2019 Rewind: Villain Movie Spectacular!

Hmm, did I really only do 3 half-assed posts about potential movie/TV ideas this year?  That's it?  I must be slipping.  But this one I mentioned in the Luthor entry lays out rough ideas for a whole bunch of villain-centric movies.  The Black Adam one is really happening, though not based on what I lay out, I'm sure.

Todd Phillips's Joker finally comes to theaters today and if it is a successful commercial venture, it could open the door for DC to make more movies from its huge stable of comic book villains.  I mean other than the 50 movies featuring Margot Robbie's tits Harley Quinn that are in development right now.  And naturally the Grumpy Bulldog has some ideas!

Actually I already did one (or two really) months ago in this post where I came up with two potential Lex Luthor movies with a black Luthor in mind.  And I think either idea would work.  Or maybe find a third and make a trilogy!  People love trilogies, right?  Like Todd Phillips's unnecessary Hangover trilogy?

Vengeance of Bane:  This idea comes from the Bane prequel miniseries that came out around the time of the Knightfall storyline.  The idea was to explain who Bane was and where he came from.  That story barely features Batman, hence making it easy to adapt into a stand-alone movie.

It'd be sort of like The Shawshank Redemption or Count of Monte Cristo meets a gangster movie like The Godfather or Scarface.  Bane is born in a prison in the fictitious island country of Santa Prisca and grows up there to serve the time his father couldn't serve.  He's taken under the wings of a couple of other prisoners (Trogg, Zombie, and Bird I think in the comics) and manages to grow to manhood.  All the time he reads lots of books to train his mind.  While in solitary he also trains his body and soon defeats the top convict to rule the prison until his escape.  In the comics he of course ends up in Gotham to destroy Batman, but a movie wouldn't have to do that.

Black Adam: The Dark Age:  Another miniseries that features a villain but not really a hero so it's easy to adapt.  Black Adam was supposed to be played by The Rock but I have no idea if that's still going to happen or not.  Anyway, Black Adam was given the ancient powers of Shazam but used them for evil to take over his own country in Africa or the Middle East.  He was married to Isis but then she died.  This story then features Black Adam after he's lost his power.  He tries to get back his power and his wife, going literally to the ends of the Earth to do so.  A lot of that journey could be changed but the gist is a great love story and non-traditional "villain" story.

Catwoman:  Obviously this has already been done--badly.  It's time to do it right!  First don't hire a stupid French director with a mononym that sounds like a rice dish.  And secondly don't come up with some stupid origin story about getting cat powers from an Egyptian goddess or whatever the hell it was.  Just stick to that she's a thief who sometimes robs rich assholes to help other people.  It should be easy enough with anyone competent at the helm.  Oh and no basketball scenes with Benjamin Bratt featuring gratuitous ass shots.

League of Shadows/Court of Owls:  These are two interchangeable ideas.  They're both evil organizations from the Batman comics that have been around for centuries.  So you can do a story in modern times or a story in olden times or maybe do a combo with some modern stuff as a framing device to flashbacks to older stuff.  A League of Shadows movie could focus on the rise of Ra's al Guhl while a Court of Owls movie could feature a plot to kill Thomas and Martha Wayne.

Talon:  the henchmen of the Court of Owls are these sort of Winter Soldier type guys called "Talons."  There was a short-lived New 52 series where one of the Talons went rogue against the Court of Owls.  So that could be a movie on its own or an extension of a Court of Owls movie.

Deathstroke:  He's not "the Merc With a Mouth" but he's a Merc and he has a mouth.  And one eye.  Another that should be really easy to do because there are tons of comics out there.  And as a super-mercenary there's no need for any superheroes to be involved; just find some run of the mill action movie baddies to fight:  drug lords, human traffickers, etc.

Lobo:  Similar to Deathstroke only he's an alien and probably about as crazy and unkillable as Deadpool.  It could easily be set in outer space to not involve any Earth-bound heroes.  Maybe a cameo by a Green Lantern or something.

Sinestro:  Speaking of space and Green Lanterns, why not a movie on the traditional Green Lantern villain?  There are a few ways to do this:  an origin story of how Sinestro came to be a Green Lantern.  A story about his time in the Green Lanterns.  A story about him breaking away from the Green Lanterns (something that was rushed into a cookie scene of the not-as-terrible-as-people-think 2011 movie).  Or a story taking place after he's broken away.  You could use the Sinestro Corps with its yellow fear rings or the more traditional solo blue costume.

Mister Mxyzptlk:  This would be a fun one for an animated movie.  You don't really need Superman since I'm sure the imp from the 5th Dimension could find all sorts of other hijinks around the universe.

Bizarro:  Similarly they could do an animated movie starring Superman's weird opposite Bizarro.  I didn't read it but there was recently a goofy series where Bizarro and Jimmy Olsen went around having fun adventures so that could be something to look into.  Or you could do a horror movie version based on B-Zero, a fucked-up clone of Superman made by Lex Luthor.

Penguin:  I think instead of the Batman Returns Penguin you'd use more of the Gotham TV show Penguin:  a weird guy who gets into a local Mafia outfit and winds up running it.  Since it'd be before Bruce Wayne becomes Batman you don't need him around.

I'm really just scratching the surface here.  There are probably a ton of other ones they can do.  But it's Warner Bros so they'll probably just fuck it up.

*BONUS:  COBRA!  Forbes Film Critic Scott Mendelson retweeted a post about a Cobra trooper figure and jokingly suggested that Paramount would make a movie about Cobra, the ruthless terrorist organization from GI JOE.  Which actually isn't the bad idea he thinks it is!  If you ask people like Tony Laplume they would mention that IDW put out some really good comics by Mike Costa focused primarily on Cobra that could make a decent movie.  So, yeah, it's really not as far out there as people would think.

So there you go.  Happy Holidays!

2019 Rewind: Streaming Knight

So here's my completely random idea for how to turn the Tales of the Scarlet Knight series into a TV show.  With so many streaming services making original content, I feel it's a matter of time before this happens.

Since much of what I do at work doesn’t require a lot of thinking my mind tends to wander to other things.  The other day through a long chain that I don’t want to get into I got thinking that there’s probably no way in hell I could do a Scarlet Knight movie but what about a TV show?  There are so many streaming services now that maybe one would buy the idea.

So how would I go about doing it?

I think Season 1 would pretty much be the first book only with a few other things thrown in to pad it out to 10-13 episodes.  The first couple of episodes would introduce Emma Earl, her friend Becky, her coworker Dan whom she has a crush on, and her boss Ian.  It’d cover Dan finding a mysterious object, Ian’s family being murdered, and Ian becoming the Black Dragoon.  Then Emma would answer The Call to become the Scarlet Knight.

There would be the first battle between the Dragoon and Scarlet Knight that Emma wins through blind luck (see the comic book on Amazon).  Then later in the season they’d meet again and Emma narrowly escapes.  In the last couple of episodes Emma finds out Ian is the Dragoon and they have their final battle.

The end of the last episode would have Dan going off to Egypt with his assistant--Isis.  Then at the start of the next season Dan would uncover the artifact that possesses his assistant, giving her the powers of the evil goddess Isis.

So the second season would cover the third book.  A couple of episodes in would be the sort of “Red Wedding” where Becky’s fiance is murdered and then she becomes the new Dragoon.  Over the season Emma would have to unravel the web Isis weaves and then in the last couple of episodes there’d be the final showdown in the Temple of Isis.

That season would end with Becky and Emma’s friendship over and Emma losing her job.  In the start of the next season she would go to work for the secretive Russian businessman Bykov.  And eventually she’d find out he’s up to some scheme and have to stop him while at the same time repairing things with Becky and exploring her feelings for Jim, aka the Sewer Rat.  I’m not sure about doing the body-swapping that’s in the fourth book.  I think I’d probably combine the fourth and fifth ones into one story arc.  The fifth book had an evil businessman developing a bomb underneath a building that led to the Sewer Rat being driven out of his sewer home--and into Emma's.  So we could probably just have Bykov do that.  In the end of that the good witch Sylvia died to save everyone from the bomb; we might kill her off or maybe we'd kill someone else off, depending on if anyone wants a new contract or to go work on their movie career or something.

Another season would have Emma getting pregnant and trying to maintain her superhero career.  A couple of episodes would have her travel to the future to meet her daughter and deal with a resurgent Isis.  Like in the sixth book Emma would have the baby only to think she dies shortly after, when in reality agents of Bykov took the baby.  (The placement of this season might depend on if for instance the actress playing Emma would get pregnant in real life.)

The following season Emma would find out her baby is alive and along with Jim, the baby’s father, she’d go to Russia and work her way to Bykov and rescue her daughter Louise, though Jim is killed in the process.  At the end of the season though we find out that Isis has returned and to save Louise, Emma gives up the red armor.

The final season then would be a streamlined version of the 8th book.  As Isis’ power grows and she turns Rampart City into her playground, Emma would be drawn to a parallel world by a girl with special powers and then they do sort of an Into the Spider-Verse thing and Emma gets a new suit of armor before the final confrontation. 

I say that’s the final season because that was the last book but maybe there could be more.  The second book is my least favorite so I wouldn’t include much of that but I think it could be a two-part episode in season 1 to help pad that out.  A villain could fuck with time to create a time tangent where Emma isn’t the Scarlet Knight and her parents are alive and then she has to decide to sacrifice them to put things right.

So there you go, it all sounds extremely plausible.  Unlikely but plausible.

2019 Rewind: Luthor, Dark Savior

I got talking at the Geek Twins how you could make a black Lex Luthor and then just to prove how awesome of an idea it is, I thought up a couple of movie scenarios.  And as I posted a couple of months ago, with the success of Joker, maybe someone should actually do this.

Yesterday I posted some random thoughts on the best and worst Lex Luthors and who I think should be the next movie Luthor.  As often happens then I started to think of a harebrained movie idea.  Actually two of them.

My first thought was, since they're slapping together that Joker thing with Joaquin Phoenix and without Batman why couldn't they make a Luthor movie without Superman?  And then I remembered a couple of books I read.  One was Luthor by Brian Azzarello that traces Luthor's life story and features Superman floating outside a window and not saying anything.  The other was Paul Cornell's run on Action Comics that focused on Luthor searching for a black power ring that would give him power over life and death.  That also didn't feature Superman much if at all.  So obviously it can be done.

The two ideas would actually start out the same and then diverge.  Now, going on my thought of making the next Luthor a black guy basically think about if Tony Stark had grown up a poor black kid in a bad neighborhood.  Like, say, Detroit.

So the opening scene we see this little boy like 10-12 and he's running through a rundown neighborhood (like, say, Detroit) and being pursued by a bunch of older boys.  He winds up in an alley where the old kids confront him and call him names and stuff.  One kid takes his backpack and there's some weird device in it.  The older kids ask him what it does and he cautions them not to turn it on.  But of course one does and immediately gets electrocuted.  The boy uses a remote in his pocket to turn it off and pick the thing up and then asks the others if they want to be next.  No one does so they take off running.

Cut to a big lecture hall many years later where a now-grown Lex Luthor is explaining that he's never liked bullies and now you have the biggest bully ever in this "Superman."  (You don't have to actually show Superman's face, just some blurred images of the suit and cape.)  And so LexCorp has evened the playing field...

Big reveal then of a hideous Superman clone (Bizarro).  Lex has his pet demonstrate his strength and speed and freeze breath.  But eventually like the ED-209 in Robocop, Bizarro starts going out of control, throwing people around and stuff.  (Maybe worse if it's an R-rating, but just broken bones in a PG-13 film.)  Lex finally uses a remote to trigger some explosives in the monster's neck to kill it.  (Or again less gory if it's PG-13.)

And now is where the two ideas diverge.

Idea 1:  Brainiac Lives

After the disastrous meeting, Lex goes to his lab to try to figure out what went wrong with the clone.  While he's there, he gets a call from his space research team that they're picking up a weak signal in space.  It soon becomes clear there's an object coming down in some remote place.  Lex has his security people stifle any news of this to the media so he can hopefully get there first.

He then goes to his private plane where his assistant is waiting.  His assistant LOIS, an android who looks like Lois Lane.  The LOIS should be an acronym standing for something like Living Operational Information System.  (The android Lois idea comes from the Black Ring story.)  They fly out to some tropical jungle, where LOIS carves a route and demonstrates her skills on a few of the local animals.

They eventually come to a crashed spaceship.  LOIS and a few security people go in first, though Lex insists on coming close behind so he doesn't miss anything.  There are scribbles of alien languages and artifacts and stuff like that.

As they're exploring they're assaulted by some big ass alien monster.  LOIS shows off her guns (like Gatling guns built into her body) to take the thing down.  There are a few other dead aliens too.  None of them who look human like a certain Kryptonian.

Lex is drawn to the ship's nerve center which is a big, fancy computer.  He figures out how to disconnect the central unit to take it with them back to Metropolis.  He leaves some security people to watch the wreck so they can salvage more of it later.  There are some government flunkies who ask about what happened at the meeting and then about the wreck, but he gets rid of them with a mixture of bribery, flattery, and threats.

Lex holes himself up in his lab again, only now it's to study the computer from the ship.  Once he gets it powered on, he finds a log of all its travels to various worlds in the galaxy--including Krypton.  Lex starts to realize just how ancient and deadly this thing is.  (Which a sane person would turn it off and smash it to pieces, but he sees an opportunity for knowledge and power beyond comprehension.)

LOIS comes back later to check on him and says that they've begun salvaging the ship and so far there's no interference from any big blue boy scout.  Lex barely acknowledges this and then triggers something in the computer so that a green face comes up and identifies itself as Brainiac.  (Maybe that's an acronym too.  Or something that sounds like "Brainiac" but is an alien word.)  Lex starts to ask it what it was doing and how it ended up here and it says that it was on a mission to preserve all the cultures of the universe when there was some disaster (meteor shower, storm, malfunction?) that caused it to crash and now it needs to continue its mission.

Lex isn't interested in its mission so much as using its knowledge to advance his agenda.  He browses some of the technology Brainiac has encountered that's millions of light years from anything even he dreamed possible.  But when he gets to the Kryptonian section he starts to recognize the similarities between that stuff and the man flying through Earth's skies.  And so he starts looking into technologies that could be used against Superman.

Over the next few days Lex is hard at work in the lab.  Brainiac pesters him about continuing its mission but Lex blows it off.  What's it going to do, right?  Well we see (but Lex doesn't because it's when he's asleep or not around) that Brainiac is assimilating technology around it, including LOIS.

Lex calls another meeting a few days later to demonstrate his latest big thing.  Some really advanced weapons and shit.  Like before everything is going pretty well--until Brainiac takes control of the whole building.  When Lex tries to override, Brainiac sics LOIS on him.  Lex runs for his life but not being an idiot he has an escape plan for an emergency like this.

He winds up going down in the sewers and ending up in his old neighborhood.  Then we reveal the other half of that first scene.  Young Lex went home triumphant only to find his mother's apartment burglarized and her dead.  Shortly thereafter he had to go live with an aunt.  Again he feels like he's lost everything but like then he's not going to give up.

Like Tony Stark in the cave, Lex gets to work on a suit of armor in some old dump where he used to work.  (This would be a good place to work in a cameo by John Henry--Steel--as someone Lex knows from the old neighborhood who's also into science and engineering.)  What Lex comes up with would be a primitive version of the Rebirth "Superman" armor he wore for a while:

Meanwhile Superman has shown up at LexCorp's headquarters but the building's systems have stopped him cold.  (And again we don't really need to see his face; some grainy news footage would suffice.)  So this looks like a job for Lex Luthor!

In his new armor Lex goes back to the headquarters and starts to take on the defenses.  He has to take down LOIS and then confront Brainiac's central core, which has turned Lex's lab into something like the crashed ship's control center.  Brainiac congratulates Lex's determination but says what a fool he is to have come in that armor.

Brainiac assimilates the primitive systems of the armor but then realizes too late that the armor's systems were a Trojan horse.  Lex encoded a virus into them that is attacking Brainiac.  The more advanced Brainiac could fend it off, but the virus gives Lex the time he needs to deactivate Brainiac and the rest of the building's systems.

And so Lex has saved the world where Superman failed.  Saved it from himself really, but who's counting?  At the end Lex is confronted by journalists (maybe the real Lois Lane) and gives them some fiction to put him in a good light.  Then to set up a sequel we reveal that Lex still has some of the technology from Brainiac.

And now Idea 2:  Hope

So we pick up after the disastrous meeting where Bizarro beat up and/or killed a bunch of people.  Lex goes to his office and calls his top scientist onto the carpet.  She is a woman we'll just call Dr. Jones for now.  Dr. Jones has MS or Parkinson's or cerebral palsy or something like that necessitating her to use crutches to get around.  Seeing her, he can't bring himself to fire her.  He tells her in no uncertain terms to find out what went wrong or else she won't be so lucky the next time.  She absorbs the abuse and maybe dishes a little back at him, which he secretly admires.

After a late night of working, he's getting in his limo and sees Dr. Jones hobbling along.  It's much too late to get a cab and so he offers to give her a ride.  They talk a little about his growing up in a bad neighborhood and making something of himself and her losing the full use of her legs and yet still making something of herself.  They don't kiss, but there is romance in the air.

A couple of days later Lex has to brush off some government flunkies like in the first idea.  Then he gets a call from Dr. Jones and goes to visit her in the lab.  She's done a complete coding of Bizarro's DNA and identified a few sections where the cloning failed.  she's also identified some of the genes that gave him superpowers.  Lex sees the potential of this right away.  If they could recreate those genes and plant them in someone he or she could have superpowers!  And it could probably also cure diseases, like MS or Parkinson's or cerebral palsy.

Lex and Dr. Jones begin working on this project and spending a lot of time together in the lab.  They share dinner together and talk and bond.  Lex has never really been in love but now finds himself falling for Dr. Jones.

When they run some successful experiments on rats in the lab, Lex and Dr. Jones make out.  (If it's PG-13 then it's just kissing but if it's an R rating then they could actually fuck.)  Not for purely altruistic reasons, Lex encourages Dr. Jones to try the gene therapy on herself.

At first not a lot happens, but slowly she starts to build up strength until not only doesn't she need crutches but she can lift a car over her head like a certain other person famously did.  Soon she's developing super speed, hearing, X-ray vision, and heat vision or freeze breath or whatever.  She and Lex are out to celebrate when they see a mugging and Dr. Jones breaks it up.

It's fairly easy then for Lex to encourage her to don a costume and adopt a new identity:  Hope.  Soon she starts doing all the stuff Superman does:  break up robberies, rescue people from burning buildings, and get cats out of trees.  With his media connections, Lex makes sure everything she does is getting plenty of exposure too.  Now you see the dark side of this, right?  He's making Superman yesterday's news for a superhero he controls.

Everything's going great, right?  But then all the sudden Hope is trying to rescue something when her powers fail.  Someone is killed and she's hurt.  In the lab Lex examines her and administers another dose of the gene therapy.  Hope soon has her powers back, but when Lex meets her as Dr. Jones, she's acting differently.  A waiter brings her the wrong thing or spills something and she nearly breaks his neck.  Lex wants to examine her, but she refuses.

Over the next few days, Hope starts going off the rails until she starts raging through downtown Metropolis.  And again in some grainy news footage we might see that not even Superman can stop her!

Lex decides he has to take this into his own hands.  He gets into some Kryptonite-powered armor he developed to fight Big Blue that looks sort of like this:

With that on he goes out to confront Hope.  He gets a couple of shots in but she generally kicks his ass.  She finally gets him down and tears away most of the armor.  Battered and bloody, Lex tells her to go ahead and kill him.  He'd rather she did than watch her continue devolving into a monster.  She balks at delivering the killing blow and gives Lex a chance to inject her with a special sedative to knock her out.

Later, Lex goes to visit Dr. Jones in the secure facility she was put in.  Her superpowers are all gone now and she's back on crutches.  He thanks her for taking the blame for the experiment, not mentioning to the cops how he helped her with it.  And he promises that he's still doing everything he can to find a cure for her.  They share a tender moment and then Lex leaves.  As he's leaving he sees Superman up in the sky and promises himself this isn't over.

[Luthor creating a new superhero to upstage Superman has been done in the comics before though I don't remember which specific ones who wrote them.]

So there you go.  Two more great ideas that will go unused while DC/WB continues fumbling around with their "cinematic universe."  Put me in charge and we'd already have a half-dozen hit movies!  Or they'd be bankrupt.  Probably that.

2019 Rewind: The Ultimate Batman Trilogy

I decided I'm going to sort of combine Storypalooza with rerunning posts by rerunning some of my harebrained ideas from this year.  First up, my Ultimate Batman Trilogy, which will probably be better than what Matt Reeves comes up with.

I'll give you a break from Critique Circle whines to give you one of my awesome fake movie ideas that I know people love so much.  Ha ha ha.

Anyway, this idea got started a couple of months ago when I watched Batman: Mask of the Phantasm.  This was a feature-length movie based on the popular animated series in the early 90s.  It came out in about 93 or 94.  The idea is that there's someone in a costume (sort of a gray Azrael costume) who's knocking off old gangsters.  Batman is accused of the crimes so he has to track down who it is and stop him...except he eventually realizes it's not a him, it's a her!  And worse yet it's an old flame of Bruce Wayne's who's recently shown up in town.

The neat thing is this serves as sort of an origin story as well because it flashes back to when Bruce is starting to war on crime.  That's when he meets this woman and falls madly in love with her.  He asks her to marry him and she accepts.  He's going to put the whole war on crime aside but then she has to leave suddenly with her father.  The backstory adopts a little of Frank Miller's Year One in that Bruce starts out just wearing a ski mask or something and gets his ass kicked.  Then he's sitting in the study when the whole bat thing comes to him.

Anyway, the woman is dressing like "the Phantasm" to get revenge on the gangsters who were responsible for her father's murder.  Which puts her at odds with Batman.  The last gangster turns to the Joker for help.  Before he became the Joker, he was the bodyguard of the gangster and was the one to kill the woman's father.  Long story short, Batman and the woman tangle with the Joker and stop him but then she has to go away and so Bruce continues his war on crime as Batman.

This seemed like it could actually work as a live action movie, especially since with the DC movie universe so fucked up they could use it as a sort of soft reboot.

As typically happens I got thinking about it and then the idea kept bigger and bigger as I started to incorporate bits and pieces from other Batman storylines I've read or seen.  And then I came up with a rough idea for not one but a trilogy of movies!

The first one would borrow heavily on Mask of the Phantasm in that there's a masked character killing people and Batman gets the blame and some woman shows up.  Only I thought:  what if the woman has a son--Bruce's son?  As in back in the flashbacks like 10 years ago or so Bruce and this woman were fooling around and after she had to leave with her father she found out she was pregnant but she never told him.

So as Batman tries to find out who this masked killer is, Bruce is getting to know his new son Damian and reacquainting himself with the woman who probably isn't Talia al-Guhl like in the comics but sort of along that same line.

Instead of the Joker I was thinking of using Deathstroke as the former bodyguard because they already cast someone for that and we can save the Joker for later on if we want.

In the end there's the big action scene with Batman/woman/Deathstroke and Deathstroke is stopped but the woman is killed.  And so it falls to Bruce to raise their son.

Then the second part would take place a few years later.  Unbeknownst to Bruce, Damian has been training and doing a little light crime fighting.  One night Batman runs into Damian and so Bruce decides to train him as Robin.

About that time the Joker shows up to terrorize Gotham.  Or it could be the Riddler or whoever.  What's the diff really?  The plot's pretty much the same no matter which villain you use; it's just the specific set pieces that would change.

Anyway, Batman has to deal with this threat and the hot-headed Damian.  Ultimately they track the Joker or whoever to a lair where he has a nuclear bomb or something stashed away.  While Batman disarms the bomb, Damian refuses to listen to Batman and takes on the Joker himself.  And gets his ass kicked.  Then he and the Joker are seemingly blown up in an explosion.  While Batman stops the bomb, he's crushed by the death of his son that he sees as his fault.  (Which it kinda is.)

The third movie would then be years later.  Batman is older and angrier, more like the Frank Miller Batman.  But that's not enough for him to actually kill the criminals--he just roughs them up more.  Then one night he sees a costumed figure who does actually kill some criminals.  (No one important, just some henchmen.)  Which reminds him of Damian's mother years ago.  But she's dead, so who could this new masked avenger be?

As Batman is trying to figure this out and the new masked avenger is killing minor villains, a new major player is moving in.  Bane, the Scarecrow, Ra's al Guhl...again, it doesn't really matter at this point.  The point is there's some bigger threat.

Batman and this new masked avenger are both working on tracking down this threat using the tools at their disposal.  Batman's a lot more subtle, obviously.  At some point they wind up meeting and there's a fight.  Eventually the mask comes off and Batman sees a scarred but familiar face:  Damian, his son!  He wasn't killed in the explosion, just injured.  But almost being blown up made him decide Bruce's way wasn't working, so he decided to go out and learn some skills and then eventually come back to do what his father wouldn't, ie kill the criminals.

Batman lets Damian go.  He eventually faces the bigger threat by himself but barely escapes and only then because of Damian's help.  They reluctantly decide they need to team up.  So they do and take down the bad guy.  Of course Damian has the chance to kill whoever it is but then pulls back.

Instead of a happy reunion, Damian decides while he might not kill people anymore (or as much), Gotham is too small for the two of them.  Batman agrees to let Damian go off to another city to find his own path.  And in a few years, when Bruce can no longer be Batman, maybe Damian will take over the legacy.

There you go.  Mostly it borrows from Mask of the Phantasm, A Death in the Family, and Under the Hood with a little Arkham Knight and Batman & Son.  I think the family drama is something they haven't really done in the previous movies so it would freshen it up a little.  You could probably make it work for Affleck or a new actor so no worries there.

Call me DC!

The Penultimate Popular Post!

I don't know if I'll get around to the prompt thing or do reruns the remainder of the year or whatever.  Here was the second most viewed post thanks to bots.  It did at least have 2 comments so at least 2 humans viewed it.


Another wonderful incident from Critique Circle.  It's great there are so many dipshits there to provide blogger fodder.  I mean, otherwise what would I talk about:  politics?  Movies?  Comic books?  How awful!

Anyway, here's another dipshit.  This time whining that the crits he's getting might not be up to snuff.

I’ve a bit of a bugaboo in assessing the worth of some crits on CC. I’ve been working for the past decade to mature a writer’s voice, a style I like and one I am comfortable with as I write and rewrite (and rewrite).

 My vexation flows from critiquers who crit as they go along and don’t seem to acknowledge the disadvantage this places on the writing and the writer. The problem I have is that my stories tend to wrap one meaningful large moment around many, at first sight, questionably mundane moments. I’ll give a poorly thought through example to attempt clarity. I’ll have a character put her groceries in her trunk after pushing her fire extinguisher aside. Comment: “Cut the fire extinguisher. It adds nothing.” Then when they reach the part that bursts aflame, comment: ‘Oh, never mind.” (The fact that I advised you to do something ruinous to your story)

 Question: How does one do that and still trust the critter’s other analyses?
 My reaction is this person should not continue offering this species of crit. For me, and I posit, for any logical writer, it lowers the worth of even their most brilliant comments because the writer can only conclude that by the time the critiquer gains familiarity with the story as written, they’ve already finished critting it.

I do not contend that no one should crit as they go. Some make that their best offering. I do contend that they should acknowledge for their own benefit the disadvantage this places on the writing and the writer and recognize times when a little sell-doubt may be in order.

It's proof that beggars can be choosy!  And look the gift horse in the mouth.  Geez, just the nerve of people critiquing my story for free for not putting enough effort into it.  Why don't they read the whole thing and give it a good long think before critiquing it?  Hell, why don't they read it three times and write a whole 5000-word essay on it?

You want to talk about entitled snowflakes, there you go.  The reality of a critique site is you get what you pay for.  You don't pay for these critiques so you can't realistically expect sage wisdom.  Most of the people you're dealing with are not professionals.  They're just amateurs giving their time in a vain attempt to help you and in return they get 1-3 points so they can load their own stories to be critiqued maybe not up to your standards.

I don't like saying "it is what it is" because that's so simplistic but in this case the system is what it is.  If you want better, get out your checkbook and pay for a professional edit.  Otherwise you have to take what you can get.

From a critiquer point of view, I often don't have lots of time to spend reading someone's story.  And to be honest so many of them are so awful I can't read them all the way through once let alone several times.  There are plenty where I just give up because it's so fucking terrible.  Then I just scribble enough to get my 3 points and move on.  You don't like it, well, maybe you shouldn't have written such a shitty story.

The idea of just disregarding a whole critique because of one comment is so stupid.  Look, even the best hitters in baseball couldn't get a hit more than 40% of the time.  You can't expect someone not to have one miss in an evaluation.  It doesn't mean you disregard everything else.  To use another cliche, it's throwing the baby out with bathwater.  In the end, though, it's no one's loss but your own.

And as I said to the people defending this:  I can't wait until you get something published for real and start getting "reviews" on Amazon and Goodreads.  You think the critiques here are poorly written?  Wait until you get your first one-star review saying only "ok."

You ain't seen nothing yet, snowflakes!

As a funny addendum, a couple days later someone started another thread complaining that he wrote a 2200-word critique and the author just said all the stuff he pointed out was intentional.  In case you need another reason why some people might not want to spend hours writing a critique.  Even funnier when I said that maybe it was the guy in the first thread who was that author I got slapped down by the admin for "personal attacks" and trying to "incite a flame war."  If you don't actually use someone's name and just suggest a link between two threads how is that a personal attack or inciting a flame war?  I just thought it was a neat coincidence.  Even the moderators are such whiny crybabies on that site!

(Postscript:  I haven't been back to that site since the lame ban and don't really miss it.  Or any writing sites for that matter.  Too many whiny snowflakes and big egos--including me.)

Prompt Failure and the Most Popular Post of the Year!

I didn't forget to do the prompt thing; I was just too lazy to get around to it.  So, here's a rehash of the most popular post of the year according to the bots.  It had 1058 views!  (And 0 comments. 😂)


I've often complained about readers writing bad reviews because a particular story didn't end Happily Ever After.  I even wrote a book as unhappily as I could to trap those morons.

But this isn't about that.  This is about something that happened on Critique Circle a few months ago.  I wrote a blurb for a story.  Here it is:

Advancing to its first Final Four should have the students of Bailey University in a hard-partying mood. Instead, the campus is shocked and horrified by a terrible crime committed against its most beloved resident. Red, the university's bulldog mascot, has been taken! If the university doesn't pay a million dollars in ransom by tip-off of the championship game, Red will be gone forever. But the crime is even worse than the student body thinks because it's an inside job.

  Mark Carmichael is Red's handler and social media coordinator—and also a rotten gambler. Into a local bookie for a hundred grand, Mark seizes upon a desperate plan to pay his debts and make a nice nest egg for himself: he'll give Red to a couple of stoner friends for a few days, stage the dognapping, and collect the ransom. Then there will be a tearful reunion on camera to make Mark and Red world famous. It's a foolproof plan. 

Except there's a stingy university president who doesn't want to pay for a dog, an overzealous campus policeman hot on Mark's trail, and an intrepid reporter—the girl Mark dreamed of having in high school—who's suddenly interested in him. Cleaning up after a bulldog and writing Twitter posts never prepared Mark for this!

 The Dognapping is a black comedy in the mold of Elmore Leonard's Get Shorty or the Coen Brothers' Fargo.

And someone replied:

And make it so the reader can pull for Mark and the intrepid reporter girl and Red to ride off happily into the sunset after Baily University—against mountainous odds—wins the tournament with a buzzer-beating three-pointer. That kind of story.

OK, so let me get this straight:  the guy who got deep in debt from gambling and stages a dognapping to get money from his employer to pay his gambling debts (plus extra for a nest egg) should get to live Happily Ever After with the reporter and the dog?  What the hell does Mark do to deserve a happy ending?  Nothing!  He's actually a pretty shitty person.  But he should totally get to run off Happily Ever After into the sunset.  No wonder there are people who still think the assholes in Superstore should get to live Happily Ever After no matter how shitty they are to other people.

This same person a month or so later whined about a story not seeming to end happy.  It was about a Mennonite woman whose husband goes to work in some other town and cheats on her--with another man!  And this person commented, why wouldn't she want him back?  Um, because he cheated on her.  With a dude.  Duh.  But no, she has to take him back!  We have to have an imaginary Happily Ever After!  Dude has some serious issues.

Much like respect, happy endings have to be earned, not just given.  Would Fargo (the basis for this story) have been better if William H Macy got the ransom and ran away with his mistress?  Or if the kidnappers had been killed and he and his wife reconciled?

Now if Mark needed money because his grandma had cancer and he needed to pay for treatments, then he might deserve a Happily Ever After, but not for paying gambling debts.  Which isn't to say that sometimes we don't root for the "bad guy."  I mean in heist movies like Ocean's Eleven we root for the crooks to get away, right?  But at least in that movie you have crooks robbing an asshole casino manager so that makes it OK!  Or in Hell or High Water two brothers rob a string of banks.  But...it's because their home is being foreclosed on and they only rob branches of that bank to pay the mortgage and keep the house, which has oil on the property.  So a happy ending is OK for them because they have a righteous cause.

So maybe if the college president is a real asshole and the bookie goes around kicking puppies or something then his caper might be justified.

But as I wrote it, Mark doesn't deserve a happy ending.  So, are some people just addicted to happy endings that they can't even recognize when a happy ending isn't justified?  I think so.

Prompt Service

While you're shopping for the holidays, enjoy a blog entry!

A few weeks ago I bought this very plain-looking book called 400 Writing Prompts from Five Below for $5.  And it has...400 writing prompts with some space to write stuff down.  Whoa!  I was hoping the prompts would be focused on fiction writing but most of them are lame journaling prompts like, "Name 10 things on your bucket list."  Like I give a shit.  A lot of them remind me of stupid questions employers put on psychological tests they make you fill out.  It's always really hard for me not to write some smartass comment because I find it really hard to take those things seriously.

But still, there were 400 of them so I hopefully found enough to provide a month of blog entries.  We shall see.

Swapsgiving: The Holiday That Never Was

Like when I came up with the idea of Swapnado, the idea of Swapsgiving seemed so obvious that I don't know why I hadn't thought of it years ago.  Thanksgiving...Swapsgiving...seems pretty obvious, right?  Why'd it take me 5 years to realize that?

The problem is the idea for this came to me in early November and I still had a little bit to finish up on what I was working on.  And even then I had a title and a general idea (something about gender swapping during Thanksgiving) but I still had to chase the idea down the rabbit hole.

The "pantser" types would say, "Just start writing and figure it out later!"  But I didn't really know what I wanted to write about yet.  For a story like this you need to set the parameters:  who's being swapped?  How?  Why?  Is it going to have a happy ending where they learn something?  Or is it going to be one of those dark endings that only I appreciate?

So there was a lot to think about and I'd just had two teeth pulled out so I wasn't exactly feeling at my best.  But I did finally come up with a rough idea involving turkey that was somehow poisoned.  And...the idea never really got off the ground.

I kept procrastinating until it was a couple of days before Thanksgiving and then there was no time to write, edit, and get the thing approved by Amazon before Turkey Day.  And what's the point of releasing a Thanksgiving-themed story after Thanksgiving?  And I figured I might as well start devoting my energy to a Christmas-themed story.  I've done a Christmas-themed one every year since 2014 so it's kind of a holiday tradition.  Ha.

I did write on Swapsgiving one Saturday before the holiday.  Here's a little taste of this turkey:

For some people the best part of Thanksgiving is seeing family.  For others it’s the parades.  Or others the football games.  Or nowadays for some it’s the shopping after the meal.

But for me, the best part of Thanksgiving is always the smell of the turkey cooking in the oven.  If I could get that smell in an air freshener for my car I would in a heartbeat.  One whiff of that heavenly aroma and I’m transported back to Mom’s kitchen, where every Thanksgiving she would roast a turkey that was usually twenty pounds or more.

Dad, my older brother Skip, and I would watch TV on the couch while the smell of roast turkey filled the air.  Within an hour all I could think of was biting into a big, juicy chunk of white meat.  Then there would be hours of torment as that smell lingered while Mom prepared the rest of the dinner and we waited for the relatives to show up.

Angie isn’t the cook Mom was, but as I read the morning paper, I detect that same lovely smell.  I put down the newspaper to sniff at the air and like a cartoon dog my mouth opens for my tongue to loll out.  I use a corner of the paper to wipe drool from my mouth.

Angie laughs at me from the doorway.  “Easy, boy.  It’s not going to be ready for a couple of hours yet.”

“It smells awesome.  Just like Mom’s.”

“Hopefully it tastes better.  No offense, but your mom’s turkey was usually dry.”

“Sacrilege!” I cry out.  I grab her wrist to pull her down onto the couch.  Angie’s lips don’t taste like turkey; they are a lot sweeter.

Far too soon she pushes me back.  “I have to get to work on the other stuff.”  She taps me in the chest with a finger.  “Don’t you go picking at that turkey.  You’ll get sick.”

“I know.  I’m not a dog,” I growl.

“Sometimes I wonder,” she teases.

I gather up the paper to get back to reading.  This is no ordinary Thanksgiving dinner:  my thesis adviser, Dr. Montcalm, is coming over with his wife.  I need his support to finally get my doctorate so I can then start to practice psychology.  And I’ll be able to insist people call me Dr. Hughes.  Then I’ll be able to pay back the hundreds of thousands in student loans.  Plus I won’t have to rely on Angie to earn most of the money, which even if this isn’t the 1950s would still ease my male pride.

I search the paper for some topics to discuss with Dr. Montcalm.  The old man is a real gossip hound; he loves trying to analyze famous people--politicians, celebrities, and even athletes--through media articles.  He once spent an entire hour discussing whether or not Meryl Streep has a narcissistic personality disorder.

I try to read, but nothing sticks.  Not with that turkey smell tormenting me.  I desperately want to go into the kitchen to rip off just a little chunk, but I can’t with Angie still in there, making the sides.  Her mashed potatoes usually end up lumpy and her stuffing bland, so I only eat enough to reassure her.  It gives me more room for that delicious turkey.

A half-hour of torture goes by until I’m finally saved by the bell--or the buzz of Angie’s phone.  I hear her answer it.  Her voice starts to get farther away and I hear the steps creak as she goes upstairs.

After eight years of dating and marriage, she knows me well enough to shout, “Hank, stay away from that turkey!”

“I’m nowhere near it!” I call back.  Angie is the only one allowed to call me “Hank;” everyone else I insist call me Henry.  It’s a privilege she’s earned and no one else has yet.

I wait another minute before I get up to slink into the kitchen.  I use a potholder to open the oven slowly to avoid making any loud noises.  The oven is a hideous kiwi-green holdover from the ‘70s that came with the house we inherited from Angie’s grandmother three years ago.  The original idea was that we would move in to serve as caretakers for the old woman, but before we could move in, she died in her sleep.  We threw out the bed she died in, but everything else we kept; we couldn’t afford to furnish an entire house on our own. 

As the door opens, the turkey scent washes over me.  I close my eyes and take it in like someone might take in an ocean breeze on a tropical beach.  As much as I’d like to bask in the smell, I only have a couple of minutes before Angie comes back.

With the potholder I ease the oven rack out a few inches--the most the crusty old rack will move.  I can’t pick from the top or Angie will be sure to see it.  I can’t go too deep as the meat inside isn’t cooked yet.  But near the bottom will be hot and almost invisible.  If Angie does see anything missing she might think it just broke off.  Plus at the bottom you get some of that grease that’s not good for the waistline, but so, so delectable. 

White meat is my favorite, but I can get by with a scrap of dark meat.  Like a hard-core drug fiend I’m not too particular about the purity; I just need something to sate my burning need.  I rip off a postage stamp-sized chunk of meat and skin still dripping with grease.  I blow on it a few seconds before I pop it into my mouth.

As I chew I push the rack back into the oven and then close the door.  The perfect crime--

I’ve just swallowed that warm, greasy piece of goodness when my stomach roils.  I double over and gag, but nothing comes out.  I gag a couple of more times before pain seizes my entire body.  I try to scream, but I can only let out a choked gasp.

I drop to my knees on the cool checkerboard tile of the kitchen floor.  I’ve never in my entire life felt pain as intense as this.  It’s like someone lit me on fire.  I let out another choked gasp as I hear--and feel--bones snapping.  What’s happening to me?  I think of those old horror movies where a guy changes into a werewolf; that can’t be happening to me, can it?  Through the pain I can’t see any hair growing on my hands; if anything there’s less.  My nails are getting longer, but not like claws.  

They’re long and glossy like Angie’s after she goes to the nail salon.

While my hands aren’t getting hairy, waves of dark hair fall over my face, getting longer until the ends coil up on the floor.  I manage to tilt my head just enough to see the top of my T-shirt has been pushed out by two big, round breasts.  I have cleavage!  The breasts, the hair, and the nails all give me an idea of what I’m becoming.

I’m turning into a woman!

***

The pain finally ends; I’m so exhausted that I collapse onto the floor.  I ought to try to get out of here before Angie sees me--and so I can take stock of what’s happened to me--but I’m too weak to move.  I pant like a hot canine and like a canine I moan pathetically.  I can’t see much with the hair that’s fallen over my face over like a veil, but I hear the creak of the stairs.

I have to get out of here!  My mind screams at me to move, but I can’t do anything.  I continue to lay sprawled on the floor like a rug as I hear Angie shout, “Oh my God!  Who the hell are you?”

I can only moan in reply.

The last thing I expect is for Angie to kick me.  Or to kick me again and again.  “Who are you?  

Where’s my husband?  Did you kill him, you goddamned tweaker?”

The last insult makes me realize she thinks I’m a junkie who’s broken into her kitchen.  The neighborhood isn’t the best, so it’s a slightly plausible scenario, though it’s not likely a junkie would be wearing her husband’s clothes and would have passed out on the floor.

It’s hard to find my voice with all the pain I’ve endured--and what Angie is putting me through--but I manage to wheeze, “It...me.”

“Me who?” she shouts.  When I can’t answer right away, she kicks me again.  “Me who?  You got ten seconds before I call the cops.”

“Hank!” I squeak.

“Yeah, right, lady.  You are definitely not Hank.”

“Clothes.”

She stops kicking me to squint at me.  “You’re wearing his clothes.  So what?  That doesn’t mean anything.”

If I could get out more than one or two words I might be able to say something to convince her of who I am.  There has to be some code word I can speak to make her believe me.  Something that would symbolize the connection between us.  I manage to wave vaguely and then spit out, “You...me...grandma.”

“What?”

“You...me...grandma.”

Her eyes narrow again as she considers what I said.  I’ve recovered enough strength to add, “Live...together.”

“How do you know about that?”

“I...Hank.”

“Yeah, right.”

I’ve apparently gotten small and light enough that Angie can grab the front of my T-shirt.  The breasts sticking out from my chest look even bigger when I’m standing; the nipples are clearly visible against the fabric.  I feel my face turning warm with embarrassment as Angie looks down at me.  “You are definitely not my Hank.”

“Am too.”

“You sure as hell don’t look like him.  Or any him.”

“I know.”

“So, what, you’re my Hank and all the sudden you turned into a girl?”

“Yes.”

“How?  Your fairy godmother?  Space aliens?”

It’s a good question.  I think about the chain of events that led to me ending up on the floor in a girl’s body.  “Turkey.”

“Turkey?  What about it?”

“Eat turkey.”

She stares at me.  The last thing I expect is for her to laugh.  “You ate the turkey and turned into a girl?  For real?”

“Yes!”

“Uh-huh.  Well, I warned Hank not to eat it.  I just thought he’d get sick.”

“It true!” I shout.  Tears start to cloud my vision.  Why doesn’t my wife believe me?  We’re supposed to have an unshakeable bond of trust, but the first time I end up on the floor looking like a girl she kicks me and berates me and refuses to trust me.

“Oh, Jesus,” Angie grumbles.  It’s hard for me to walk on my own, so Angie pretty much drags me into the living room.  She pushes me down on the couch like I’m a rag doll and like a rag doll there’s nothing I can do but flop down on the cushions.  “You are really fucked up, lady.”

“Hank!”

“I’m not calling you Hank, lady.  Why don’t you give me a real name?”

“Hank!”

“Bullshit.”  She holds up her phone.  “Give me a real name or I’m calling the cops.  I mean it.”

“I am Hank!”

“Then prove it, bitch.”

“How?”

“Where did Hank propose to me?”

“Central Park.”

“Good guess.  What song did we dance to at our wedding?”

“Endless Love.”

Her eyes narrow.  “OK, that’s two for two.  But you could have been a guest at the wedding.  Let’s try something personal.  There’s one thing Hank does in bed that I really, really like.  What is it?”

“Nibble nipple,” I say.

She puts the phone in her pocket and then shakes her head.  “I guess you’re either Hank or some girl he’s coached real well.  And if he told you about that last one just to play a joke I’m going to kill him.”

“No joke.”

She studies me for a moment before she says, “Stay there.  I’ll be right back.”

I can’t go anywhere even if I want to.  I lie on the couch, idly watching the Macy’s parade on TV.  There’s some school band marching by when Angie bends in front of me.  She puts something to my lips.  I soon realize it’s orange juice.

“Thanks.”

“You’re all clammy,” she says, wiping sweat from my forehead.

“Tired.”

“I bet.  I mean, changing into a woman would be tiring, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes.”  My exhausted body manages the energy to yawn.  “Sleepy.”

A Christmas Swap Story Conundrum

I will probably get no helpful advice from the phantom readers, but I'm going to try anyway.

So one day I had this idea--the 12 Days of Christmas, with gender swaps!  I looked up the song and wrote down the lyric for each day and some were pretty easy like drummers drumming, pipers piping, and of course ladies dancing.  But then you get all those birds and it gets a bit trickier.

Anyway, I started chasing the idea down the rabbit hole and finally came up with something I think is pretty cool.  Think of it like The Time Traveler's Wife meets that 13 Reasons Why show on Netflix--which I never watched.

So there's this guy named Taylor and one day he meets this cute redhead who moves in next door but he blows it and she never talks to him again.  On Christmas Eve he comes home from work to find she's killed herself.  (Or did she?  Hurm...)  Later he opens his mailbox and there's a mysterious package with an ornament in it.  He puts the ornament on the tree and finds himself in the body of a girl and back in time when the redhead was still alive.  He's only there a short time before he comes back.

And then each day another ornament shows up and Taylor quantum leaps to some random point in the redhead's life as he tries to unravel who she is and why she killed herself--if she did.  And as he does he falls in love with her and she falls in love with him, but is she still fated to die?  Or will there be a Christmas miracle?

That's the story and I hope I actually manage to get off my ass and finish it in time, unlike a Thanksgiving story I'll talk about Friday.

The problem now is I'm not sure about the title.  Here's the question for the phantom readers:  which do you like better:

A.  The 12 Swaps of Christmas
B.  The 12 Days of Swapmas

Or do you have a suggestion of your own?  Personally I'd like something a little classier but generally I try to keep these simple for the readers.  Here are some possible cover images I dug up:

Let me know what you think, not that you will.  And merry Swapmas!  Or Swaps of Christmas.  Whatever.

Free Enterprise: The Next Generation

I meant for the Storypalooza 2.0 to end in November, but I just can't seem to turn it off!  Case in point on my birthday I was watching my favorite indie comedy, Free Enterprise.  It's a fun low budget movie filmed in 1997 but  not released until 1999 about two geeks who are about to turn 30 and their struggles to find happiness in relationships.

The thing I always liked about this movie since I first saw it late at night on the Sci-Fi Channel about 2004 is that Rob and Mark aren't the stereotypical fat, awkward nerds who live in their mom's basement.  They're fairly normal except for their love of sci-fi and Rob is even a bit of a pick-up artist.  It really is rare for a movie to treat sci-fi geeks as normal people with the same wants and desires as most everyone.

Since much of the movie concerns birthdays--and it ends with a big surprise birthday party that features William Shatner rapping a speech from Julius Caesar--I usually watch it on or around my birthday whenever possible.  I've watched it about 100 times and yet when I was watching it this year I got an idea for a sequel.

The idea of a sequel isn't new.  On IMDB I read a few times that there was supposed to be a sequel called something like My Big Fat Geek Wedding about Rob and Mark marrying the girls they ended up with at the end of the first movie.  Since the first movie featured Bill Shatner as himself there was hope of getting Leonard Nimoy to play himself in the second one.

Obviously those plans fell through and now Nimoy is dead, so that certainly wouldn't work.  And really it's been 20 years so a movie about them getting married wouldn't work either.

But you know what would work?  Married...with children!  Instead of focusing on them getting married, why not focus on Rob and Mark trying to bring up kids?  Sort of like Parenthood only with sci-fi geeks.

I haven't roughed out an entire script but the gist of it would be there would be issues with the kids.  Like maybe purist Rob's kid is really into the reboot movies or Discovery or Next Generation or whatever.  Maybe Mark's kid isn't into it at all.  Or maybe the kids are being picked on by bullies and what do they do about that?  And somehow Bill Shatner (and maybe someone else like Patrick Stewart or Chris Pine or someone from one of the other properties) would help to guide them to sorting things out.

As far as marriages I suppose that would depend on whether you can get the whole cast back.  Otherwise you can just say that Clare or Laura divorced Rob or Mark or they died or whatever.  I'm not a big fan of that but it's been 20 years so it might be hard to get all the same people.

Since no one else I know has ever watched the first movie they have no idea what the hell I'm talking about, despite that I've mentioned this movie before several times.  And you can watch it on Amazon Prime.  I don't know about Netflix, but maybe look into that.  Or you can buy it on DVD.  Obviously it's a little dated, but part of the fun for me is seeing the old toys and comics and stuff; sometimes I wish I could just step through the screen like when they're in Toys R Us or the comic book store and look at all that classic, vintage stuff.

An advantage of trying to make a sequel now vs about 15 years ago is you have Kickstarter and all that to help raise money.  And as long as Shatner and Eric McCormack and whoever else don't want too much it probably wouldn't cost more than a million or two--about .01% of a Marvel or Star Wars movie.  I'm just saying.