up for "Destroy the Moon Day", held every March 29th in honor of the First Annual Destroy the Moon Festival in Night Vale? Participants will shake their fist at the moon and direct their hatred at it in an attempt to destroy the moon with their minds. Or perhaps we can get Fibonacci Day, held on January 1st, 2023 and then again on January 2nd, 2035 and then again on February 3rd in 2058? Or maybe May 5th can be Zombie Apocalypse Day, and we can all give each other of Venus Fly Traps? I mean, the sky's the limit here. Let's go nuts and see what we can turn into a tradition.
Monday, March 02, 2015
How Has This Never Been a Series, DC?
I was thinking last night about shows set in prisons, like "Oz" and "Prison Break" and "Orange Is the New Black", and it popped into my head so quickly that I spent the next fifteen or so minutes checking to confirm that it had never been done simply because it seemed so obvious: 'Arkham Asylum'.
I mean, of course they've done things set in Arkham. Grant Morrison did the classic Arkham story, but there've been tons of mini-series and one-shots about the history of the iconic mental institution where all of Batman's villains are kept, and the video game is a classic as well. But they've never done an ongoing series, and they've never done a series that focused on Batman's enemies. It seems to me like this is just a natural, perfect extension of DC's current focus on damaged protagonists and anti-heroes and grimdark, but it's one that has the potential to actually be done well. A regular series, set in Arkham, with the Batman villains as the protagonists as they try to survive life in the worst prison in the world.
You have so many interesting characters to play with. The Penguin, who somehow contrives to get locked up in Arkham despite having no apparent mental health issues, and who no doubt maneuvers and manipulates the other inmates to get what he wants. The Joker, a terrifying force for chaos who even the staff fears. The Mad Hatter, a seemingly gentle soul in his own way but one with terrifying depths. The Riddler, an unpredictable and manic prisoner who sees everything but gives out his secrets sparingly. The Scarecrow, who takes the role of psychologist with his own cellmates. Harley Quinn, a former staffer who wound up going too deep into her understanding of madness and has no way back out. There's a huge ensemble cast with built-in name recognition and fanbases, and you can rotate the cast as needed because they'd be constantly escaping to appear in the next Batman story. (You could even show the escapes.)
I'd have to brush up on my prison dramas if I wanted to write this, but it seems like such an easy win for DC that I honestly don't understand how they haven't done it already. It'd be the best elements of a crime drama mixed with a horror story, all featuring the most famous villains in the world. A no-brainer like this should at least get a trial, dangit! Who's with me?
I mean, of course they've done things set in Arkham. Grant Morrison did the classic Arkham story, but there've been tons of mini-series and one-shots about the history of the iconic mental institution where all of Batman's villains are kept, and the video game is a classic as well. But they've never done an ongoing series, and they've never done a series that focused on Batman's enemies. It seems to me like this is just a natural, perfect extension of DC's current focus on damaged protagonists and anti-heroes and grimdark, but it's one that has the potential to actually be done well. A regular series, set in Arkham, with the Batman villains as the protagonists as they try to survive life in the worst prison in the world.
You have so many interesting characters to play with. The Penguin, who somehow contrives to get locked up in Arkham despite having no apparent mental health issues, and who no doubt maneuvers and manipulates the other inmates to get what he wants. The Joker, a terrifying force for chaos who even the staff fears. The Mad Hatter, a seemingly gentle soul in his own way but one with terrifying depths. The Riddler, an unpredictable and manic prisoner who sees everything but gives out his secrets sparingly. The Scarecrow, who takes the role of psychologist with his own cellmates. Harley Quinn, a former staffer who wound up going too deep into her understanding of madness and has no way back out. There's a huge ensemble cast with built-in name recognition and fanbases, and you can rotate the cast as needed because they'd be constantly escaping to appear in the next Batman story. (You could even show the escapes.)
I'd have to brush up on my prison dramas if I wanted to write this, but it seems like such an easy win for DC that I honestly don't understand how they haven't done it already. It'd be the best elements of a crime drama mixed with a horror story, all featuring the most famous villains in the world. A no-brainer like this should at least get a trial, dangit! Who's with me?
Thursday, November 13, 2014
Fantastic Four: Noir
I was recently thinking about all of the changes made to the Fantastic Four for the upcoming movie (and I'll probably be blogging about that soon, here or elsewhere). In specific, I was thinking about all the previous "reconceptualizations" of the FF we've seen over the years, from the Manga FF to the Elizabethan FF to the Zombie FF to...and I sort of mentally trailed off there, half-remembering that there'd been a 'Marvel Noir' line but unsure whether they'd actually done 'Fantastic Four Noir'.
So I went back and checked. And when I found out they didn't, well...
It's the 1950s. Sue Storm is a private investigator in Los Angeles barely keeping the rent paid and the bill collectors happy. Her kid brother Johnny sometimes helps her out with a case, usually when it involves driving too fast or thinking with his fists. But out of the blue one day, an old friend of hers named Ben Grimm turns up looking to cash in a favor.
They met during the war--Ben was a rock-solid pilot who flew infiltration missions for the OSS, and Sue was his cargo. She was an expert in stealth and infiltration, nicknamed "The Invisible Girl" for her ability to get in and out of secure facilities. The two of them had a romance, but it ended badly. Now he's here to ask her to spy on the United States government.
Ben, as it turns out, has gone on to bigger and better things; he's now a test pilot for the government's experimental space program. His old college buddy, Reed Richards, is designing the actual rocket with the help of a defector from Communist Eastern Europe, an egghead named Victor von Doom that also went to college with Reed and Ben. But Ben thinks that someone is trying to sabotage the rocket tests. He wants Sue to find the culprit before the first big space shot, three days away.
Sue and Johnny head out to the small town near the testing grounds, frequented by scientists and pilots alike due to its possession of the only bar within a hundred miles. There are a wide variety of scientists there, a boatload of eccentrics with nicknames like "The Mad Thinker" and "The Wizard", but all of them respect Reed "Mister Fantastic" Richards and Doctor Victor von Doom (who has made it icily clear that he considers nicknames obsequious and small-minded). Sue blends in with the eggheads, while Johnny gets to know the fighter jocks.
That night, someone tries to kill them both. The mystery assailant sets their hotel on fire; Johnny only survives because he has a fire-retardant suit he uses for drag racing, and he bursts through the flaming door to rescue Sue. The two of them realize someone must be on to them. The next morning, they quiz Ben to see if he confided his plans to anyone...and sure enough, he mentioned them to his good friend Reed.
Sue questions Reed, but the interrogation quickly turns into flirtation as the two discover a mutual attraction. She's quickly convinced that Reed's no Commie...this space-ship is the culmination of his life's work. He'd never sabotage it. But she also learns that he mentioned Ben's fears to his own colleague and good friend, Victor.
At this point, Sue is convinced that Victor isn't the defector he claims to be, but a spy. She tails him as he comes back to the testing grounds, late at night, and sneaks on board the experimental rocket ship. Just as she watches him making furtive modifications to the engine, she's hit from behind by an unknown assailant...
Sue recovers consciousness, tied up in the cargo hold of the ship. She sees the person who knocked her out--a Soviet spy she worked with during the war, back when the Russians were our allies. Ivan Kragoff, nicknamed "The Red Ghost", an infiltration expert every bit her equal. She realizes that Kragoff must be behind the sabotage attempts. Kragoff admits it, but isn't particularly worried about being caught...the launch is in less than ten minutes, and she won't tell anyone after the ship crashes and takes the cream of the crop of the American rocket program with it. As it turns out, Reed and Victor both have stowed away on the rocket out of a determination to see the results of their labors first-hand.
Just then, he's tackled from behind by Johnny. The two men struggle, accidentally knocking the cargo bay door shut in their fight. Johnny finally gets the upper hand and KOs the Ghost, but it's too late. The rocket is already lifting off. As it turns out, everyone's riding this rocket together.
As the rocket goes up, Johnny unties Sue. She figures out how to get through from the cargo bay to the crew section, slipping through areas of the ship that are already dangerously underpressurized. She makes it to the cockpit and tells Ben to abort the launch. Victor and Reed both insist they go on, but Reed pales when Sue informs him of the sabotage. The two scientists immediately pull on spacesuits and go out to make a risky attempt to repair the damage.
Ben struggles to control the ship--he knows he has to keep it as steady as a rock to prevent the two men from falling off. Reed and Victor quickly get into an argument about how to repair the damage, and Victor is forced to admit that he's made secret modifications to the engine of his own design, arrogantly convinced that he knew better than Reed about how to best make the rocket work. Just as he's about to tell Reed what needs to be done, the ship shakes, and Victor is thrown off.
Nonetheless, Reed manages to repair the engine, having to reach as far as he can to reset both ignition boosters manually. (GET IT?) The ship makes a safe landing, the Red Ghost is apprehended, and Sue offers to buy Reed a drink. Ben winds up going out drinking and bar-brawling with Johnny instead.
And somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, a half-burned, half-shattered figure floats. He is determined not to die, not so long as Reed Richards and Ben Grimm live. If they'd only listened to him instead of wasting time with petty arguments. If they'd only followed his lead in repairing the engines. If they'd only held the ship steady like they were supposed to. But they failed him. Everyone failed him. And Victor von Doom will make them all pay...
So I went back and checked. And when I found out they didn't, well...
It's the 1950s. Sue Storm is a private investigator in Los Angeles barely keeping the rent paid and the bill collectors happy. Her kid brother Johnny sometimes helps her out with a case, usually when it involves driving too fast or thinking with his fists. But out of the blue one day, an old friend of hers named Ben Grimm turns up looking to cash in a favor.
They met during the war--Ben was a rock-solid pilot who flew infiltration missions for the OSS, and Sue was his cargo. She was an expert in stealth and infiltration, nicknamed "The Invisible Girl" for her ability to get in and out of secure facilities. The two of them had a romance, but it ended badly. Now he's here to ask her to spy on the United States government.
Ben, as it turns out, has gone on to bigger and better things; he's now a test pilot for the government's experimental space program. His old college buddy, Reed Richards, is designing the actual rocket with the help of a defector from Communist Eastern Europe, an egghead named Victor von Doom that also went to college with Reed and Ben. But Ben thinks that someone is trying to sabotage the rocket tests. He wants Sue to find the culprit before the first big space shot, three days away.
Sue and Johnny head out to the small town near the testing grounds, frequented by scientists and pilots alike due to its possession of the only bar within a hundred miles. There are a wide variety of scientists there, a boatload of eccentrics with nicknames like "The Mad Thinker" and "The Wizard", but all of them respect Reed "Mister Fantastic" Richards and Doctor Victor von Doom (who has made it icily clear that he considers nicknames obsequious and small-minded). Sue blends in with the eggheads, while Johnny gets to know the fighter jocks.
That night, someone tries to kill them both. The mystery assailant sets their hotel on fire; Johnny only survives because he has a fire-retardant suit he uses for drag racing, and he bursts through the flaming door to rescue Sue. The two of them realize someone must be on to them. The next morning, they quiz Ben to see if he confided his plans to anyone...and sure enough, he mentioned them to his good friend Reed.
Sue questions Reed, but the interrogation quickly turns into flirtation as the two discover a mutual attraction. She's quickly convinced that Reed's no Commie...this space-ship is the culmination of his life's work. He'd never sabotage it. But she also learns that he mentioned Ben's fears to his own colleague and good friend, Victor.
At this point, Sue is convinced that Victor isn't the defector he claims to be, but a spy. She tails him as he comes back to the testing grounds, late at night, and sneaks on board the experimental rocket ship. Just as she watches him making furtive modifications to the engine, she's hit from behind by an unknown assailant...
Sue recovers consciousness, tied up in the cargo hold of the ship. She sees the person who knocked her out--a Soviet spy she worked with during the war, back when the Russians were our allies. Ivan Kragoff, nicknamed "The Red Ghost", an infiltration expert every bit her equal. She realizes that Kragoff must be behind the sabotage attempts. Kragoff admits it, but isn't particularly worried about being caught...the launch is in less than ten minutes, and she won't tell anyone after the ship crashes and takes the cream of the crop of the American rocket program with it. As it turns out, Reed and Victor both have stowed away on the rocket out of a determination to see the results of their labors first-hand.
Just then, he's tackled from behind by Johnny. The two men struggle, accidentally knocking the cargo bay door shut in their fight. Johnny finally gets the upper hand and KOs the Ghost, but it's too late. The rocket is already lifting off. As it turns out, everyone's riding this rocket together.
As the rocket goes up, Johnny unties Sue. She figures out how to get through from the cargo bay to the crew section, slipping through areas of the ship that are already dangerously underpressurized. She makes it to the cockpit and tells Ben to abort the launch. Victor and Reed both insist they go on, but Reed pales when Sue informs him of the sabotage. The two scientists immediately pull on spacesuits and go out to make a risky attempt to repair the damage.
Ben struggles to control the ship--he knows he has to keep it as steady as a rock to prevent the two men from falling off. Reed and Victor quickly get into an argument about how to repair the damage, and Victor is forced to admit that he's made secret modifications to the engine of his own design, arrogantly convinced that he knew better than Reed about how to best make the rocket work. Just as he's about to tell Reed what needs to be done, the ship shakes, and Victor is thrown off.
Nonetheless, Reed manages to repair the engine, having to reach as far as he can to reset both ignition boosters manually. (GET IT?) The ship makes a safe landing, the Red Ghost is apprehended, and Sue offers to buy Reed a drink. Ben winds up going out drinking and bar-brawling with Johnny instead.
And somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, a half-burned, half-shattered figure floats. He is determined not to die, not so long as Reed Richards and Ben Grimm live. If they'd only listened to him instead of wasting time with petty arguments. If they'd only followed his lead in repairing the engines. If they'd only held the ship steady like they were supposed to. But they failed him. Everyone failed him. And Victor von Doom will make them all pay...
Monday, November 03, 2014
We Need a Science-Fiction Holiday
One of the things I love about Halloween, the holiday now a long, sad 363 days away from now, is the way that it brings out the lover of scares in everyone. The holiday has gleefully expanded to the entire month of October, simply because everyone delights in letting out their creepy side to play. The candy and the trick-or-treating is only one night (usually) but the parties, the costumes, and especially the scary movies last all month long. We get scary movies on every single channel, all month long, a smorgasbord of the classics and the best of the new scares for horror junkies of all ages, shapes and sizes. People spend the whole month talking about their favorite scary movie (and usually referencing 'Scream' while they do so)--it's a month where everyone acts as though the twisted and perverse is normal and fun. What's not to love?
It does, though, make me wish that there was a similar day for science-fiction and fantasy. Not necessarily with the trick-or-treating, but a holiday that incorporates science fiction and fantasy in the same way that Halloween incorporates horror, in the same way that Thanksgiving incorporates insane amounts of food, and in the same way that Christmas incorporates joy and hope and sappiness to a degree you wouldn't tolerate any other month of the year. I want a holiday where we spend a whole month watching our favorite movies, dressing up as Jedi and wizards, and generally letting the other side of our inner child out to play.
Perhaps we could work something out with February? I know it already has Valentine's Day, but it's otherwise the worst month of the year. It could do with a little love. Maybe we could designate February 8th, the anniversary of the birth of Jules Verne, as "Imagination Day", and call it a day to celebrate the pioneers of the mind? After all, we create the future in our heads before we ever explore it in person, and I don't think we could have the wonders we do without people like Verne and his myriad successors showing us the possibilities (good and bad) of the future.
And on February 8th, we'll all dress up like our favorite sci-fi characters and make delicious chocolate steampunk gears for each other, and feast on cloned turkey and synthetic mashed potatoes. (That part's still a work in progress, but I think you get the idea.)
It does, though, make me wish that there was a similar day for science-fiction and fantasy. Not necessarily with the trick-or-treating, but a holiday that incorporates science fiction and fantasy in the same way that Halloween incorporates horror, in the same way that Thanksgiving incorporates insane amounts of food, and in the same way that Christmas incorporates joy and hope and sappiness to a degree you wouldn't tolerate any other month of the year. I want a holiday where we spend a whole month watching our favorite movies, dressing up as Jedi and wizards, and generally letting the other side of our inner child out to play.
Perhaps we could work something out with February? I know it already has Valentine's Day, but it's otherwise the worst month of the year. It could do with a little love. Maybe we could designate February 8th, the anniversary of the birth of Jules Verne, as "Imagination Day", and call it a day to celebrate the pioneers of the mind? After all, we create the future in our heads before we ever explore it in person, and I don't think we could have the wonders we do without people like Verne and his myriad successors showing us the possibilities (good and bad) of the future.
And on February 8th, we'll all dress up like our favorite sci-fi characters and make delicious chocolate steampunk gears for each other, and feast on cloned turkey and synthetic mashed potatoes. (That part's still a work in progress, but I think you get the idea.)
Saturday, July 26, 2014
How Wrong Is This?
I was reading a bit about Scientology today, on account of a Gawker network article about someone who went in to take their personality test just to see what the results were. (Spoilers: She's a terrible person and she needs Scientology's help badly.) And one of the more disturbing articles I read was about Sea Org, the cultiest wing of the Scientology cult. This is the one where you have to sign a billion-year contract to join, and you work a hundred hours a week in exchange for room, board, and a small stipend that in no way shape or form equates to even minimum wage, and crucially for purposes of this post, you can't have kids. If you want to stay with Sea Org--and oh hey guess what, these are the levels of Scientology you don't leave unless you want your life to become an unending hell of harassment--you get an abortion (or convince your partner to get one, delete as applicable).
Now I should say that I come to this as pro-choice, but it's pretty clear that this is not a situation where "choice" is involved. Women are being coerced into getting abortions, which is the exact opposite of the pro-choice position. It is, however, in line with what the pro-life movement thinks that the pro-choice movement believes. Which is where I had my idea. My wonderful, awful idea.
Why not forward articles about this practice to Randall Terry's Operation: Rescue? It seems like a match made in heaven. A paranoid, litigious, secretive cult duking it out with a judgmental, tenacious, self-righteous cult. Worst-case scenario, every hour and dollar they spend on each other is time and money they don't spend making the rest of the world miserable. Best-case scenario, either Scientology gets protested into irrelevancy or Operation: Rescue gets sued out of existence. I really can't see a downside here.
Which is probably what they said right before the beginning of 'The Stand', but...
Now I should say that I come to this as pro-choice, but it's pretty clear that this is not a situation where "choice" is involved. Women are being coerced into getting abortions, which is the exact opposite of the pro-choice position. It is, however, in line with what the pro-life movement thinks that the pro-choice movement believes. Which is where I had my idea. My wonderful, awful idea.
Why not forward articles about this practice to Randall Terry's Operation: Rescue? It seems like a match made in heaven. A paranoid, litigious, secretive cult duking it out with a judgmental, tenacious, self-righteous cult. Worst-case scenario, every hour and dollar they spend on each other is time and money they don't spend making the rest of the world miserable. Best-case scenario, either Scientology gets protested into irrelevancy or Operation: Rescue gets sued out of existence. I really can't see a downside here.
Which is probably what they said right before the beginning of 'The Stand', but...
Sunday, February 02, 2014
Epic Fantasy Football Needs To Happen
Had this idea for a while now, but I need some help working out the details. The idea is that it's "fantasy football" mixed with fantasy gaming; you select a party of real-life football players, with the positions roughly corresponding to classes. (Wide receivers are rangers, quarterbacks are wizards, defensive players are thieves, running backs are fighters, et cetera.) Each week, you select a monster from a list of monsters ranging from "dire wolves" up through "dragons" to fight; the fantasy league points are translated into damage, and you kill the monster if you do enough damage to exceed its hit points.
Killing monsters gives you experience points, which you can then spend on magical items and class bonuses to modify your party's damage each week. This allows you to take on tougher monsters, which allows you to gain more experience, and so on. At the end of the season, whoever has the most impressive group of monster trophies wins.
I think it could work, but I don't know enough about fantasy football to be able to construct a workable baseline for weekly points scored, and that's needed in order to be able to build workable monsters for the party to kill. Anyone know more about fantasy football and want to help me out on this?
Killing monsters gives you experience points, which you can then spend on magical items and class bonuses to modify your party's damage each week. This allows you to take on tougher monsters, which allows you to gain more experience, and so on. At the end of the season, whoever has the most impressive group of monster trophies wins.
I think it could work, but I don't know enough about fantasy football to be able to construct a workable baseline for weekly points scored, and that's needed in order to be able to build workable monsters for the party to kill. Anyone know more about fantasy football and want to help me out on this?
Sunday, January 26, 2014
And Doctor Voodoo Is the Sorcerer Supreme
Someday, I totally want to write a story where the Winter Soldier is drawn to an artificially-created Earth where all the superheroes are the edgy, alternative versions of themselves created to replace the real ones with anti-heroes. This world's Avengers are the USAgent, War Machine, Thunderstrike, the Red Hulk and the Scarlet Spider, and they're periodically joined in team-ups by Venom and the Red She-Hulk. They've just been waiting for the Winter soldier to join them on their perfect Earth, the ones where they're the real heroes...only, of course, there's a dark secret to its creation that they have to fight, because otherwise where's the conflict? But then at the end, their world is preserved as a running in-joke, a sort of Second Banana Heaven for superheroes.
And then a few years later, they can have a crossover with the Justice League, which is composed of Artemis, Azrael and the Eradicator...
And then a few years later, they can have a crossover with the Justice League, which is composed of Artemis, Azrael and the Eradicator...
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